Bret Hart Pushes Back On Shawn Michaels’ Scrapped Title Claim

Bret Hart has rejected the idea that he and Jim Neidhart intentionally sabotaged a planned WWE Tag Team Championship change for The Rockers decades ago, calling a since-repeated claim from Shawn Michaels a “cheap-shot remark.”

Speaking on Inside The Ropes, Hart revisited the infamous match between the Hart Foundation and The Rockers that was supposed to see Michaels and Marty Jannetty capture the tag titles. According to Hart, both teams had spent the day rehearsing and were confident the match would be something special. “This is going to be the best tag match ever,” Hart recalled thinking, adding that The Rockers were “super pumped up” heading into it.

Those plans fell apart when Neidhart hit the turnbuckle and the top rope snapped. Hart says he and Michaels both pleaded with referee Freddie Sparta to halt the action so the ring crew could fix it, but were told repeatedly to keep going. Without a functioning top rope, Hart said he couldn’t execute his signature Hart Attack, and the match derailed from there. “I started screwing up my moves and screwing up spots,” he said. “This match has turned out from being the greatest tag match we’re ever going to do to the worst match I’ve ever had in my life.”

Despite the chaos, The Rockers won the titles that night — a victory Hart says he personally asked Vince McMahon not to air given how sloppy the match had become. McMahon ultimately scrapped the result entirely, and the title change was wiped from WWE history, with Hart saying McMahon came to them the next day and simply called off “the whole thing.”

What clearly still irritates Hart is Michaels’ later suggestion — repeated in various retellings over the years — that the Hart Foundation caused the rope to break or botched the match on purpose to deny The Rockers their moment. Hart was adamant that neither he nor Neidhart had any issue losing the belts. “Me and Jim were happy to drop the belts to the Rockers,” he said, dismissing any suggestion of sandbagging as untrue and unfair to his reputation.

This is a story wrestling fans have heard pieces of for years, but Hart’s renewed pushback is notable given how often the scrapped Rockers title win gets cited as one of the more bizarre “what if” moments in WWE history. It’s also a window into the tension between two Hall of Famers whose on-screen rivalry years later — Hart vs. Michaels at WrestleMania XII and beyond — carried real backstage friction that has occasionally spilled into shoot interviews like this one.

Whether Michaels responds to Hart’s comments remains to be seen, but given how frequently both men have revisited their history publicly, it wouldn’t be surprising if this becomes another chapter in their long-running dialogue about those early WWF years.