Bret Hart Accuses WWE Legend Of “Killing Him Off” In WCW

Bret Hart has taken one WWE Hall of Famer to task for how his career panned out in WCW, and it’s not Goldberg.

Bret Hart is undoubtedly one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. He led the WWE through the mid-nineties as champion, and his memorable feud with Stone Cold Steve Austin helped pull Austin out of midcard purgatory and elevated him to become perhaps the most iconic wrestling star of all time.

Hart infamously left WWE after the Montreal Screwjob to head to WCW. Despite being a five-time WWE Champion, the leader of the Hart Foundation, a master technician, and coming off one of the most controversial moments in wrestling history, WCW simply didn’t know what to do with The Hitman. Or perhaps, they had too many names at the top jockeying for position, unhappy that another big name had crowded the field even more.

The standout moment of Bret Hart’s WCW career is when he lured Goldberg to the ring in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Hart received a hero’s welcome, and he let loose with one of the best promos of his career. He reminded everyone that he defeated Austin every time he was in the ring with him and called Goldberg a “big chicken.”

When Goldberg finally emerged and nailed Hart with a spear, everyone was confused when Hart got to his feet first. He had been hiding a steel plate across his torso that knocked Goldberg out when he hit the spear. But this iconic moment almost never happened.

Bret Hart Takes Aim At Kevin Nash

Speaking to Inside the Ropes, Bret Hart highlighted the mess at the top of WCW at the time, with boss Eric Bischoff claiming Goldberg wouldn’t like the idea despite him already enthusiastically agreeing to it. When Bischoff went on vacation, that left Kevin Nash running the show, something that Hart clearly was not happy about:

First thing he tells me is, ‘Bill Goldberg will never go for it.’  Eric Bischoff goes on a hiatus… goes all the way over to France on a vacation with his wife or something, and he leaves Kevin Nash in charge.

Kevin Nash did his best to kill me off on TV for three weeks until we got to Toronto.

Part of the problem was that on his way to his confrontation with Goldberg, Nash wanted Bret Hart to lose to Dean Malenko, something Hart refused to do:

I beat Austin. I beat Vince McMahon. And at this time, you’re going to have Dean Malenko—who’s like two feet tall—beat me in the middle? I said, ‘I can’t. I don’t want to do it.’ And I never refused to ever do a job for anybody—including Dean Malenko. And they end up sticking me in there with some other wrestler that I beat that night.

Kevin Nash was infamously booking WCW when he became the man to end Goldberg’s legendary undefeated streak. Neither Goldberg nor WCW ever recovered from that decision, with it being one of many that led to the company shutting its doors in 2001.