What Could Have Been: What If Goldberg Hadn't Concussed Bret Hart In WCW?

December 1999. The 20th century is about to draw to a close, and Bret "The Hitman" Hart is looking to walk into the year 2000 as the WCW World Heavyweight Champion. To do that, he would have to defeat Goldberg in the main event of the final WCW pay-per-view event of the year, Starrcade, the same event where Goldberg's legendary undefeated streak came to an end 12 months earlier. Following a No Disqualification Match that ended in similar fashion to how the Montreal Screwjob went down in WWE two years earlier, Hart retained his title. However, this would be the final WCW pay-per-view match of Hart's career.

During the bout, Goldberg delivered a Mule Kick that Hart reportedly didn't see coming and suffered a severe concussion in the process. This wouldn't be the only concussion Hart suffered at the end of 1999 as he would continue to wrestle on "WCW Nitro" and "WCW Thunder" heading into the holiday season, unknowingly causing more damage to his head. "The Hitman" would eventually vacate the WCW World Heavyweight Championship in January 2000 due to injuries, and even though he made a few non-wrestling appearances throughout the year, Hart never wrestled for WCW again and was released from his contract and subsequently retired before the year was out.

Hart had already been wrestling for over 20 years by the time he hung up his pink boots, but everyone knows that he would have carried on performing well into the 2000s had post concussion syndrome not taken its toll. He was even confined to a wheelchair in 2002 after suffering a stroke and still had the will to get back in the ring for one more run in 2010 for WWE, burying the hatchet with both Vince McMahon and Shawn Michaels for what happened at the 1997 Survivor Series in the process.

So what would have Hart's career looked like if Goldberg didn't send his brain back to Calgary? Well we've once again put our hypothetical booking caps on and traveled to a strange, alternate timeline to see where "The Hitman" would have ended up, who he would have wrestled, and what his career would have turned out like if Goldberg didn't give him a concussion in 1999.

Not even "The Hitman" could pull WCW out of the spiral that the company was in heading into 2000, but he would have at least been a diamond in the rough.

WCW in the year 2000 is without question one of the worst wrestling products that has ever been broadcast to an audience. It is the most schizophrenic, non-sensical mess of a company that there has ever been and that's not coming from a place of hatred, that's coming from the people who actually worked there. WCW wasn't where you wanted to be in 2000, especially since WWE were firing on all cylinders at the time with the "Attitude Era," something that had taken WWE from being beaten every week in the ratings by WCW, to an international mainstream phenomenon. 

Bret Hart wouldn't have saved WCW, and it is very likely that the company would have still been bought by Vince McMahon in March 2001, but if he was able to have a proper run with the WCW World Heavyweight Championship, it would have at least brought eyes to the promotion. With people like Hollywood Hogan and Kevin Nash throwing their weight around, Hart wouldn't have had a title reign that lasted very long, but if he holds the belt until the summer, Chris Benoit doesn't win the title, David Arquette certainly doesn't win the title no matter how much promotion "Ready To Rumble" needed, and the infamous Bash at the Beach 2000 incident potentially doesn't happen either.

A lot of WCW's most infamous moments vanish with Hart still as champion, which would have gone a long way to rebuilding the good will the company had continued to lose towards the end of the 20th century. However, Vince Russo still had the pen, and Hart's injury played a part in Russo actually walking out of the company in January 2000, so with that in mind, Hart probably doesn't hold the title for very long and WCW dies the same way it did in our timeline.

We're not saying Bret Hart and Goldberg were going to be skipping through cornfields and having picnics together, but they would at least be able to have a decent conversation with each other.

"The Hitman" to this day despises Bill Goldberg, and when you look at it from Hart's point of view, it's very understandable. Wrestling runs through the veins of everyone in the immediate Hart family, so to have the one thing that Hart, at one point, probably loved more than his own friends and family taken away from him because of something that was completely avoidable — you'd be upset too if that happened to you. Regardless of whether it was an accident, Goldberg took Hart's livelihood away from him, the way he made a living, the way provided for his family, gone because of one kick gone wrong.

With all that said, there is already evidence to suggest that Hart and Goldberg wouldn't have the beef they have now had "The Hitman" not been concussed at Starrcade 1999. While Hart did claim that Goldberg was someone who had a tendency to injure people during his matches, mainly for being too green and irresponsible, he did at one point have a soft spot for Goldberg. In the 2006 WWE-produced documentary made about Hart's career, "The Hitman" admitted that he regrets someone as kind-hearted as Goldberg being the one to effectively end his career, suggesting that the two men were actually on good terms until Starrcade. They were even WCW World Tag Team Champions together a week before the event; there was a time where they got along just fine. It's safe to say that the long-standing rivalry between Hart and Goldberg wouldn't exist today if it weren't for "The Hitman's" career-ending concussion.

Following the Montreal Screwjob in 1997, the relationship between Bret Hart, Vince McMahon, and WWE was frosty at best. It would have taken something astronomical for Hart to be on the same page as McMahon at the turn of the century, but with McMahon purchasing WCW in 2001, "The Hitman" might not have had a choice but to return to WWE as that was the only game in town with ECW also closing its doors during the same period.

Assuming that the Invasion angle goes down the way it did, would Bret Hart have led the WCW invasion against WWE? Possibly. It could have been worked into a storyline where Hart decided to take charge of the WCW/ECW alliance as a way to get revenge on McMahon for what happened in 1997. That would have been better than what we actually got which was just more McMahon family drama, but making the highly anticipated WWE vs. WCW invasion be centered around what is effectively a WWE story in the Screwjob wouldn't have been as great as some would suspect.

Knowing that he had time to finally heal all the non-concussion injuries he had been dealing with in WCW, the most logical choice Hart could have made was join the likes of the New World Order, Jeff Jarrett, Goldberg, Sting, Scott Steiner, and many more in sitting out the rest of the Time Warner contracts and be paid to sit at home and do nothing. It would have given Hart the chance to reflect, regroup, and rest up for what was to come in March 2002 — WrestleMania in Canada.

In reality, Hart turned down the chance to be the referee for the Undisputed WWE Championship match between Triple H and Chris Jericho as he didn't want to make it look like he had forgiven WWE for what happened in 1997. However, another pitch was given to him by none other than Kurt Angle, who asked him if he would like to have a match in Toronto, blissfully unaware that Hart had suffered a near fatal stroke just a few weeks earlier. Whether the stroke was brought on by the post concussion syndrome remains to be seen, but it's impossible to imagine Hart, a Canadian, turning down the chance to wrestle at a WrestleMania in his home country. What's more, it would have been against a man he had not only never wrestled before, but a man he had openly stated that if he never retired would be a dream opponent of his.

We all know by now that Bret Hart can be a little bit grumpy, and given that he still hates Goldberg, maybe a return to WWE would have been a little too soon. So if Hart is still healthy but doesn't want to go back to WWE, where does he go? 

The immediate answer would have likely been overseas, specifically to New Japan Pro Wrestling. Long before he ever became "The Hitman," Hart wrestled for NJPW between 1980 and 1984 as his father Stu Hart had a good relationship with the company, resulting in many members of the Stampede Wrestling roster being sent to Japan to gain more experience. NJPW were in a strange time heading into the 21st century as the rise of Mixed Martial Arts in Japan, as well as the birth of Pro Wrestling NOAH, meant that NJPW weren't hitting the same heights they were a few years earlier. Having someone like Hart come in as the top gaijin would have been huge for NJPW as they would have a champion who was well known for the casual fans, respected by the hardcore fans, and still technically gifted enough to hang in the hard-hitting NJPW main event scene.

Unless Hart fully moved to Japan, he would need something back in North America to keep him busy, and fortunately for him, two opportunities were right around the corner. 

Ring of Honor held its first show in 2002 and was presented as a promotion that showed love and respect to the sporting nature of professional wrestling, which is something that would have been right up Hart's street. He did make some appearances for ROH in 2009, one of which coincided with the final match of both Bryan Danielson and Nigel McGuinness' ROH careers at the time, two men who would have had classic bouts with "The Hitman." Throw in the likes of Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels, and one of the most well known Bret Hart fans, CM Punk, and Hart would have probably loved to have put the next generation of superstars over in ROH.

If he wanted something with a bit more exposure, there was TNA. Granted, it would have been very similar to how WCW was for him considering he would have been around Jeff Jarrett and Vince Russo again, but TNA would grow into the number two promotion in the United States throughout the 2000s, and that would have accelerated if Hart was a part of the company. Plus, Bret Hart vs. AJ Styles? Yes please. 

When Bret Hart retired, he had already been wrestling for 22 years, which was rare in his era given how demanding the business was on people's bodies. As fun as it is to speculate on dream matches that Hart would have had if he never got concussed in WCW, the likelihood of him actually wrestling for many more years after WCW is slimmer than some would like to believe. Having said that, if he never got concussed, when would Hart hang up his boots?

Let's say he does do all the things we said he was going to do. He wrestles Kurt Angle at WrestleMania 18, he goes back to NJPW for a tour or two, wrestles the next generation in Ring of Honor and the wider independent circuit, and even has a fun little cameo in TNA and helps them get their monthly pay-per-views and "TNA Impact" shows up and running a little faster. Where is the natural end point for him? In reality, he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2006 over the weekend of WrestleMania 22, and his DVD came out not long after, so the fences were being mended at that point, but he was inducted mainly because no one thought he'd ever step in the ring again, so a retirement in a different timeline would be a little later.

Ironically, for as bad as the match was in real life, his WrestleMania 26 match against Vince McMahon in 2010 is ultimately the perfect way for Hart to go out. His in-ring style was known for being safe so he could have easily had a 30-year career in the business, which would have given him enough time to appear in NJPW, ROH, TNA, and make his way back to WWE for one last run, a WrestleMania moment with McMahon, revenge for the Screwjob, a Hall of Fame induction, and retirement ceremony similar to what Ric Flair had at WrestleMania 24 two years earlier.

Hart could have been kept on as a producer to help out backstage, something he did offer to AEW but was turned down, and even though there would have still been politics to navigate, his knowledge would have been invaluable at that time. After all, could you imagine "WWE NXT" starting out with Bret Hart and Dusty Rhodes being the guiding hands? That warrants an entire piece in itself!