During the latest edition of his “Confessions Of The Hitman” podcast, Bret Hart commented on his WrestleMania 8 match with Roddy Piper, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On his initial reaction to being told that he would lose the Intercontinental Title to the Mountie: “I wasn’t that impressed with the news. Like, I got told, ‘Oh, we’re going to take the title off of you.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I just got it! I’ve hardly had a chance to show anybody what I can do.’” Hart said, “Roddy was the one who told me – he goes, ‘You’re going go end up working with me.’ And I was thinking, I just thought, naw, the way the business usually works is to somehow benefit you. Like, it [has] got nothing to do with me. I’m just going to be the patsy, or the guy that got the belt taken from him.”
On not believing at the time that it would work out: “Roddy was the one to kind of stress to me in the beginning, like, ‘No, no, no, this is going to be really good for you. Like, you’re going to see that this is going to be great for you.’ And I had my doubts about it. I kept thinking, like, ‘He’s my friend, and I can tell as we get closer to WrestleMania, it’s going to be, ‘We’ve changed our mind – we’re going to go a different direction with Roddy. We’re going to do this, this, and this.’ In fact, I think I started to send little messages down to WCW to see if I could consider going there, because I thought maybe this was it, maybe this was my big push coming to an end here, and coming fast.”
On how Piper sold the feud: “[Piper] was kind of playing the story of the old veteran, big brother type of thing, looking out. He had always been a mentor to me, and this is all true. And he makes up and implies a little bit that he lived in the Hart house, and had sandwiches with the family, and all that. Yeah, that didn’t happen. It made for a good story at the time. He always thought he was my cousin, so we had fun with that.”
On Piper not wanting to turn heel for WrestleMania: “The beauty of the match with Roddy was that we were both good guys. In this case, Roddy did not want to turn heel. Like, he had already been a heel. He’s quite popular at this time and he wanted to stay that way, but he knows that he can get on the wild side and still be a good guy, which is what people love about him. And he’s smart enough to know how not to be too vicious, and too rough, and how to be enough of a good guy to keep your fans onside without tipping the scale over. And it’s a real fine line there between going over the top and just finding the right line to be a bad guy in.”
On working with Piper on the match: “Me and Roddy, when we sat down in this restaurant, I already had mapped out in my head the entire match. Like, I had this match in my head. I don’t know the ending but I’m thinking of the pace, and the type of stuff that we’ll be doing. I thought it would be really hard for me to tell Roddy Piper that I don’t like his idea, that this is my idea, and I’d like to do my idea instead of yours. You have to be really careful about that kind of stuff. A) because sometimes you’re right and B) because it’s difficult to tell a veteran, an old pro, that his idea is not good enough, and yours is better. And that doesn’t fly very high most of the time.”
On his plans working with Piper’s: “And so I went over to Roddy and we sat down. I remember bracing myself for it, like, ‘How do I not hurt his feelings if it’s lazy, lame kind of stuff?’ So he started talking, and anyway, he goes, ‘This is how I think it should go.’ And he talked for about 25 minutes without interruption, but it was almost the exact match that I had in my head. I remember I had total agreement with everything he said, that it was exactly what we should do. We were on the exact same page from the very first time we talked about it.”
On Piper suggesting he violate WWE’s no-blood rule at the time: “In [WWE] at the time, there was a no-blood rule, which was a good rule, and I’m glad they had the rule. But because of the no-blood rule, every once in a while there are situations in wrestling where guys bump heads, or fall and hit their head on the post for real, and things like that where people get busted open. So, sometimes accidents happen. Roddy had said to me, he goes, ‘I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I think it would hit this thing out of the park if there was a little blood in this match.’”
On blading for the match: “I generally carried [the razor] in my mouth right here, and it would stay there the whole match. It wouldn’t move. I never cut myself, never even a cut on my gum or anything. It was the perfect place to carry it. By the time you tape a razor blade up, it’s about the size of a Chiclet with a little piece of razor on it. You just stick it right in there and it stayed there the entire time, including interviews. It was very risky for me to take it upon myself to do that, but we wanted to draw attention to our match.”
On how they got away with not being fined: “Ric Flair and ‘Macho Man’ were deciding to do the same thing after our match. They were on right after us, and so me and Roddy had the match, and of course, I was discrete. No one really saw what happened, and all of a sudden, I’m bleeding. And luckily for me, it wasn’t a real gusher. Like, the one with Roddy was like someone smeared some blood on my face kind of a thing, but it wasn’t like the Steve Austin time, where there was blood pouring everywhere. Yeah, but it was effective enough. But I remember when I came back to the dressing room, we had to pretend we were mad at each other. He was apologizing and telling me it was an accident, that he didn’t mean to kick me. Because we had to put on a big charade so we didn’t get fined. So then, 10 minutes later, Ric Flair and ‘Macho Man’ go out there and have a juice fest. Anyway, [WWE] fined them. Both of them, I think, got $5,000 each fined for having blood in the match. And I remember, they said, ‘What about Bret and Roddy?’ and they said, ‘Their’s was real,’ so we never got fined.”
(h/t – Wrestlinginc)
