Jeff Jarrett Confirms He Had Talks With Bret Hart About Joining TNA

On the latest episode of My World With Jeff Jarrett, the WWE Hall of Famer talked about having talks with Bret Hart about coming into TNA Wrestling over the years. You can check out some highlights below:

On whether they had talks about bringing in Bret Hart to TNA: “Often. And when I say often, it’s not like a weekly [case], but multiple times. Conrad, when TNA made a mistake, but anyway, made the decision to go on Monday nights. What did WWE put opposite of our Monday night debut? [Bret Hart confronting Shawn Michaels].”

On talks with Bret Hart: “I say that to say, when I heard that advertised, it all — my gut was right all along. That he never wanted to commit to us. And I get it, he had — I mean, a legacy for years. And I think he went back and did that, now you can kind of see here we are 20 years later, or almost 20 years later, kind of his thoughts. But I just had that real sense — and the reason that I had optimism. Look, me and Bret are buddies.”

On their relationship: “Bret — not just because we were buddies or both sons of promoters, but we had a good working relationship. And kind of what he’s done — ‘Look, Bret, nobody expects you to wrestle. How can we get you involved?’ So those conversations kept ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing, because I knew there would be an ambassador role in there.

“And when you think about — I’ll say this, the Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, the real in-ring product, Bret could really endorse or knight or give the rub to multiple folks. Namely, in my mind, AJ Styles. Like, ‘How can I get Bret to get involved with the product and really first understand who AJ is, and then really give him the rub.’ And maybe Bret would come up, or we’d collaborate on whatever it may be.”

On why he thought Hart would be interested: “The reason I had — I guess you could say even more confidence, was that he did those Australian tours that I was on. And he flew over to Australia and would come out and do promos and all that. So Bret wasn’t certainly opposed to working outside of WWE at all.

“But every time we would kind of get serious or close, for one reason or another it was — and I wasn’t the only one. Scott D’Amore, Jeremy Borash, and others had relationships with him and all that. But I think it would only come down to him make a decision, ‘Am I going to go work for Jeff?’ And I think at the very end of the day, he always had hope and optimism, ‘I’m going to go back to WWE and everything’s going to be all right’. I just think that was in his brain, and he never would commit. And obviously, he went back and all the different things that happened back then. But yes, there were multiple conversations with Bret through the years.”

On whether they talked about him wrestling again: “No, we specifically discussed, ‘Bret, you can kind of let me know what you do or don’t want to do. What my goal is — and he’d say, ‘What are you thinking?’ I said, ‘Bret, you know that your image if you will, is the Excellence of Execution. The Best There Is, Best There Was — just all of that. And so we’re not going to duplicate that here, but what you can do is bring your aura, and bring in a promo, and bring in a rub.’ And I said, ‘Whether we get into a storyline or not, that’s up to you.’ I would kind of try to toss back to [Hart] and say, ‘Hey, man, what do you want to do?’

“And he was never on his ‘Yeah, I want to wrestle,’ or ‘Yeah, I want to do this,’ or ‘Yeah, I want to do that, as far as in the ring.’ Necause I think he got there and — look, who knows? I’m sure he will do a — I don’t know what pushed him over the line to agree to those performances [in WWE], but obviously Vince and company said, ‘Alright, if we’re going to do this, we want a payoff. We want to get you in a match.’ That’s natural promotion, that’s natural leverage that the promotion had. ‘Hey, Bret, you want this? Here’s what we want out of it.’ And Bret essentially had to agree to it or nothing was going to come out of it. I didn’t want to have those kind of parameters. I wanted him to be a part of the project. And like I said, I’d love for him to get on somehow, on some level, you know, focus on AJ.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit My World With Jeff Jarrett with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.