In a letter to his email list, Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart struck back at former NWA champ Jack Brisco for comments he made during a chat on SLAM! Wrestling on October 16th.
Brisco had been asked by a fan whether anything comparable to the ‘Montreal screwjob’ that saw Hart lose the WWF title to Shawn Michaels in 1997 had happened during his day.
“Not in the ring. They knew better!” Brisco responded in the chat before continuing. “And by the way, I thought Vince McMahon did the right thing by taking the belt off him. Bret Hart owed it Vince McMahon, the other wrestlers and the WWF to do the time honored tradition.
What does it mean, ‘I can’t drop the belt in Montreal because I’m from Canada?’ He’s from Calgary!
That would be like me saying I couldn’t drop the belt in Florida because I’m an American!”
The Hitman’s comments below are unedited.
In response to Jack Brisco’s misinformed comments of October 16th, I woud like to pose a question to him. When he was NWA champion if they’d have told him to do the job for Crazy Luke Graham and then add on top of that, Crazy Luke telling Jack Brisco that he would absolutely never, under any circumstances be willing to put him over, ever, would he still do it? (I use Crazy Luke here as a worst case example and mean to imply no comparison between him and Shawn Michaels).
It wasn’t a question of losing in Canada, it was a question of losing to somebody who had no professionalism and no respect for me, or for any of his peers in the dressing room.
I would like to say that Jack Brisco is wrong to suggest that it’s never happened before. It happened all the time and I imagine that he’s quite lucky that it didn’t happen to him. He also needs to understand that after all those years of wrestlers having no rights, I had achieved the legal right, per my contract, to refuse to put somebody over, which was intended to prevent purposeful devaluation of my “stock” and impact should the time come when I left the promotion; it could have been a major step forward for all wrestlers. It should be noted that in my entire career, up until Montreal, I never refused to do a job for anybody and lost many times in my home country and in my home town. Likewise, no wrestler ever refused to do a job for me – until Shawn Michaels – and that’s the point. It has nothing to do with losing in Canada. I made it clear to Vince that I would have no problem dropping the belt to Shawn, or to anybody else, in Canada, or anywhere else, after Shawn would do the professional thing and put me over at Survivor Series.
Jack Brisco shouldn’t pass judgement on things he knows nothing about without first hand info – other than that which he gets from his deceptive brother, Jerry, who, in fact, had a large part in orchestrating how to screw me, under orders from McMahon; no more than I should make comments about how Ernie Ladd beat the crap out of the Brisco brothers in a parking lot, stuffed them into the trunk of his car and drove all over town with them, eventually dumping them out lke trash at the promoter’s house. Or then again, maybe I don’t know enough about it so I shouldn’t say.
When I knocked out Vince McMahon no less than ten former world champions each called me on the phone to tell me they were very proud of me. I certainly never needed a call from Jack Brisco
Jack Brisco can kiss my ass.
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