Stone Cold Steve Austin vs. Bret The Hitman Hart (Sep 1996 – Jul 1997)

Background

Bret Hart went into the fall of 1996 having been away from WWF television for seven months. He'd lost the WWF Championship to Shawn Michaels in the Iron Man match at WrestleMania XII that March, and rather than chase an immediate rematch he took the rest of the year off, a break built into his contract.[5]

Steve Austin spent that same stretch turning himself into the company's next problem. He'd arrived in WWF in 1996 as a mid-card heel with a manager, Ted DiBiase, and shed both the gimmick and the crutch on live television that June. At King of the Ring on June 23, 1996, Austin beat Jake "The Snake" Roberts in the tournament final and cut the interview that rewrote his career, mocking Roberts's habit of quoting scripture with a line of his own: "You talk about your psalms, you talk about John 3:16. Well, I've got John 3:16 too: Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!"[14] Within months the number was on t-shirts in every arena the company ran.[14]

Austin spent the summer needling a champion who wasn't even around to answer him, using Hart's absence itself as material and daring him to come back and do something about it.[5] Hart, by his own account, had specifically pushed the company to sign Austin in the first place, having watched his work in WCW and rated him as one of the best pure wrestlers he'd ever seen; he wanted the match as much as Austin did.[1]

The two actually met once before any of it aired at home. On September 14, 1996, on a WWF overseas tour stop at Sun City in South Africa, Hart and Austin wrestled a twenty-minute match for local television, with Hart's younger brother Owen on commentary and Hart winning with a cradle.[2] It was a low-key dry run for a rivalry the American audience hadn't been told was coming yet, closer in tone to mutual respect than the war it would become.[2]

Build-up

Hart's return came on the October 21, 1996 Raw. He walked out for a live interview after seven months away and accepted Austin's challenge on the spot, setting up a number-one contender's match for Survivor Series.[15] It was framed from the start as a clash of value systems: a technical champion who believed the audience owed him respect for the work, against an attitude that treated respect as something you took rather than earned.

Survivor Series, on November 17 at Madison Square Garden, delivered a 28-minute match that both the Wrestling Observer and contemporary reviewers rated among the best of the year, with Dave Meltzer settling on four and a half stars.[4] Austin worked Hart's history of knee injuries and locked in his Million Dollar Dream; Hart, fully in the hold, bridged his shoulders off the canvas and rolled Austin into a small package, hooking the bottom rope for leverage the referee never saw, and stole the pin.[4] Austin didn't take the loss quietly, and the finish read less like a clean ending than the opening shot of something longer.

The two crossed paths again in a tag match on the December 30 Raw, Hart and Savio Vega against Austin and Faarooq, which Hart's team won by disqualification, keeping the singles feud simmering without spending it.[7]

The Royal Rumble on January 19, 1997, turned the rivalry personal in a way a finish alone hadn't managed. Hart threw Austin over the top rope and out of the match, a clean elimination by every replay, but the referees were watching a ringside brawl between Terry Funk and Mankind at the exact moment it happened.[4] Austin climbed back up the steps and re-entered a match he had no legal right to still be in, going on to eliminate Hart himself along with Vader and The Undertaker to win his first Royal Rumble.[4] WWF let the finish stand, and the injustice of it, obvious to anyone who'd watched Austin sneak back in, became part of the character rather than a mistake to be corrected.[4]

That set up In Your House 13: Final Four on February 16 in Chattanooga, a four-way elimination match under no-disqualification rules for the WWF Championship that Shawn Michaels had vacated after announcing on a special Thursday Raw that he'd "lost his smile" and couldn't defend it.[9][10] Hart threw Austin out early with a fireman's carry, and Austin, despite being eliminated, stayed involved from ringside rather than heading to the back.[9] Vader went next, low-blowed and dumped by The Undertaker after Austin distracted him at the rail, and it was that same tactic Austin used again moments later: distracting Undertaker at the exact moment he had the match in hand, letting Hart clothesline him out and win the vacant title.[9] Hart had the belt for one night. On the following night's Raw, defending against Sycho Sid, he had Sid trapped in the Sharpshooter when Austin ran in and cracked him across the skull with a steel chair, and Sid powerbombed a concussed Hart for the championship.[11] Whatever restraint either man had shown up to that point was gone.

The Matches

WrestleMania 13 took place on March 23, 1997 at the Rosemont Horizon outside Chicago, in front of 18,197 fans, and the match wasn't even supposed to exist in this form; with Michaels off the card and the marquee singles slot open, Hart and Austin's rivalry was moved into the vacancy as a No Disqualification Submission Match with UFC's Ken Shamrock as special guest referee.[5][12] WWE avoided calling it an "I Quit" match specifically, reasoning that fans expected a spoken surrender and wouldn't accept the finish they actually had planned.[12]

Austin attacked Hart before the bell during his entrance, and the two brawled up through the crowd and back before the match ever formally started, trading whatever weapons were within reach.[5] Once it settled into the ring, Hart went after Austin's surgically repaired knee with the figure-four and repeated post work, softening him for the finish they'd built the whole match around.[5]

At roughly the twelve-minute mark, Hart Irish-whipped Austin into the ringside barrier and busted him open, a blade job the two men had agreed to privately and hidden from the office. Hart later described the arrangement: "The cut was completely planned between us, but we had to keep it secret. Backstage, we fake-argued to hide it from management, yelling about 'careless punches' to throw them off. Only Steve and I knew the truth for years."[6] Hart also convinced Austin, mid-plan, that the visual needed one more escalation, telling him he should be bleeding by the time he passed out, and Austin agreed to it without WWE's approval.[8]

Austin, streaked red, kept refusing to give up even as the crowd's sympathy audibly swung toward him. Hart applied the Sharpshooter in the middle of the ring; Austin thrashed against it, wouldn't tap, and lost consciousness from the pain and blood loss instead.[5] Shamrock called for the bell and raised Hart's hand, and Hart, rather than stopping, kept attacking the unconscious Austin, going after Shamrock himself when the referee tried to pull him off.[5] The Rosemont Horizon crowd, cheering Hart minutes earlier, turned on him completely and started chanting for Austin, who came to, hit a referee with a Stunner, and limped up the ramp to the loudest ovation of the night.[5]

Hart later said Austin's now-iconic post-match groin kick, the shot that flipped the building, wasn't planned at all: "Steve's kick wasn't planned. I told him, 'Aim for my backside, sell it like death.' That single move flipped the crowd's allegiance in real time."[6]

Aftermath

The alignment swap held immediately. Both men appeared on the April 20 In Your House: Revenge of the 'Taker card in a number-one contender's rematch, and this time it was the reunited Hart Foundation working as a unit against Austin: the British Bulldog hit him with a chair for the disqualification finish, and after the bell Austin caught Hart's attempted ring-bell shot and locked him in his own Sharpshooter in front of a crowd that ate it up.[26] A Raw street fight the following night ended in a no-contest, another example of a rivalry that had moved past clean finishes into pure spectacle.[16]

The program's clearest coda came that summer, on Bret's own turf. In Your House 16: Canadian Stampede, on July 6 in Calgary, pitted the reunited Hart Foundation, Bret, Owen Hart, the British Bulldog, and Jim Neidhart, against a team built around Austin, Ken Shamrock, Goldust, and the Legion of Doom.[17] Hart had turned the loss of American affection into a nationalist angle, positioning himself and his family as Canada's team against an increasingly hostile United States crowd, and in the Saddledome that framing was no longer heel work; it was simply true.[17] The Hart Foundation won the ten-man tag in 24:31, one of the last unambiguous celebrations Bret Hart would get in a WWF ring.[17]

Austin's own story took a violent turn less than a month later. At SummerSlam on August 3, 1997, Austin faced Owen Hart, Bret's younger brother, for the Intercontinental Championship. About fifteen minutes in, Owen reversed a move into a sit-down piledriver, and Austin's head came down wrong, the crown of his skull absorbing the impact meant for his shoulders.[25] Austin was left temporarily paralyzed, unable to feel anything from his neck down, and the match had to stall in the ring while everyone involved figured out whether he could continue at all.[25] He did, crawling to his feet to pin Owen for the title.[25] The incident is widely described as a broken neck, though Austin himself has said the actual diagnosis was a severely bruised spinal column; whichever the precise term, doctors told him not to wrestle again, and he kept going anyway, in near-constant pain, for years afterward.[25]

Hart's own WWF story wound down that same fall, as his contract dispute with the company became the central drama heading into November. He and Austin never shared the ring again after Canadian Stampede; Hart's remaining weeks in the company were consumed instead by the championship program with Shawn Michaels that ended, three months after Austin's SummerSlam injury, with the Montreal Screwjob at that November's Survivor Series.[1]

Behind the Scenes

The respect between them was lopsided going in, and neither man hid it. Hart made a point in his own promos of praising Austin's ability, while Austin's line about Hart's nickname became one of the feud's defining insults: "If you put the letter 'S' in front of Hitman, then you have my opinion of Bret Hart."[27] Hart has said he noticed the imbalance and wanted it corrected in the ring rather than on the microphone, calling himself "greedy for that respect" and predicting Austin would give it to him once they'd actually wrestled.[27]

The double turn itself is, by both men's later accounts, Vince McMahon's design rather than either performer's. Austin has said plainly that he didn't see it coming the way McMahon did: "It was Vince's vision. I guess I didn't see the big picture that Vince saw of turning me babyface."[18] Reflecting on the match decades later, Austin credited Hart directly for the opportunity that followed: "I couldn't have had that run without Bret."[18]

Austin's own comfort with the finish took convincing. He worried a match ending in unconsciousness, rather than a fought-to-the-finish submission, would read as weak for a character built on refusing to quit, and it took McMahon walking him through how the audience would actually experience it before he agreed.[12] Both men have said the plan for Hart to keep attacking him after the bell, the beat that actually turned the crowd, was something they built together in the ring rather than something scripted in advance down to the second.[6]

The blood was the part they hid from everyone. WWE's New Generation era operated under a strict no-blood policy, and Hart and Austin's decision to blade anyway was made entirely between the two of them, with a cover story ready in case anyone backstage asked questions.[6] Hart's account of staging the disagreement, loudly blaming Austin's "careless punches" where officials could hear it, describes two performers actively managing their own employer's perception in real time, mid-program, without permission.[6]

None of the animosity in the ring, on either side, carried over between Hart and Austin specifically. Hart has called the match his favorite of his career without qualification: "When I watch it back, I wouldn't change a thing. It was a beautiful, violent piece of art. Working with Steve was easy, it was fun, and it was memorable."[1] Ken Shamrock, who spent the match a few feet from both men rather than watching from the crowd, said the pace and physicality genuinely unsettled him as a newcomer to the business: "About five minutes into the match, I'm thinking to myself, man, I can't believe what I'm seeing here. I couldn't tell you the difference between what was happening when I was fighting in MMA as opposed to what they were doing in the wrestling ring."[19]

The same could not be said for Austin and Owen Hart after SummerSlam. Austin had voiced doubts about the piledriver spot beforehand, and Owen talked him into it anyway; when it went wrong and left Austin briefly paralyzed, Austin's anger wasn't only about the injury but about what he took as a lack of concern afterward, since by multiple accounts Owen called him only once in the immediate aftermath, too ashamed of the mistake to do more.[28] Austin largely refused to work programs with Owen again outside of multi-man matches for the rest of Owen's life, a genuine, lasting piece of fallout from a feud that otherwise left no real scars between its two central participants.[28] Owen died in a ring-rigging accident in May 1999, and Austin has said in later years that he let the grudge go.[28]

Legacy

Dave Meltzer rated the WrestleMania 13 match five stars, the promotion's first match of that caliber in years by his account, and both the Wrestling Observer's readers and Pro Wrestling Illustrated's named it 1997's Match of the Year.[5] Jim Ross, calling the match live, has said in later interviews that it remains the best match he ever called at WrestleMania.[5]

Mick Foley has credited the match with saving the show's relevance at a moment WrestleMania badly needed it: "Bret and Austin, '97, that was really special. That was so badly needed because Mania was, if you recall, on the verge of becoming just another show. The buy rate was very [low]."[20] In 2025, at WrestleMania 41 weekend, WWE inducted the match into its Hall of Fame as the first "Immortal Moment," a new honor built specifically around it; Austin recalled getting the call from Triple H directly: "He said, 'Hey, man, we're thinking about doing this, and this is gonna be the first match to go in.'"[21]

For Austin, the match is the hinge his entire subsequent run pivots on, the night a rule-breaking troublemaker became the biggest babyface of the era by simply refusing to lose consciously. For Hart, it's the last unambiguous American triumph of his WWF career, a performance he still calls his best even though the character work inside it required turning the crowd against him on purpose. Within months the same instincts that made the match work, Hart's refusal to be anyone's designated loser and the company's willingness to let him say so out loud, would collide with a different set of stakes in Montreal.

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. "Bret Hart vs Stone Cold: 15 Untold Stories of Their HOF Feud" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/bret-hart-stone-cold-steve-austin-wrestlemania-13-wwe-hall-of-fame-untold-stories/
2. "Stone Cold Steve Austin vs Bret Hart – WWF Sun City Superbowl (09/14/1996)" — Brock Hates Wrestling. https://brockhateswrestling.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/bret-austin-sun-city/
3. "Every Bret Hart Vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin Match, Explored" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/every-bret-hart-steve-austin-match-explored-wrestlemania-survivor-series/
4. WrestleMania 13 — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_13
5. "Bret Hart Explains The Secret Plan They Had To Make Stone Cold Bleed At Wrestlemania 13" — Balls.ie. https://www.balls.ie/american-sports/bret-hart-explains-secret-plan-make-stone-cold-bleed-wrestlemania-13-386046
6. "Every Bret Hart Vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin Match, Explored" (December 30, 1996 Raw tag match) — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/every-bret-hart-steve-austin-match-explored-wrestlemania-survivor-series/
7. "The Real Life Story Behind Steve Austin & Bret Hart's WrestleMania 13 Submission Match, Explained" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-real-life-story-behind-steve-austin-bret-hart-wrestlemania-13-match/
8. In Your House 13: Final Four — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Your_House_13:_Final_Four
9. "Lost Smiles and Rising Stars – Revisiting In Your House: Final Four" — The Signature Spot. https://www.thesignaturespot.com/articles/revisiting-in-your-house-final-four-25-years-later
10. "Bret Hart vs. Sycho Sid: WWE Championship Steel Cage Match: Raw, February 17, 1997" (title-change context) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/videos/bret-hart-vs-sycho-sid-wwe-championship-steel-cage-match-raw-february-17-1997
11. "10 Things WWE Fans Should Know About Bret Hart Vs Steve Austin At WrestleMania 13" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-bret-hart-vs-steve-austin-wrestlemania-13-facts-trivia-things-to-know/
12. "18th Anniversary of Stone Cold Steve Austin's 'Austin 3:16' promo" — Sportskeeda. https://www.sportskeeda.com/wwe/18th-anniversary-of-stone-cold-steve-austins-austin-316-promo
13. "WWF RAW 10/21/1996" — Wrestling Recaps. https://wrestlingrecaps.com/2015/06/10/wwf-raw-10211996/
14. "Every Bret Hart Vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin Match, Explored" (Revenge of the 'Taker and street fight) — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/every-bret-hart-steve-austin-match-explored-wrestlemania-survivor-series/
15. In Your House 16: Canadian Stampede — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Your_House_16:_Canadian_Stampede
16. "Steve Austin On WrestleMania 13 Match With Bret Hart Being First 'Immortal Moment'" — PWMania. https://www.pwmania.com/steve-austin-on-wrestlemania-13-match-with-bret-hart-being-first-immortal-moment
17. "Ken Shamrock Recalls Refereeing at WrestleMania 13" — 411Mania. https://411mania.com/wrestling/ken-shamrock-recalls-refereeing-bret-hart-vs-steve-austin-wrestlemania-13/
18. "Reliving A Feud #44: Bret Hart Vs. Steve Austin In WWF '96-'97" (Mick Foley quote context) — Wrestling Recaps. https://wrestlingrecaps.com/2020/08/06/reliving-a-feud-44-bret-hart-vs-steve-austin-in-wwf-96-97/
19. "Steve Austin On WrestleMania 13 Match With Bret Hart Being First 'Immortal Moment'" (Triple H quote) — PWMania. https://www.pwmania.com/steve-austin-on-wrestlemania-13-match-with-bret-hart-being-first-immortal-moment
20. "'Stone Cold' gives his iconic 'Austin 3:16' speech: King of the Ring 1996, only on WWE Network" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjWPoQWdmjg
21. "FULL MATCH: Bret Hart vs. 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin: Survivor Series 1996" — YouTube (WWE Vault). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hTB_xjeeOA
22. "FULL MATCH: Bret Hart vs. 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin | No DQ Submission Match: WrestleMania 13" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYELJpHHwCQ
23. "Steve Austin - The Neck Injury That Changed His Life Forever" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/steve-austin-neck/
24. In Your House 14: Revenge of the 'Taker — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Your_House_14:_Revenge_of_the_%27Taker
25. "Why Bret Hart Vs Steve Austin At Survivor Series 1996 Is One Of The Best Matches In The Event's History" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-bret-hart-vs-steve-austin-survivor-series-1996-one-of-best-matches-in-event-history/
26. "Owen Hart & Steve Austin's Troubled Relationship, Explained" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-owen-hart-steve-austin-troubled-relationship-explained/

Further Listening

• Steve Austin's Broken Skull Sessions with Bret Hart — both men breaking down WrestleMania 13 spot by spot
• Bret Hart's autobiography, Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling — Hart's own account of the blood plan and the double turn
• The Ariel Helwani Show — Hart discussing the secrecy around the blade job in detail decades later
• Talk Is Jericho with Steve Austin — Austin's own recollection of agreeing to bleed and his early doubts about the finish