On Monday’s episode of Raw, Natalya announced that her uncle, WWE Hall of Fame legend and cancer obliterator Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart, would be in her corner for her WWE Women’s Championship match against Charlotte at Payback.
Hart and WWE have had a good working relationship for the past few years, but in an interview with FloCombat’s Duane Finley, Hart revealed that he believes there’s a company doing pro wrestling better than WWE: UFC. According to the Hitman, UFC does pro wrestling better than pro wrestling. Here’s the choice quote:
“I think I was really good at it. I brought out a lot of realism to my matches,” Hart told FloCombat’s Duane Finley during a recent Dreamwave wrestling event in La Salle, Ill. “I think that stands out today. As an example, if you watch WrestleMania 13, with Steve Austin in Chicago, it’s like watching a UFC fight. Except no animals were harmed in the making of that movie.”
As the UFC continues to sweep across the globe, Hart notices the same flamboyance more and more within the sport of mixed martial arts.
“I’ll say it now, UFC does better pro wrestling than pro wrestling,” Hart said. “The promos, the whole, [Jon] ‘Bones’ Jones and [Daniel] Cormier sitting in a chair. That’s the gripping television that pro wrestling used to deliver.”
With no disrespect meant to the Hitman, I’m not sure I can think of a Bret Hart match that feels like UFC. That’s not an insult to Bret or his matches, it’s just that pro wrestling is an artform operating on a very broad, sorta vague spectrum of gritty realism to intensely comical bullsh*t. How many UFC fights ended with an inverted atomic drop into a Russian legsweep into an elbow from the second rope, you know? How many title defenses ended with someone walking up a cage and flipping backwards into a pin where the guy holding the submission can’t figure out to let go?
What do you think? Is UFC’s presentation of their fighters as legitimate, real-life athletes more effective than WWE’s exaggerated extremes? Is that what people want when they watch pro wrestling?
