Starting with 1996 and now going through 1998, I’ve been able to watch a lot of talent that while I was familiar with them, I never got to appreciate them for how good they are. And there is no greater example of this than Owen Hart. A tremendous wrestler, could do anything in the ring, was funny, could be serious in the right situation. He is just a joy to watch. And I know had I been watching at the time, he would have been one of my favorites.
Owen wrestled mostly in the mid card and tag team divisions from 1996 to 1997 while working with main eventers, like Shawn Michaels, from time to time. 1998, due to the aftermath of the Montreal Screwjob, again, if I had been watching at the time I would have thought that 1998 would have been a huge year for Owen. But it wasn’t. So I wanted to make this thread to highlight the good, bad, and ugly of Owen Hart in 1998 to see what he did and what he could have done.
November 97 – March 98:
Again, obviously this all starts with the Montreal Screwjob. Don’t really think I have to go into detail with what happened there. Bret gets screwed, he heads off to WCW. Davey Boy Smith heads off to WCW. Jim Neidhart, well, he stays in WWF for a couple more weeks to join DX, they betray him, and then leaves for WCW……It was weird.
Fast forward a month later to the In Your House: DX show in December. Shawn Michaels is defending his WWF Championship against Ken Shamrock. After getting himself disqualified, Shawn is attacked by a returning Owen Hart, the one member of the Hart Family still left in the company.
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Then later on Raw, Owen confronts Vince, who wants answers for his recent actions. It’s here he would proclaim that he was going to make Shawn Michaels’s life a living hell for obvious reasons. He gave himself nicknames such as the “The Sole Survivor (of the Hart Foundation) and “The Black Sheep. The nickname he would eventually settle on was the “Black Hart”.
Man, this was so good. You have a guy who, while he was a heel for the past few years, was guy who the audience clearly respected as a performer. You had the perfect motivation for him to go after Shawn. Owen has the intensity and look to sell it. The crowd is clearly into it. So clearly this is going to lead to a big Shawn vs. Owen PPV match, right?.........right?
Owen would continue to target Shawn, and Triple H and Chyna by association, leading to WWF Championship match on the final Raw of 1997. After a predictably good match, the match ended in DQ. And while Owen would continue to feud with DX, Shawn would shift his focus on The Undertaker, and Owen would start working exclusively with Triple H up to WrestleMania and beyond.
I know this has been a talking point among wrestling fans for years now. Why didn’t they do Shawn vs. Owen at the Rumble? Again, it was a hot feud and they should have at least one chance to display the feud on a big stage in a big match. And as far as Undertaker goes, it’s not like he was still feuding with Shawn. After Bad Blood in October he was working pretty much exclusively with Kane. He didn’t interact with Shawn at all after that. But then, I think on the very first Raw of 98, Taker comes out for a promo and all of a sudden he’s in a Casket match with Shawn at the Rumble. It just felt very random.
I remember listening to Bruce Pritchard and Conrad Thompson’s podcast on the situation awhile ago with Bruce doing his best to put his spin on it and he basically said they needed to blow off Shawn vs. Taker. But again, they pretty much already did. A 3rd match, as much as I liked the Casket match, wasn’t needed. They were both on different directions by this point.
And really after watching it, I realize the match with Shawn vs. Taker wasn’t the most important thing, it was the angle afterwards. They wanted the night to end with Kane costing Taker the match, throwing him in the casket, and lighting it on fire. So of course the easy recommended solution for this is to do Shawn vs. Owen as the title match and put Undertaker in the Rumble match. Slight problem with that, in my opinion. You want the main highlight of that match to be Austin winning it. If you throw in the Taker/Kane spot in the match too, both of those moments probably take away from each other.
So, in a way I get why they did what they did. But still, there had to be a way to make this all make sense in the end so that we could get everything we wanted. But instead, Owen gets shafted to a degree and works with Triple H. And look, I get it. Austin was the man going into WrestleMania. Everything was built around him and Shawn (and Tyson) going into that show. So obviously I’m not saying Owen shouldn’t have played a part in that. But still, it sucks to see that momentum he had coming out of Montreal really go to nothing. Michaels moves onto Austin, Taker moves onto Kane, and Owen gets downgraded to Triple H. Who by all means was coming into his own at the time and working with Owen at the time did a lot of good for him. But even with Triple H, he was on crutches at the time recovering from an injury, so for most of the build Owen was limited with what he could do with Triple H.
I mean, Owen did get the European Championship out of the rivalry for a bit. But again, Triple H was injured. So they had Owen beat Goldust….sorry, “The Artist Formerly Known as Goldust” dress up as Triple H to take his place and fuck with Owen during a title match. And Commissioner Slaughter, who hated DX, decided that the title change would count and Owen would be the new champion. And even with that, Owen ended up losing the title right before their WrestleMania match because he suffered his own minor injury back to Triple H. It was all kind of messy.
So we get to WrestleMania, Triple H and Owen have a pretty good undercard match, and of course Triple H retains the title. And the thing is, I don’t blame them at all for pushing Triple H and he only got better as the year went on. But this was basically the final nail in the coffin for anything good coming out of Owen’s momentum coming out of Montreal.
April – August 98:
So coming out of Mania Owen continued his feud with Triple H, even though by this point the bloom was off the rose with their rivalry. I think at bare minimum Owen could have made a solid challenger for new WWF Champion Steve Austin. But, I’d imagine Austin wasn’t too eager to work a championship program with the guy who broke his neck last year.
But, Owen would eventually get a nice new direction in late April, when he became sick of constantly losing to DX and joined the Nation now lead by The Rock:
I think it was the shift in character he really needed, and they cemented it really strong by having Owen Low Blow Shamrock, crush his ankle, lock him in the Sharpshooter, AND biting his ear which would jump start a fun rivalry with him over the Summer.
Before we get to that, Owen had some other highlights after joining the Nation. The Nation feuded with DX for most of the Summer meaning Owen was still interacting with Triple H. And although I understood that ‘s how the crowd reacted, it was very hard to look at Triple H and company as the faces and Owen as the heel. But, Owen was so good he made it work. Which I will say, the continued rivalry with DX lead to a couple of fun matches with Owen and X-Pac. They had good chemistry. Also, he and Rock had a short lived tag run together and I think they worked well off each other. But possibly the most memorable part of his Nation run was his interactions with comedian Jason Sensation.
Nothing to really analyze here, it was just funny, lol.
But getting back to Shamrock he and Owen would go onto have a pretty fun rivalry in the Summer of 1998, with their major matches not even happening in the ring. Starting with the Dungeon match at Fully Loaded and the Lion’s Den match at Summerslam, with Owen winning the former and Shamrock winning the latter.
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This really highlighted both men’s versatility and skillset to have two non traditional matches in a row and knock both out of the park with Owen, like he did with Triple H earlier in the year, putting Shamrock over in the end. Owen’s 1998 might not have gone as well as it could have, but he did end being involved in some really entertaining stuff in 1998. Well at least up until now that is.
September – December 98:
After his feud with Shamrock wrapped up, Owen would move onto his next phase (and my least favorite phase) of 1998. Owen would wrestle Dan Severn on Raw. And in a callback to his match with Austin a year earlier, Owen would deliver a horrific Sitout Tombstone Piledriver to Severn.
https://external-preview.redd.it/t2...wkFyM5NtPkoSndKoYjvqQ.gif?format=mp4&s=5cceb3ebdd6866f3571652fcc547314c9bcb443d
Now, I had no idea this angle ever happened, so honestly my first reaction was something like “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT.” But, it became clear pretty quickly that this was all apart of an angle. In kayfabe Severn was temporarily paralyzed from the move, and the company sold this like a serious angle. Certainly not the most tasteless thing WWF has done, but still, not something I would have done after what happened to Austin.
After this incident Owen be shown depressed over what he did, constantly beating himself over injuring another wrestler. He would go through the motions in his matches. He wasn’t his normal, high energy self on commentary. He just looked completely defeated.
This would eventually lead to Owen “retiring” out of guilt for what he did. And because I don’t really care much for this phase of Owen’s career (for multiple reasons in hindsight), I’ll wrap this up real quickly. At the same time Owen “retired”, the Blue Blazer, Owen’s former character returned to TV.
And this would continue a running theme every week on Heat and Raw where either 1 of 2 scenarios would play out:
Final Analysis:
1998 started out with so much promise for Owen and it was disappointing to see how it all played out. I mean, I was mostly aware of how it all played out, but to watch it all unfold just made it even more disappointing. Had a bunch of interest coming out of Montreal and that gets squandered. Eventually, he does go onto to have good matches and programs with guys like Triple H and Shamrock. But then it comes down again with a tasteless angle followed up by a silly angle. I can only imagine what I would have thought of all of this had I been watching at the time.
Owen wrestled mostly in the mid card and tag team divisions from 1996 to 1997 while working with main eventers, like Shawn Michaels, from time to time. 1998, due to the aftermath of the Montreal Screwjob, again, if I had been watching at the time I would have thought that 1998 would have been a huge year for Owen. But it wasn’t. So I wanted to make this thread to highlight the good, bad, and ugly of Owen Hart in 1998 to see what he did and what he could have done.
November 97 – March 98:
Again, obviously this all starts with the Montreal Screwjob. Don’t really think I have to go into detail with what happened there. Bret gets screwed, he heads off to WCW. Davey Boy Smith heads off to WCW. Jim Neidhart, well, he stays in WWF for a couple more weeks to join DX, they betray him, and then leaves for WCW……It was weird.
Fast forward a month later to the In Your House: DX show in December. Shawn Michaels is defending his WWF Championship against Ken Shamrock. After getting himself disqualified, Shawn is attacked by a returning Owen Hart, the one member of the Hart Family still left in the company.
Then later on Raw, Owen confronts Vince, who wants answers for his recent actions. It’s here he would proclaim that he was going to make Shawn Michaels’s life a living hell for obvious reasons. He gave himself nicknames such as the “The Sole Survivor (of the Hart Foundation) and “The Black Sheep. The nickname he would eventually settle on was the “Black Hart”.
Man, this was so good. You have a guy who, while he was a heel for the past few years, was guy who the audience clearly respected as a performer. You had the perfect motivation for him to go after Shawn. Owen has the intensity and look to sell it. The crowd is clearly into it. So clearly this is going to lead to a big Shawn vs. Owen PPV match, right?.........right?
Owen would continue to target Shawn, and Triple H and Chyna by association, leading to WWF Championship match on the final Raw of 1997. After a predictably good match, the match ended in DQ. And while Owen would continue to feud with DX, Shawn would shift his focus on The Undertaker, and Owen would start working exclusively with Triple H up to WrestleMania and beyond.
I know this has been a talking point among wrestling fans for years now. Why didn’t they do Shawn vs. Owen at the Rumble? Again, it was a hot feud and they should have at least one chance to display the feud on a big stage in a big match. And as far as Undertaker goes, it’s not like he was still feuding with Shawn. After Bad Blood in October he was working pretty much exclusively with Kane. He didn’t interact with Shawn at all after that. But then, I think on the very first Raw of 98, Taker comes out for a promo and all of a sudden he’s in a Casket match with Shawn at the Rumble. It just felt very random.
I remember listening to Bruce Pritchard and Conrad Thompson’s podcast on the situation awhile ago with Bruce doing his best to put his spin on it and he basically said they needed to blow off Shawn vs. Taker. But again, they pretty much already did. A 3rd match, as much as I liked the Casket match, wasn’t needed. They were both on different directions by this point.
And really after watching it, I realize the match with Shawn vs. Taker wasn’t the most important thing, it was the angle afterwards. They wanted the night to end with Kane costing Taker the match, throwing him in the casket, and lighting it on fire. So of course the easy recommended solution for this is to do Shawn vs. Owen as the title match and put Undertaker in the Rumble match. Slight problem with that, in my opinion. You want the main highlight of that match to be Austin winning it. If you throw in the Taker/Kane spot in the match too, both of those moments probably take away from each other.
So, in a way I get why they did what they did. But still, there had to be a way to make this all make sense in the end so that we could get everything we wanted. But instead, Owen gets shafted to a degree and works with Triple H. And look, I get it. Austin was the man going into WrestleMania. Everything was built around him and Shawn (and Tyson) going into that show. So obviously I’m not saying Owen shouldn’t have played a part in that. But still, it sucks to see that momentum he had coming out of Montreal really go to nothing. Michaels moves onto Austin, Taker moves onto Kane, and Owen gets downgraded to Triple H. Who by all means was coming into his own at the time and working with Owen at the time did a lot of good for him. But even with Triple H, he was on crutches at the time recovering from an injury, so for most of the build Owen was limited with what he could do with Triple H.
I mean, Owen did get the European Championship out of the rivalry for a bit. But again, Triple H was injured. So they had Owen beat Goldust….sorry, “The Artist Formerly Known as Goldust” dress up as Triple H to take his place and fuck with Owen during a title match. And Commissioner Slaughter, who hated DX, decided that the title change would count and Owen would be the new champion. And even with that, Owen ended up losing the title right before their WrestleMania match because he suffered his own minor injury back to Triple H. It was all kind of messy.
So we get to WrestleMania, Triple H and Owen have a pretty good undercard match, and of course Triple H retains the title. And the thing is, I don’t blame them at all for pushing Triple H and he only got better as the year went on. But this was basically the final nail in the coffin for anything good coming out of Owen’s momentum coming out of Montreal.
April – August 98:
So coming out of Mania Owen continued his feud with Triple H, even though by this point the bloom was off the rose with their rivalry. I think at bare minimum Owen could have made a solid challenger for new WWF Champion Steve Austin. But, I’d imagine Austin wasn’t too eager to work a championship program with the guy who broke his neck last year.
But, Owen would eventually get a nice new direction in late April, when he became sick of constantly losing to DX and joined the Nation now lead by The Rock:
I think it was the shift in character he really needed, and they cemented it really strong by having Owen Low Blow Shamrock, crush his ankle, lock him in the Sharpshooter, AND biting his ear which would jump start a fun rivalry with him over the Summer.
Before we get to that, Owen had some other highlights after joining the Nation. The Nation feuded with DX for most of the Summer meaning Owen was still interacting with Triple H. And although I understood that ‘s how the crowd reacted, it was very hard to look at Triple H and company as the faces and Owen as the heel. But, Owen was so good he made it work. Which I will say, the continued rivalry with DX lead to a couple of fun matches with Owen and X-Pac. They had good chemistry. Also, he and Rock had a short lived tag run together and I think they worked well off each other. But possibly the most memorable part of his Nation run was his interactions with comedian Jason Sensation.
Nothing to really analyze here, it was just funny, lol.
But getting back to Shamrock he and Owen would go onto have a pretty fun rivalry in the Summer of 1998, with their major matches not even happening in the ring. Starting with the Dungeon match at Fully Loaded and the Lion’s Den match at Summerslam, with Owen winning the former and Shamrock winning the latter.
This really highlighted both men’s versatility and skillset to have two non traditional matches in a row and knock both out of the park with Owen, like he did with Triple H earlier in the year, putting Shamrock over in the end. Owen’s 1998 might not have gone as well as it could have, but he did end being involved in some really entertaining stuff in 1998. Well at least up until now that is.
September – December 98:
After his feud with Shamrock wrapped up, Owen would move onto his next phase (and my least favorite phase) of 1998. Owen would wrestle Dan Severn on Raw. And in a callback to his match with Austin a year earlier, Owen would deliver a horrific Sitout Tombstone Piledriver to Severn.
https://external-preview.redd.it/t2...wkFyM5NtPkoSndKoYjvqQ.gif?format=mp4&s=5cceb3ebdd6866f3571652fcc547314c9bcb443d
Now, I had no idea this angle ever happened, so honestly my first reaction was something like “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT.” But, it became clear pretty quickly that this was all apart of an angle. In kayfabe Severn was temporarily paralyzed from the move, and the company sold this like a serious angle. Certainly not the most tasteless thing WWF has done, but still, not something I would have done after what happened to Austin.
After this incident Owen be shown depressed over what he did, constantly beating himself over injuring another wrestler. He would go through the motions in his matches. He wasn’t his normal, high energy self on commentary. He just looked completely defeated.
This would eventually lead to Owen “retiring” out of guilt for what he did. And because I don’t really care much for this phase of Owen’s career (for multiple reasons in hindsight), I’ll wrap this up real quickly. At the same time Owen “retired”, the Blue Blazer, Owen’s former character returned to TV.
And this would continue a running theme every week on Heat and Raw where either 1 of 2 scenarios would play out:
- The “Blue Blazer” would come out, with it being obvious that’s it’s Owen, and JR (or Cole) and King would argue over whether it was Owen or not.
- Someone else would dress up as Owen, Owen would show up later to “prove his innocence”, and JR (or Cole) and King would argue about it the whole match.
Final Analysis:
1998 started out with so much promise for Owen and it was disappointing to see how it all played out. I mean, I was mostly aware of how it all played out, but to watch it all unfold just made it even more disappointing. Had a bunch of interest coming out of Montreal and that gets squandered. Eventually, he does go onto to have good matches and programs with guys like Triple H and Shamrock. But then it comes down again with a tasteless angle followed up by a silly angle. I can only imagine what I would have thought of all of this had I been watching at the time.
