Bret The Hitman Hart vs. Owen Hart (Nov 1993 – Nov 1994)

Background

Bret Hart came into this as the WWF's established main event. He had won the first King of the Ring pay-per-view in 1993 and spent that year in a feud with Jerry Lawler, and he would end up with the most combined days as WWF Champion of anyone in the 1990s.[8]

Owen was eight years younger and had been in and out of the company twice. He wrestled amateur at the University of Calgary, started in his father Stu's Stampede Wrestling in Alberta, and was Pro Wrestling Illustrated's Rookie of the Year for 1987.[7] The WWF signed him in 1988 and put him in a mask as the Blue Blazer, a high-flying superhero character he worked until leaving in June 1989.[7] He came back in November 1991 and spent two years in tag teams, first the New Foundation with Jim Neidhart and then High Energy with Koko B. Ware, which ended in March 1993.[7]

The wrestling was never the plan. Martha Hart, who met Owen in 1982 when she was 15 and he was 17, has said he intended to be a physical education teacher: "Owen was never going to get into the business... Owen was a very sensitive person and he really loved his dad. That's all it took was that you can really help your dad."[16] Stu's promotion was struggling against the WWF's national expansion, and Owen went in to help.[16]

Bret's own read on where his brother stood by 1993 was that the company had not done anything with him. "They never gave him a real break," Bret has said. "They kind of pushed him over to the side."[13] Owen's version of the same complaint, in Bret's telling, was a question: "why can't I work with you? I'd make... why can't I get my break?"[13]

By November 1993 the two of them were on the same Survivor Series team, alongside their brothers Bruce and Keith.[3]

Build-up

Survivor Series ran on November 24, 1993 at the Boston Garden in front of 15,509.[3] The Hart Family faced Shawn Michaels and three masked Knights, a match originally built for Jerry Lawler, who had been feuding with the Harts all year and could not appear.[3] The Harts won it in 30:57 and lost only one man.[3]

Owen was that man. Bret was hobbling on the apron, Owen ran toward him, lost track of what was happening behind him, and Michaels pinned him at 27:26.[1][3] When the match was over Owen came back to the ring and shouted at Bret, blaming him for it.[3]

Through December and into January Owen kept asking for a match and Bret kept turning him down.[1] What they got instead was a reconciliation. By late December the brothers had worked it out on television and decided to form a tag team, and the team debuted challenging The Quebecers for the WWF Tag Team Championship at the Royal Rumble on January 22, 1994 in Providence, in front of 14,500.[2][24]

The Quebecers spent the match on Bret's leg, and their manager pulled the ropes out from under him on the floor.[2] When Bret went for the Sharpshooter the knee gave out, and the referee stopped the match and gave the titles to the champions.[2] Owen did not help him up. He kicked the bad leg and walked out.[2]

Then he explained himself to an interviewer, in the sentence that followed him for the rest of his career and past it: "I don't need you with a bad leg doin' it Bret! You're too damn selfish, & that's why you're sitting there with a bad leg, & that's why I kicked your leg out of your leg!"[14] The rest of the promo was straighter. He had never won a title in the WWF, and he was tired of it.[14]

The main event that night gave the feud its shape. Bret and Lex Luger went over the top rope at what looked like the same instant, the referees disagreed, the replays were no help, and WWF President Jack Tunney declared them co-winners, the only time the Rumble has ended that way.[2] Both men were owed a title shot at WrestleMania, so Tunney put both on the card and had a coin toss decide the order.[1]

Luger won the toss on the January 31 Raw and took the first match with Yokozuna.[1] That left Bret wrestling earlier in the night, and the opponent was Owen.[1]

Between the Rumble and WrestleMania, Owen campaigned for the singles match and Bret kept refusing, so Owen spent the weeks beating what the company put in front of him: John Paul on the February 7 Raw, then the Smoking Gunns in a tag with Crush on March 7.[24]

WrestleMania X ran on March 20, 1994 at Madison Square Garden, 18,065 in the building and a 420,000 buyrate.[1] Bret opened the show against his brother and closed it against Yokozuna, and lost the first one.[1]

Owen spent the spring collecting the credibility the win bought him. On June 19 at the Baltimore Arena he won the King of the Ring tournament in one night, beating Tatanka, the 1-2-3 Kid and Razor Ramon in the final, and used the coronation to name himself the King of Harts and aim it at Bret.[5] Earlier on the same card Bret retained the WWF Championship against Diesel by disqualification, when Jim Neidhart came in and interfered.[5]

Neidhart, Bret's old Hart Foundation partner and the brothers' brother-in-law, had been drifting toward Owen all summer, and that got the title match made for SummerSlam.[5] Owen wanted it in a cage.[4]

The Matches

The WrestleMania X opener went 20:21.[1] It opened on the mat, headscissors and hammerlocks and armdrags, with Owen celebrating every small advantage as if the match were already over.[22] Bret controlled the early arm work; Owen matched him hold for hold and then started cheating, pulling hair out of a wristlock and taking it outside to run Bret into the ring post.[22]

The middle was Owen's: a pendulum backbreaker, a grounded chinlock, and a swandive headbutt that missed and gave Bret his run of finishers back.[22] They traded German suplexes and leg-clutch near falls from there.[22]

Then Owen went to the leg, the same one he had kicked in Providence, with dragon screws, an Indian deathlock and a figure-four, borrowing his brother's own style of limb work to do it.[22] The finish came off a victory roll: Bret went for it, Owen sat down on the attempt and held him for the three, and the Garden was silent.[22]

Bret came back out at the end of the night and beat Yokozuna in 10:38 for the WWF Championship, after Yokozuna lost his balance on the top rope going for the Banzai Drop.[1] Owen watched his brother leave the Garden with the belt he had beaten him for eleven matches earlier.

SummerSlam ran on Monday, August 29, 1994 at the United Center in Chicago, 23,300 in the building and a 300,000 buyrate.[4] The cage was the stipulation nobody involved actually wanted. "We never wanted to have a cage match," Bret has said. "The truth was, I would have liked to have had a ladder match against Owen," but Shawn Michaels and Scott Hall had used the ladder at WrestleMania that March.[10]

So they built it as escape rather than violence. The rules were escape only, no pinfalls, and the match ran just over 32 minutes on that structure: heavy offense, then a climb, then a save at the last second, over and over.[23] Both men spent it climbing and getting dragged back, Owen getting over the top before Bret pulled him back in by the hair.[4]

There is a superplex off the cage in the middle of it that Bret sells by rolling onto his knee rather than sitting up, which is roughly the level the two of them were working at.[23] The finish came when Bret threw Owen's head into the steel and Owen's leg caught between the bars; Bret went over the top and dropped to the floor to retain.[4] Owen lost it, in the end, by trying to do what Bret does and getting caught in the cage doing it.[23]

Neidhart came out the second it was over. He put British Bulldog down, padlocked the cage door, and he and Owen worked Bret over inside it until the rest of the Hart family got through and broke it up, with Stu and Helen watching from ringside.[4]

Dave Meltzer rated the cage match five stars.[9] Bret's own view of what they did with a stipulation he did not want has stayed consistent: "A cage is generally a gory, hardcore match with a lot of blood. I didn't want to have that kind of match with Owen... The way I described it in my book is a cage match without blood is a chocolate sundae without the chocolate sauce."[10] What they went for instead, he said, was "the suspense of getting in and out of the cage," and "we were proud of the match. I thought it was a beautiful story."[10]

Aftermath

Owen did not stop after losing the cage match. At Survivor Series on November 23, 1994 at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Bret defended the WWF Championship against Bob Backlund in a submission match that could only end when one man's second threw in a towel.[6] Bret's second was British Bulldog. Backlund's was Owen.[6]

The match ran 35:11.[6] Backlund got Bret in the crossface chickenwing and held it, Bulldog knocked himself out on the ring steps chasing Owen, and Owen went to his parents at ringside and begged one of them to throw the towel in and stop it, saying it had gone too far.[6] Stu did not buy it. Helen did, and threw it.[6] Owen grabbed the towel and ran to the back holding it over his head, and Backlund left with the title.[6]

That was the end of the run. Bret beat Owen again in the weeks after the following Rumble, and the program was over.[7] Owen went to WrestleMania XI on April 2, 1995 with a mystery partner who turned out to be Yokozuna, and the two of them beat The Smoking Gunns for the WWF Tag Team Championship, which gave Owen the title he had spent the whole feud complaining about not having.[19] Jim Cornette took over managing them, and the group became Camp Cornette.[19]

Bret's own decade kept going. He would go on to hold the WWF Championship longer in total than anyone else across the 1990s.[8]

Owen went back into the mask as the Blue Blazer in the late 1990s. On May 23, 1999, at the Over the Edge pay-per-view at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, he was being lowered into the ring on a cable from the catwalk when his quick-release harness came undone and he fell to the ring.[15] He died within minutes of a traumatic aortic rupture.[7][15] He was 34.[7]

The company finished the show.[15] Jim Ross told the audience on air: "This is not part of the entertainment here tonight. This is as real as real can be here."[15] Bret later told The New York Times that the decision to continue was "very cold-blooded," and Martha Hart wrote that the tribute show the following night was "a sick way to profit from Owen's death."[15]

Behind the Scenes

Bret has said repeatedly that he did not want the angle. "I remember I didn't want to do it. They came to me with the idea and I was like, they ran it by me and I said, 'first of all, I can only do it with Owen, if I do this.'"[13] By his account the company's first pitch had a different brother in it entirely, and that brother could not wrestle him: "It actually was going to be one of my other brothers first. That brother was not able to wrestle me. I remember saying, 'But Owen's the better wrestler,' and if I was going to do that idea, I'd have to do it with Owen."[12]

Owen turned up the next day wanting in.[12] Bret's answer came with terms attached. "If you want to do it, we'll do it," he told him. "But remember this, Owen, if we do this thing, we do it old school. We don't talk to each other."[12]

The rest of the conditions were about control and about distance. "I'm the boss, not Vince. If I decide we're not doing it, we're not doing it," Bret has said, and on travel: "we don't ride together. We don't travel together. We don't room together."[13]

They held to it away from the buildings too. "I would go there and mingle with everybody and talk... but Owen and me would walk passed each other and not say a word to each other," Bret said of family gatherings during the run.[13]

The WrestleMania X match was rewritten the night before it was wrestled. "Owen and me had a match worked out that we worked on for three or four weeks," Bret has said. "We were all set to do the match, we had it all locked in. Then I called him the night before we left to fly to New York. I said, 'Meet me up at Dad's house, we need to change the whole match.' So we met in 'The Dungeon' and changed everything."[11]

What they changed it into was a fix for a problem with Owen specifically. "Owen was too babyface," Bret said. "If Owen did a bunch of dropkicks off the top, they're going to go, 'Why are we booing this guy?' We needed him more mean, more nasty, more cheap shots, doing anything to win, the ball shot, biting and bending my finger."[11]

Underneath all of it was a man who had been trying to leave the business for years. Martha Hart has said Owen applied to the fire department annually and was turned down for lack of a degree he could not finish while wrestling full time, and that he also applied to be a customs agent.[16] Her account is that he was working toward getting out, not toward the King of the Ring.[16]

Bret's advice to him at the time, by his own telling, was to leave and come back with leverage: "quit, go home, go somewhere else. Go to Japan for a couple of years. Then, come back and you'll get your break."[13] Owen stayed. The feud with his brother is the break he got, and it came from asking the one person in the company who could hand it to him.

Legacy

The SummerSlam cage match is one of only a handful of WWF matches from the decade that Dave Meltzer rated five stars.[9] The WrestleMania X opener has been called the best opening match in wrestling history and was ranked fourth on IGN's list of the top 20 WrestleMania matches, and Chris Jericho has described it as "amazing" with a "great story."[1] Neither man won a 1994 Wrestling Observer award for it; that year's Match of the Year went to the ladder match on the same WrestleMania card.[9]

The year did what Owen had been asking for. He went into it as a tag wrestler whose last team had folded in March 1993 and came out of it having beaten the WWF Champion clean at WrestleMania, won King of the Ring in a night, main-evented SummerSlam for the world title, and taken the belt off his brother by proxy at Survivor Series.[7]

Bret's assessment of the WrestleMania match has stayed modest in a way the retrospectives have not: "For our first match, that was a really good match," he has said, and "For our time, Owen and I was a great match."[11]

Owen has never been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Martha Hart has said she will not allow WWE to honor him, holding the company responsible for his death, and after a wrongful death suit was settled out of court she used the settlement to start the Owen Hart Foundation in Calgary, which funds scholarships and housing.[17]

His name came back into wrestling through a different door. In September 2021 AEW and the Owen Hart Foundation announced the Owen Hart Cup, an annual men's and women's tournament whose winners receive a trophy called The Owen; Adam Cole and Britt Baker won the first two at Double or Nothing on May 29, 2022.[17][18] Since 2024 the winners also get world title matches at All In.[18]

Bret has spent the years since arguing his brother belongs in the Hall of Fame regardless of the family's position on it.[15]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. WrestleMania X — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_X
2. Royal Rumble (1994) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rumble_(1994)
3. Survivor Series (1993) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Series_(1993)
4. SummerSlam (1994) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SummerSlam_(1994)
5. King of the Ring (1994) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Ring_(1994)
6. Survivor Series (1994) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Series_(1994)
7. Owen Hart — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Hart
8. Bret Hart — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Hart
9. List of professional wrestling matches rated 5 or more stars by Dave Meltzer — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_wrestling_matches_rated_5_or_more_stars_by_Dave_Meltzer
10. "Bret Hart on SummerSlam '94: 'We Never Wanted to Have a Cage Match'" by Justin Barrasso (Jul 29, 2024) — Sports Illustrated. https://www.si.com/fannation/wrestling/wwe/bret-hart-on-summerslam-94
11. "Bret Hart Fondly Remembers Classic 'WrestleMania X' Match vs. Owen" by Justin Barrasso (Mar 11, 2020) — Sports Illustrated. https://www.si.com/wrestling/2020/03/11/wwe-bret-hart-owen-wrestlemania-x-match-interview
12. "WWE Hall Of Famer Bret Hart Looks Back On How Match With Brother Owen Came Together" (Attitude Era Podcast, Aug 30, 2024) — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1651103/wwe-hall-famer-bret-hart-looks-back-match-brother-owen-came-together/
13. "Bret Hart Talks How Owen Hart Feud Started, Owen Never Getting A Big Break In WWE" (Jul 9, 2020) — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2020/07/bret-hart-talks-how-owen-hart-feud-started-672281/
14. "Royal Rumble 1994" (Owen Hart's post-match promo) — Rich on Wrestling. https://richonwrestling.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/royal-rumble-1994/
15. "The Owen Hart Tragedy Was the Moment We Came to See Wrestlers as Human" by Dan Greene (May 23, 2019) — Sports Illustrated. https://www.si.com/wrestling/2019/05/23/wwe-owen-hart-death-20th-anniversary
16. "Martha Hart On How She First Met Owen Hart And His Family, How Owen Got Into Pro Wrestling" (Talk Is Jericho, May 23, 2020) — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2020/05/martha-hart-on-how-she-first-met-owen-hart-and-his-family-670619/
17. "AEW Partners With Owen Hart's Family to Celebrate His Legacy" (Sep 20, 2021) — Sports Illustrated. https://www.si.com/wrestling/2021/09/20/aew-owen-hart-foundation-tournament
18. Owen Hart Cup — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Hart_Cup
19. Owen Hart and Yokozuna — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Hart_and_Yokozuna
20. "FULL MATCH: Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart: WrestleMania X" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsY_MaBuzeY
21. "FULL MATCH: Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart | WWE Title Steel Cage Match: SummerSlam 1994" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zaxk6zm4z4
22. "Match Review: Owen Hart vs. Bret Hart (WWE WrestleMania X) (March 20, 1994)" — BackBodyDrop. https://backbodydrop.com/blog/reviews/match-review-owen-hart-vs-bret-hart-wwe-wrestlemania-x-march-20-1994/
23. "Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart, WWF SummerSlam (8/29/1994)" — Handwerk Reviews. https://handwerkreviews.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/bret-hart-vs-owen-hart-wwf-summerslam-8-29-1994/
24. Owen Hart match-by-match profile — Online World of Wrestling. https://www.onlineworldofwrestling.com/profile/owen-hart/

Further Listening

• Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling (Bret Hart's autobiography) — Bret's chapter-length account of the angle, the conditions he set, and Owen
• Broken Harts: The Life and Death of Owen Hart (Martha Hart) — Owen's life away from wrestling and his attempts to leave the business
• Talk Is Jericho with Dr. Martha Hart — Martha on meeting Owen, the Hart family, and the Owen Hart Foundation
• Dark Side of the Ring: 'The Last Match of Owen Hart' — the 1999 Over the Edge accident and its aftermath
• Attitude Era Podcast with Bret Hart (Aug 2024) — Bret on how the WrestleMania X match came together and the night they rewrote it in the Dungeon