Bret Hart has high praise for Rhea Ripley.
Hart recently spoke with FOX Sports Australia to promote his upcoming appearance at the Starrcast wrestling convention coming to Ballarat, Victoria in April. Hart took some time to praise Rhea Ripley, the current WWE Women’s World Champion. He said Ripley really found a character that adds some realism in wrestling, a trait that has been missing.
“I really like her a lot. I really like her poise, her staying in character and sort of living her – she seems like she’s adapted a character that’s fun to play, and she’s playing into that, full tilt,” Hart said. “She’s putting that realism into it; that’s what I miss in a lot of wrestling today, just making it feel more real, and she makes it feel pretty real all the time.”
Who wants to watch that?
Bret Hart also spoke about the realism he tried to add to the business. He explained how calling wrestling a “performance” and being so scripted hurt the product.
“But you watch my wrestling and you go, jeez, he was the best. I think I made it look more real than anybody all the time. I made your stuff look good, I made my own stuff look good, nothing looked rehearsed. There’s so much I think in today’s wrestling that’s so badly rehearsed, over and over. I saw something just a few days ago in a wrestling match. All the girls were lying in the middle of the ring together. And they were doing the big belly flops on all of them. And you think they would get away from that kind of phony rehearsed kind of wrestling? Who wants to watch that? I don’t want to watch that, I know my kids don’t want to watch that.
“The best pro wrestling has to always pretend to be real. And that way it’s fun – but when you basically say it’s not real, and it’s all just a performance, it loses some of that what I think was in my style. My punches, my kicks, my dropkicks – if I dropkicked somebody I hit him right in the face, but I didn’t hurt him. But both feet pushed his face hard enough to know jeez, I’m guessing that might’ve hurt. And the thing I take so much pride in is every wrestler I ever worked, every single one, came back and he shook my hand to say thanks for the match.”
