Bret Hart Told WWE Superstar To Refuse Losing To Steve Austin

Bret Hart and Steve Austin had a famous feud on screen, but it turns out The Hitman might have been pulling for Austin’s failure behind the scenes a little big.

While speaking with Kee On Sports’ Vince McKee, former WWE Superstar Duke “The Dumpster” Droese said that Bret Hart advised him to refuse losing to Austin. He decided to take Hart’s advice, but looking back he believes that The Hitman was just winding him up about the situation.

“He was giving me what seemed to be good advice. I thought he was giving me good advice, especially because that time seemed to be when my contract was coming up, and that’s when I refused to work with Steve in his first match, which I explained to him why. It wasn’t him, and we became good friends after that. But I stood up for myself in that situation and it worked. They gave me the angle with Triple H, so I said, ‘Holy crap, there’s something to this [complaining].’”

“I thought Bret was giving me good advice, and I would take advice of his later on that wouldn’t necessarily be so good [laughs]. I think at times he was just winding me up, but it is what it is. I was inexperienced and I didn’t know any better. I was clueless in a lot of ways. That’s the way it was, but yeah, he did, he told me on a couple of occasions just to refuse to do it or not do the job. That one time [with Steve Austin] it definitely worked but that’s only because my contract was up.”

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Steve Austin went on to have a great career in WWE despite any backstage pushback at the time. It’s interesting how things turn out when retrospect is a part of the the picture. Now he can look back and see that complaining did work out for him back then. It’s pretty hard to picture The Dumpster not losing to The Texas Rattlesnake now.