Bret Hart

Bret Sergeant Hart (born July 2, 1957) is a Canadian retired professional wrestler. A member of the Hart wrestling family and a second-generation wrestler, he has an amateur wrestling background at Ernest Manning High School and Mount Royal College. A major international draw within professional wrestling, he is credited with changing the perception of mainstream North American professional wrestling in the early 1990s by bringing technical wrestling to the fore. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time; Sky Sports noted that his legacy is that of "one of, if not the greatest, to have ever graced the squared circle". For the majority of his career, he used the nickname "the Hitman".

Hart joined his father Stu Hart's promotion Stampede Wrestling in 1976 as a referee and made his in-ring debut in 1978. He gained championship success during the 1980s and 1990s in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE), where he helmed The Hart Foundation stable. He left for World Championship Wrestling (WCW) following the controversial "Montreal Screwjob" in November 1997, where he remained until October 2000. Having been inactive from in-ring competition since January 2000, owing to a December 1999 concussion, he officially retired in October 2000, shortly after his departure from the company. He returned to sporadic in-ring competition from 2010 to 2011 with WWE, where he won his final championship, headlined the 2010 SummerSlam event, and served as the general manager of Raw. Throughout his career, he headlined the respective premier events of the WWF and WCW, WrestleMania (9, 10, and 12) and Starrcade (in 1999). He was inducted into the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame upon its inception in 1996, while still an active performer.

Hart held championship titles in five decades from the 1970s to the 2010s, 32 throughout his career and 17 between the WWF/WWE and WCW. Among other accolades, he is a seven-time world champion; a five-time WWF Champion and a two-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He went the most combined days as WWF Champion during the 1990s (654) and was the first WCW World Heavyweight Champion born outside the United States. He is the second WWF Triple Crown Champion and fifth (with Goldberg) WCW Triple Crown Champion. He is also the 1994 Royal Rumble match winner (with Lex Luger), and the only two-time King of the Ring, winning the 1991 tournament and the first King of the Ring pay-per-view in 1993. He co-headlined multiple pay-per-view events as part of an acclaimed rivalry with Stone Cold Steve Austin from 1996 to 1997. He is the first wrestler to be inducted three times into the WWE Hall of Fame: in 2006 individually, in 2019 as a member of The Hart Foundation, and in 2025 when his Submission match with Stone Cold Steve Austin at WrestleMania 13 was inducted as the inaugural entry into the Immortal Moments category.

Outside of wrestling, Hart has appeared in numerous films and television shows such as The Simpsons as well as featuring in several documentaries, both about himself specifically and others about his family or the wrestling industry in general. He also helped found and lent his name to the major junior ice hockey team the Calgary Hitmen and has written two biographies along with a weekly column for the Calgary Sun for over a decade. After his retirement, he spent much of his time on charitable efforts concerning stroke recovery and cancer awareness, due to his experiences with the two.

The eighth child of wrestling patriarch Stu Hart and his wife Helen, Bret Hart was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada into the Hart wrestling family. He is of Greek descent through his maternal grandmother and of Irish descent through his maternal grandfather. His father was of Scottish, Irish and English ancestry. Hart is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States since his mother Helen was born in New York. Hart has stated that he considers himself to be North American and that he is equally proud of his U.S. and Canadian nationality. His maternal grandfather was long-distance runner Harry Smith.

Hart grew up in a household with eleven siblings, seven brothers Smith, Bruce, Keith, Wayne, Dean, Ross and Owen, as well as four sisters, Ellie, Georgia, Alison and Diana. As a child he was the closest with his older brother Dean who was the nearest to him in age of all his older brothers, being three years his senior. Together they would often fight with Bret's two older sisters, Ellie, who was two years older, and Georgia, who was one year older. Hart's family were non-denominational Christians, but he and all of his siblings were baptized by a local Catholic priest.

Hart spent the vast majority of his childhood in the Hart family mansion which was owned by his father. During one period his father was housing a bear known as Terrible Ted chained under the building, the bear had had all of its teeth removed and Hart would sometimes as a very young child let the bear lick ice cream off his toes since he thought it was a good way to keep them clean.

His introduction to professional wrestling came at an early age. As a child, he witnessed his father training future wrestlers like Superstar Billy Graham in the Dungeon, his household basement which served as a training room. Before school, Hart's father, also a wrestling promoter, had him hand out fliers to local wrestling shows. In the 1998 documentary Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows, Hart reflected on his father's discipline, describing how Stu uttered morbid words while inflicting excruciating submission holds that left broken blood vessels in Bret's eyes. Hart claimed his father had an otherwise pleasant demeanour.