The WWF icon had his legacy buried for years —until he decided to play Vince McMahon’s game.
Photo: John Barrett/PHOTOlink/AlamyPhoto: John Barrett/PHOTOlink/AlamyPhoto: John Barrett/PHOTOlink/Alamy
In the immediate aftermath of Owen’s death in 1999, Vince kept leaving voice mails for Bret, asking to talk. He remembered Vince saying, “This is the worst thing to ever happen in the business, to the nicest guy who was ever in the business.” But a few months later, Bret saw Vince being interviewed on TSN’s Off the Record, talking about their park bench meeting.
Bret and Vince didn’t speak again for years. Much of the footage of Bret’s awe-inspiring work at the WWF would remain locked in the company vault. Even his later stint with WCW was beyond Bret’s grasp: Vince had acquired the WCW archive when he purchased the promotion in 2001. Bret had sustained a massive in-ring injury in 2000 that had effectively ended his career.
To Bret, it was as if Vince was holding his past hostage. As the years went by, the company occasionally approached Bret to ask him to appear in one event or another—hinting that if he played along, they might find a way to release the footage of his work. Every time, Bret turned them down. Why should he bargain for access to something Vince had already promised to give him, back on that riverbank in 1999? At one point, a spokesperson told him Vince had no memory of the conversation.
In 2002, Bret had a serious stroke that paralyzed half of his body. He was lying in his hospital bed, unsure of the extent to which he’d ever recover, when the phone rang. Slowly, Bret recovered from his stroke. And in 2005, two years after the death of Stu Hart, Vince finally followed through and released a DVD callede, which featured some of Bret’s finest moments, along with a documentary. When it came out, WWE inducted Bret into the Hall of Fame, but Bret refused to participate in that year’s WrestleMania. He still felt he should never appear in one of Vince’s shows ever again.
“I was like, ‘You’re still so bitter and angry,’ ” Bret recalls. “That’s why I did what I did: it was so I wouldn’t end up like that, [where] everything is about what ‘they’ did and how I’m going to get ‘them’ someday… . “I just don’t think Martha understands how my family was wrestling,” he continues. “Everyone was so involved with wrestling. You couldn’t just cut it out of your life. My brother Owen died, so I’ve got to forget every single thing I ever did in wrestling? I didn’t want that.
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