9. Bret Hart
Say what you will about his obsession with keeping grudges and his ability to complain about things when they aren’t going his way, but Bret Hart could work. One of the greatest technicians of all-time, Bret was almost that way to a fault. Like Bob Backlund in the era before him, Bret’s focus on the TECHNICAL aspect of his matches led many to feel he was one-dimensional, or worse, “boring”. He wasn’t the flashiest, but he was never supposed to be.
His opponents knew they were going to look good, because he would step the quality level up, but they also knew that if they didn’t try to keep up, he would make them look foolish. That’s a good combination to have. You keep your level of quality high, but force your opponents to do the same, so that it benefits both of you in the end.
Bret even came up in the business at a time that forced him to be versatile, and able to work with different types of opponents of varying sizes. In the late-1980′s and throughout the 1990′s, you saw plenty of “big man” WORKERS, but also men like Curt Hennig, Shawn Michaels, Steve Austin, Ric Flair, Ted DiBiase, Jerry Lawler, and so on, who were much smaller than the likes of Sycho Sid, The Undertaker, or Yokozuna. It was a much more diverse place than today’s WWE, where there is almost always a shortage of the larger workers, making the superstars all around the same general size.
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