It sounds like there’s still some bad blood between Bret “The Hitman” Hart and Bill Goldberg. During an interview on the Prime Time with Sean Mooney podcast that dropped last week, Hart brought up the infamous Starrcade match with Goldberg in 1999, where he suffered a concussion from one of Goldberg’s thrust kicks that would wind up bringing his in-ring career to an abrupt end. Hart argued during the interview that the former WCW World Heavyweight Champion should never have been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, given his history of injuring other wrestlers.
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“I wish that Bill Goldberg had never kicked me in the head as hard as he could,” Hart said. “I don’t know how you give a guy a Hall of Fame thing for hurting as many wrestlers as Bill Goldberg hurt, and without consequence. He usually got a pat on the back and told how good of job he did out there, when you’re scraping the wrestler that worked with him off the mat.
“When Bill Goldberg kicked me in the head, I honest to God, I lost about 16 million dollars in like one second,” he continued. “I just signed with WCW for three million a year for another three years on top of the two years I had left on my original contract, so it was bad timing, and unfortunate.”
In the six days since Hart’s interview dropped, Goldberg has not commented publicly on his comments. Hart was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame twice, first as a singles wrestler in 2006 and again in 2019 as a member of the Hart Foundation tag team.
Goldberg returned to WWE television earlier this year for what became an infamous match with The Undertaker at the Super ShowDown event in Saudi Arabia. The big man inadvertently knocked himself out early on in the match with a turnbuckle spot, which led to botches later in the match where both men got spiked on the top of their heads. Undertaker looked visibly disappointed after the match was over, while Goldberg took to social media to apologize for his performance afterwards. He redeemed himself months later with a quick win over Dolph Ziggler at SummerSlam.
The three-time former world champion explained what went wrong with the match in an interview with Booker T.
“I can’t bounce back from it like I used to, and then the perfect storm of the heat, and the perfect storm of Taker not having the timing and not going at the same time at one point or something,” he said. “Hey, at the end of the day, there’s never been a dude in the freaking ring that I couldn’t pick up, period…. It was an unfortunate deal that I shouldn’t have gone as hard as I went. And then there were a couple of people saying that he referee should have called it. Well guess what? The referee asked me 15 times how I felt and you know what I told him? Fifteen different answers. I felt different every single time that he asked me.”
