Bret Hart says, “Hulk Hogan knew that I could have embarrassed him if he had worked with me”

Bret Hart was WWF Champion more than any other wrestler during the 1990s, with a total of 654 days as a champion, and was the first WCW World Heavyweight Champion to be born outside the United States.

He also holds the record of reigns as the WCW / WWE United States Champion and was the second WWF Triple Crown Champion and the fifth (with Goldberg) WCW Triple Crown Champion, becoming the first wrestler to obtain such recognition in both the WWF and the WCW.

He was also the winner of the Royal Rumble in 1994 (ex aequo with Lex Luger) and the only two-time WWE King of the Ring in history, after winning the tournament in 1991 and 1993 (which by the way was the first edition transmitted in pay-per-view).

He is the second WWF Triple Crown Champion and fifth (with Goldberg) WCW Triple Crown Champion, and the first man to win both the WWF and WCW Triple Crown Championships.

Hart is also the 1994 Royal Rumble match winner (with Lex Luger), and the only two-time King of the Ring, winning the 1991 tournament and the first King of the Ring pay-per-view in 1993.

Stone Cold Steve Austin, with whom Hart headlined multiple pay-per-view events as part of an acclaimed rivalry from 1996 to 1997, inducted him into the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2006.

In 2019, Hart became one of four people to enter the WWE Hall of Fame twice, when he was inducted again as a member of The Hart Foundation, with brother-in-law Jim Neidhart.

During a long interview with ESPN, he explained why Hulk Hogan never wanted to work with him: “I think Hulk Hogan knew that someone like me could embarrass him on the ring, or really take the edge off him from a fan perspective because he was so limited as a wrestler, and being so much bigger than me, like 6’8″, wrestling a guy that was six foot, he was always gonna be the overdog, I was always gonna be the underdog against Hulk Hogan, and that would have been too big a thing, it would have been, Hulk Hogan could never make another wrestler, and especially another wrestler that might end up being bigger than him.

He couldn’t bear the thought of wrestling me and making me so he completely buried the knife in me and made sure that he never worked with me”