AEW recently held the first-ever Owen Hart Foundation Memorial Tournament, crowning Dr. Britt Baker D.M.D and Adam Cole as its inaugural Owen Hart Foundation Champions. Dr. Martha Hart would even present the Championships to Cole and Baker during AEW’s Double or Nothing pay-per-view, and while Owen’s brother Bret Hart didn’t end up appearing during the event, he recently revealed his reaction to AEW honoring Owen during a recent interview with SportsKeeda. When asked about AEW’s honoring of Owen, Bret said “I’m happy to see Owen remembered in any way. It was very nice.”
Bret has worked with AEW’s FTR during a previous event at Big Time Wrestling last month, but while there were rumors and plenty of teases that he might end up showing up in AEW at some point for a bigger storyline, it never materialized. He did however sign a new deal with WWE, but that wouldn’t bar him from working with AEW according to reports on the matter.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Regarding the Owen Hart Foundation Memorial Tournament, Chris Jericho revealed to ComicBook.com how the event and partnership came about and why AEW was the perfect place to honor Owen and his legacy. “It was a passion project for me and obviously for Martha and Tony. We worked on it for a long time, about a year and a half, to put the deal together and figure out what we wanted to do. I just knew I wanted Owen’s legacy to be something positive and something great as far as wrestling goes, rather than just be dwelling on his death. That’s the main reason why we all wanted this to happen, so we can celebrate Owen Hart’s career and the contributions that he made. He was a pioneer,” Jericho said.
“‘What’s his connection to AEW?’ some people are saying. Well, one of the connections is that he’s specifically the reason I got into wrestling. Owen Hart was the guy. To an extent, Shawn Michaels and Ricky Steamboat, but Owen Hart, to me, I thought, ‘I want to be like that guy.’ There is your connection to AEW. The original AEW face of the company is an Owen Hart fanatic and disciple. That’s the reason we wanted to do this,” Jericho said.
“We’ll do the Owen Hart Cup and tournament and make people feel good about Owen rather than sad. We know what happened, but that was over 20 years ago. Let’s move forward remembering his amazing contributions and legacy in the ring that still resonate to this day. I’m really excited about it and very happy about it and really happy the deal got done. We put a lot of time and work to make it happen, but it did and now we can move forward and have great times with Owen involved, which I’m sure he would love as well,” Jericho said.
H/T Fightful
