Bret Hart on How Easy Randy Savage Was to Work With, Replacing Jake Roberts Once Against Savage at the Last Minute

– Fightful recently interviewed WWE Hall of Famer Bret Hart, who reflected on his career. During the interview, he discussed opponents who were easy to work with, and how he once ended up replacing Jake Roberts against Macho Man for a WWF live event. Below are some additional highlights.

Hart on other wrestlers who had a similar work ethic and would give him an easy night at the office: “Curt Hennig was one. Sting was one. My brother Owen was one of them. Macho Man was another one where you didn’t need to even talk. omeone just said, ‘Quick, run out there you’ve got to go twenty minutes with Macho Man and we don’t know what you’re doing. Just figure it out on the fly.’ I’ve done that with Macho Man. Some guys you can just work. They’re total pros that way. Really it’s important for all wrestlers to try to be like that. I do remember wrestling Macho Man one time where something happened with someone’s flight. I was in Detroit, but they were running another show in South Bend, Indiana.

“It might’ve been Jake Roberts who had been working against Macho Man, but he had gotten delayed somewhere or he couldn’t make his plane or something like that. They told me I was on the first match in Detroit, they put me on first and said, ‘You gotta get on an airplane, fly all the way to South Bend, Indiana and wrestle Macho Man. That’s a sell-out crowd and the main event’s not going to be there.’ Literally by the time I’d wrestled, and got on a charter plane to South Bend from Detroit, and the time zone change, I landed and had no time. I actually pulled up and Macho Man was in the ring cutting an interview. He’d been on the mic cutting an interview for about thirty minutes waiting for me to show up. They were just about ready to cancel the main event and I pulled up.”

Hart on replacing Jake Roberts against Macho Man at a live event: “I remember they told me as I was running in, ‘You just go straight to the ring. Figure it out in the ring.’ I didn’t have a finish, I didn’t have an ending. Most of all it was at a time when I wasn’t necessarily sure that I could be the main event. It was always questionable whether I had reached that level, you know, ‘Send Bret Hart out, is that going to get a reaction?’ Like, ‘Oh, he’s not a big enough star to replace Jake Roberts.’ I just remember running out, and the place popped and went crazy. It was like, ‘I guess I’m over enough to replace Jake Roberts to be the main event.’ That was the first sort of start of me being a bigger star than just being Bret Hart, the singles wrestler.”