WWE News: Bret Hart Reveals How Hulk Hogan Ruined His First-Ever World Title Reign
He will always be considered one of the greatest to ever step into a wrestling ring, but the career of Bret “Hitman” Hart is not without its share of controversy. Other than “The Montreal Screwjob,” there are plenty of instances from his time in WWF/WWE that will go down in the history books as infamous. Hart recalled his first-ever world title reign and how WWE lied to him. That reign was ruined by none other than Hulk Hogan.
Hart has done a lot since retiring from the ring, and that includes appearing for All Elite Wrestling to introduce their World Championship. Over the years, he has made appearances for WWE, but he hasn’t come back in any kind of full-time capacity.
One of the biggest days in Hart’s career ended up being one of the worst for him, as he recently recalled.
Bret Hart was a recent guest on Prime Time with Sean Mooney where he discussed a number of topics, including WrestleMania IX. On that evening, Hart was going to be in his first-ever WrestleMania main event and he was excited about it, but things didn’t go the way he had hoped.
As a matter of fact, Hart walked into the event as the WWE Champion and then lost the title to Yokozuna, who promptly lost it to Hulk Hogan in almost record time.
While Hart said he does have good memories of WrestleMania IX, he was disappointed with how WWE said his future would go. There were big plans revealed to him for his championship run and it was expected to go on for many years, which would have made him a lot of money.
Unfortunately for the WWE Hall of Famer, that is not how things ended up, and Hulk Hogan had a lot to do with it.
“Vince had said to me from the day I won the title, he said, ‘You don’t have to worry about anything. We’re looking at you as a long-term champion. You’re going to be champion here for a long time. We’re thinking six…maybe seven years.’ Kind of going back to what Bruno [Sammartino] did, where the champion holds the belt for a really long time, and that Hulk Hogan would have no bearing on anything that I was doing.
“Those were the first lies that they told me. In the end, it was like, they lied to me. They gave me no warning for that at all.”
In the main event of WrestleMania IX, Hart had Yokozuna in the Sharpshooter but Mr. Fuji threw salt in the champion’s eyes and he was pinned. Hulk Hogan came out to check on the well-being of Hart and ended up being challenged to a match by Fuji and Yokozuna.
Fuji attempted to throw salt into the eyes of Hogan, but he missed and hit Yokozuna instead. Twenty-two seconds later, Hogan dropped the leg and won the WWE Championship. As Bret Hart has revealed, none of that went the way that Vince McMahon and others had originally planned, but that’s all history.
