One of the most infamous feuds to have ever taken place due to how it ended, but a feud that gave two men the platform to become main event stars, with both men becoming household names as a result of it.

The first meeting between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels came way back in the 1980s when the two men were young up-and-comers in the WWE tag team division. Hart was part of The Hart Foundation alongside Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, while Michaels teamed up with Marty Jannetty as The Rockers, and the two teams would routinely face off on the house show. Over the years, it was Bret and Shawn who established themselves as the breakout stars, and in 1992 they would come into contact once again, this time one their own, feuding over the WWE Intercontinental Championship, and even introducing the Ladder match to the WWE audience.

Hart was the first to make it to the top of WWE, winning the WWE Championship in 1992 and even defending it against Michaels at that year’s Survivor Series, an event that would become synonymous with the two men. However, in the wake of the steroid trial in the mid-1990s, WWE needed to lean into the slimmer, more athletic looking stars rather than the hulking beasts that had dominated the company throughout most of the 1980s, and both Hart and Michaels were the men tasked to do that. There was just one problem; by the time 1996 came around, the two men legitimately hated each other.

If there’s anything that will make a wrestling feud feel more alive and vibrant, it’s a little of bit of real life animosity, and in the case of Bret and Shawn, it wasn’t a little bit, it was a lot. The ending of their WrestleMania 12 main event is a prime example of this, as Shawn reportedly told referee Earl Hebner “Tell him to get the f**k out of my ring, this is my moment,” much to the dismay of Hart, and the tensions would only grow from there. After a 1996 that saw Shawn dominate WWE and become their top star, 1997 would be a constant back-and-forth struggle between egos as Bret thought Shawn was disrespectful, while Shawn thought Bret was arrogant. 

There were many backstage altercations, unscripted lines about supposed adultery, and a WrestleMania rematch that never came to be because of a lost smile, but then there was Survivor Series 1997. You all know about the Montreal Screwjob by now, and if you don’t, there are a million videos and articles about it to get you up to speed, but for right now we’ll say this; Shawn claimed to know nothing about the plan, while Bret had a sense something was off. Once Shawn locked Bret in the sharpshooter, the wrestling business changed forever. While not the absolute best feud from a TV standpoint, wrestling itself wouldn’t be the same without the feud between Bret and Shawn.