Bret Hart attack casts shadow over Hart Foundation’s Hall of Fame moment

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Brett "The Hitman" Hart and his niece Natalya Neidhart at the 2019 WWE Hall of Fame ceremony where The Hart Foundation was inducted. (Dan Humphreys/WWE)

BROOKLYN, New York — The WWE Hall of Fame induction ceremony is a night when a life of narratives gives way to reality, when an audience gets to peek behind the curtain with the stars.

On Saturday night at the Barclays Center it got a little too real and as a result some jerk from Nebraska stands charged with trespassing and assaulting Bret Hart.

A special place in Hell is reserved for scene stealers and, in the case of a seemingly deranged "fan" who tackled the 61-year-old former WWE world champion, presumably some special cell in Riker’s Island.

Wrestling fans take a special pride in seeing things coming but no one who went to the arena Saturday night could have predicted the disruption of the ceremony honouring the Hart Foundation, the defining tag-team of the 1980s. Hart was in the ring with Natalya Neidhart, who is both his niece and the daughter of the late Jim the Anvil Neidhart, the antic half of the tag team. Natalya, who is a WWE talent herself, had handed off the mic to her uncle after a moving speech about her father, who died after a seizure and resulting fall in the family home last summer. Hart started to talk about his struggles starting out in the WWE, including his painful miscasting as Cowboy Bret Hart, and the evolution of the Hart Foundation.

Hart seemed to be in good spirits, showing no ill effects from the stroke he suffered years back — he wasn’t racing through his speech but neither was he struggling with it. Hart told a hilarious story about getting a heel’s reception from fans when he left Madison Square Garden with Neidhart and King Kong Bundy, who died earlier this year. As Hart told it, he was the designated driver and after fans showered them in garbage he feared they were going to flip over their rental car with Bundy wedged in the back. His was the funniest speech of the night and, per usual, he didn’t crack a smile throughout.

And at that point, history gave way to reality.

It takes a low double-digit IQ to assault a professional wrestler but a Next-Level brand of stupidity to do that with cameras rolling and dozens of the wrestler’s very tough friends in attendance, along with New York’s finest.

Now, I will admit that, from my seat in the arena, I thought the attack was "work" — that is, a piece of theatre, if not entirely scripted then a bit of improv with everyone in on it. It happened so fast and so unexpectedly that I was combing my memory for a likely candidate from a reheated grudge. It couldn’t have been Ric Flair, from whom Hart had wrested the heavyweight championship years back. Too spry. Shawn Michaels and the Montreal Screw Job Redux? Nah.

The idiot who invaded the ring knew a little bit about the game. His entrance, leaping from ringside and sliding under the bottom rope to Hart’s blind side, couldn’t have been choreographed better. There were ropes on only three sides of the ring, but he eschewed them using the steps. Hart didn’t need to sell the fall, though — if you don’t see it coming or expect it, well, a perp could take down anybody this side of King Kong Bundy.

The cameras went dark and the digital screens in the arena hastily cut to a WWE logo, so all you’ll have to go with is a few blurry Youtube videos of the events immediately thereafter.

The party crasher then had his own balloons popped by more than a dozen wrestlers and the security detail who jumped into the ring, tackled him and gave him various back-alley versions of Swedish massage, reflexology and noogies. On the floor of the arena, with all the past and current WWE stars lining the ring, it might have been the one venue where the bouncers and self-appointed deputies out-numbered the patrons. Where’s Rhonda Rousey when you need her?

When the speech and the broadcast resumed, Hart was seemingly unaffected, save for a few strands of his grey mane being knocked out of place. He picked up his speech where he left off and didn’t bother acknowledging the unfortunate interruption.

It’s a shame but not a tragedy that the Hart Foundation’s moment might not be remembered so much as the ass who tried to spoil it and should be tried to the full extent of the law. We’ve seen other events disrupted before and, though writing this might exacerbate the issue, they do tend to live in memory longer than the show itself. Just think of Fan Man, the guy who piloted his little parachute craft into the ring for the Riddick Bowe-Evander Holyfield fight.

What I will say, however, is that anyone in attendance who first griped about security, about having to pass through a metal detector and check their bags, breathed a sigh of relief that they were so inconvenienced. Yes, for Hart, the whole shemozzle might have evoked the scene outside MSG with the Anvil and Bundy, but it could have been far, far uglier — think of Monica Seles or even John Lennon. This guy brought nothing into the ring besides misbegotten bad intentions and a really ugly beret seemingly borrowed from Bob Marley’s estate.

Fandom requires the ability to temporarily abandon rationality, but attacking a star in the forum at such a moment is the stuff of the forever unmoored.

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