Sean Waltman Recalls His 1994 Match With Bret Hart, Hart Trying to Get Him Over, It Being His Favorite Match

– During the latest X-Pac 12360, Sean Waltman recalled his famous 1994 match with Bret Hart in honor of the upcoming the 25th anniversary of the bout. The match took place on the July 11th, 1994 RAW and was a big factor in helping Waltman (then the 1-2-3 Kid) getting over and was unusually long at the time at over 22 minutes. Highlights from the discussion, as well as the full podcast, are below:

On Hart working to get him over in the match: “Yeah, he absolutely [worked to get me over]. Now Bret, he got really aggressive with me in there for the sole purpose of making sure the people were behind me. Because you know, people were always solidly behind me back then, but I’d never been up against, been across the ring from Bret.”

On if that was his first time in a position to see if he could hang in the main event: “Yeah, I guess so. I never really thought of it at the time, but looking back on it that match really, besides the stuff with Razor coming in the door, beating him and having the $10,000 challenge match when I got back, you know, obviously that was great for me and the victories over DiBiase and all that stuff. But no, this was, I needed that. I needed that match, I had a little bit — after SummerSlam ’93 my push kinda came to a little bit of a halt due to my own behavior outside the ring, I think. No one ever really tells you, ‘Oh you know, we’re punishing you now.’ You’re just, all of a sudden you’re losing matches you think you’re supposed to be winning and things like that.”

On his match with Owen Hart the month before: “I had a great match with Owen, a lot of people talk about it, King of the Ring 1994. And so King of the Ring is mid to late June, and usually right around, I think that year it was the 19th … but so you know, we had about a month in between that and this match with Bret.”

On the match itself: “We knew a couple weeks out. I remember like the TV before that, because we would tape, one taped show, one live show, so it was at the previous set of TVs, I’m pretty sure it was Pat Patterson that came up to Bret, and told Bret we were having the match. So you know, the match was held at this place, it was called Fernwood Resort. It was like this crazy — up in the Pocono Mountains, it was this crazy resort, like you go to in Cancun or something, but it was in the Pocanos. They had the crazy honeymoon suites with the heart-shaped beds and all that. I think we dressed in one of those rooms actually. And then they came to get us for the match like two or three different times, and two or three different times, Bret said, ‘We’re not ready yet.’ And so they shot our match out of sequence. And finally obviously, eventually we were ready. It’s just that we were putting a lot of thought into that. And man, he just — he really made me in that.”

On the commentary helping the match: “Jim Ross and Randy Savage just crushed it on commentary. That actually made the match even better. Because I’ve watched that match with other voiceover, because obviously at one point Randy Savage was [on the outs with WWE]. And so anything with his voice in it, they VO’d. So when they released this match on something, I can’t remember what it was, they had a voiceover with Gorilla Monsoon and Stan Lane. And it f**king sucked. I was so mad. Stan Lane was making jokes and here we are out there, doing this match all serious, and uh, I was so f**king mad when I heard that.”

On when he started hearing the crowd get behind him: “It was at, you know, once I’d mounted my comeback, there was the [point where] he goes to superplex me and I turned it into a crossbody press situation. That was good. Actually any of that stuff. Like, when I dropped the f**king leg off the top, I think I jackknife powerbombed him. And they were buying, the crowd was buying all the near-falls hook, line, and sinker … the uppercut forearms, the European-style uppercut forearms that are referred to as ‘lifters.’ That’s what we call them, lifters. And Bret throws pretty much the best lifter of anyone that’s not from the UK or ain’t dead. And Bret, if you watch the match when he hits me with those things, it looks like he’s taking my head off. He actually told me, no one’s ever sold those like that before. But it wasn’t hard to sell them!”

On what it was like wrestling Bret at his peak: “It was great. I mean, I don’t know what you want me to say [laughs]. I wish I would have had more matches. That was what we did after the first time we ever — the first and only time we ever had a match and that’s what came of it. So I can’t imagine if we were ever able to go out there and really get to know each other in the ring, what could have happened. He’s one of those guys that you just, I mean, the term ‘ring general’ in the dictionary will have his picture up next to the definition. You could just go out there and listen to the guy … to me, if someone asks me ‘What’s your favorite match,’ ‘What’s your best match,’ any of those questions … that’s it, that’s the one I choose.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit X-Pac 12360 with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.