Bret Hitman Hart vs. Goldberg (Mar 1999 – Dec 1999)

Background

Bret Hart signed with WCW in the direct aftermath of the November 1997 Montreal Screwjob, arriving with two decades of WWF championship pedigree and a legitimate grievance the promotion never fully knew how to use.[1] His brothers-in-law Davey Boy Smith and Jim Neidhart followed him from the WWF around the same time.[1] WCW's first instinct badly undersold the signing: Hart's on-screen WCW debut, at Starrcade 1997, had him working as the special referee counting a pinfall rather than wrestling, on the company's biggest show of the year.[1]

Goldberg, by contrast, had spent 1997 and 1998 becoming the hottest act WCW had produced in years off the back of an undefeated streak, a WCW World Heavyweight Championship win over Hollywood Hogan, and a controversial title loss to Kevin Nash at the previous year's Starrcade.[6] By early 1999 the two men, a veteran carrying real anger from his old company and a former NFL player still establishing himself as WCW's top new star, were natural opposite numbers for a program.[2]

Build-up

The feud's first real angle came on the March 29, 1999 Nitro. Bret goaded Goldberg into spearing him, a move nobody had walked away from clean in Goldberg's WCW run, then stood back up wearing a steel plate hidden under his Toronto Maple Leafs jersey; the impact knocked Goldberg out cold.[2][3] It became one of the most-remembered moments of Hart's WCW run, a rare angle that used his real cunning and his real hometown pride in the same beat.[2]

The momentum stopped less than two months later. On May 23, 1999, Bret's brother Owen Hart died after falling from the rafters during a stunt at the WWF's Over the Edge pay-per-view.[3] Bret did not return to WCW television and took roughly four months away from the company to be with his family.[3]

He came back on the September 13, 1999 Nitro, and the Goldberg program picked back up that fall inside a WCW Championship tournament being run to fill the vacant title. Hart beat Goldberg in a tournament match on the October 25 Nitro, and Goldberg then helped protect Hart's path to the final by fighting off interference from Scott Hall and Kevin Nash during Hart's tournament-final match against Chris Benoit at Mayhem on November 21, where Hart made Benoit submit to the Sharpshooter to win the vacant WCW World Heavyweight Championship.[4][5]

What happened next complicated the two men's on-screen relationship rather than clarifying it. On December 7, Hart and Goldberg, positioned as rivals in the tournament they had just finished, won the WCW World Tag Team Championship together by beating Creative Control; they dropped the belts six days later to The Outsiders.[5] Neither man's later public account fully explains the logic of pairing them as champions less than two weeks before booking them against each other for the world title.[5]

Starrcade, on December 19 at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C., was built as a direct callback to the promotion's biggest controversy of the decade. The match was booked No Disqualification with Roddy Piper as special referee, and the planned finish had Piper call the match off without an actual submission, deliberately echoing the Montreal Screwjob finish from two years earlier, this time with Hart on the other end of a finish nobody was supposed to fully believe.[5]

The Matches

The match ran under those No Disqualification, Piper-refereed terms in front of 8,582 fans, a modest crowd for a show built around a world title defense with this much real-world history behind it.[5] During the bout, Goldberg threw a kick that was supposed to miss Hart entirely. It didn't. The mule kick caught Hart under the chin.[2][3]

Hart has described the impact directly: "It felt like someone chopped me with a hockey stick."[2] He went down holding the back of his head and neck and, by his own account, remembered almost nothing of what happened in the ring afterward, finishing the match on instinct with no clear memory of doing so.[2] The planned finish played out as scripted, Piper calling the match for Hart without a submission, the controversy built to land as an homage rather than a repeat, while the real injury that had just happened went unacknowledged on the broadcast.[5]

Examined afterward in Calgary, Hart was told directly how serious the damage was. Dr. Willem Meeuwisse's assessment, as Hart has recounted it, was blunt: "This part here feels like hamburger. Your career is probably over."[2]

Aftermath

Hart tried to continue as champion through the following weeks, unaware at first how severe the injury was, but was eventually diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome and relinquished the WCW World Heavyweight Championship on January 16, 2000, forcing the title to be vacated on the following Nitro.[2][5] He remained affiliated with WCW television into the fall of 2000, including a stretch reforming a version of the nWo, but wrestled only a handful of matches after Starrcade before his career effectively ended.[5]

The injury resurfaced as storyline material months later. On the September 6, 2000 Thunder, in what turned out to be Hart's final WCW television appearance, he cut a promo directly referencing the injury, saying it had left him with "10% disability to his brain" and describing himself as feeling "like a circus animal waiting to be taken out and shot."[7] Goldberg, confronted in the same segment, said he was "sick" of "Bret's whining in the media," and the angle ended with Scott Steiner attacking Goldberg from behind with a pipe while Hart looked on.[7] Hart formally announced his retirement from in-ring competition later that year.[5]

Behind the Scenes

Both men have given consistent, if differently emphasized, accounts of what the kick was supposed to be. Hart has said he told Goldberg beforehand, plainly, "Don't hurt me."[2] Goldberg has said the two had discussed the spot and that Hart knew the kick was coming, and has been direct that the outcome was never intended: "If I really wanted to hurt the guy, he would have never have gotten up. No joke."[3]

Goldberg has described Hart as one of his idols and has said he carries lasting remorse over what he calls a misplaced kick rather than a reckless one, framing it as the kind of accident that happens in a business built on physical trust between opponents.[3] Hart's own accounting of the cost has been far less measured, and he has put a number on it publicly, saying the injury and the shortened career that followed it cost him "millions of dollars," a claim he has repeated in various figures across different interviews.[2]

The September 2000 Thunder segment, using the real injury as scripted material for a worked confrontation between the two men, sits at the uncomfortable center of how this feud is remembered: a real, life-altering injury was written into an angle as if it were just another storyline beat, with both performers delivering lines about it in character months after the damage had already been done.[7] The finish of the Starrcade match itself, deliberately built to gesture at Montreal, adds a layer of real irony that has not been lost on anyone who has revisited the tape: a match designed to reference a fake screwjob produced a real, career-ending injury instead.[5]

Legacy

Hart's WCW run is widely regarded, including by historians sympathetic to him personally, as a mismanaged coda to one of the greatest championship careers in wrestling history, and the Goldberg kick is the single moment most often cited as the point that run turned from disappointing to genuinely tragic.[1][6] The injury forced Hart out of full-time competition years before he intended to retire, and he has said publicly that its effects, including post-concussion syndrome, followed him for years afterward.[2]

Goldberg has continued to address the incident in interviews for decades since, consistently describing it as the low point of his in-ring career even as his broader WCW run is remembered as one of the most successful pushes the promotion ever built.[3] The two men have both said, separately, that they eventually made peace with what happened, even as their public accounts of its cost and its intent have never fully lined up.[3][6]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. "10 Biggest Mistakes WCW Made With Bret Hart" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/biggest-mistakes-wcw-made-with-bret-hart/
2. "Bret Hart and Goldberg: The Kick That Ruined Bret's Career" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/bret-hart-goldberg-kick/
3. "Goldberg On Botched Kick To Bret Hart: If I Wanted To Hurt Him, He Wouldn't Have Gotten Up" — Fightful. https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/goldberg-botched-kick-bret-hart-if-i-wanted-hurt-him-he-wouldn-t-have-gotten/
4. Mayhem (1999) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayhem_(1999)
5. "Reliving A Feud #24: Bret Hart vs. Goldberg In WCW '99-00" — Wrestling Recaps. https://wrestlingrecaps.com/2014/10/10/reliving-a-feud-24-bret-hart-vs-goldberg-in-wcw-99-00/
6. Starrcade (1999) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starrcade_(1999)
7. "Bret Hart's Final Appearance In WCW Saw Him Trick Goldberg One Last Time" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wcw-thunder-bret-hart-final-appearance-trick-goldberg/

Further Listening

• Bret Hart's Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling — his own account of the WCW run, the Starrcade injury and its aftermath
• Bret Hart's Wrestling with Shadows follow-up interviews on leaving the WWF and the toll of the years that followed
• Goldberg's own shoot interviews and podcast appearances discussing the kick as the low point of his in-ring career