25 biggest pro wrestling ‘what ifs’ of the past 25 years

20. What if Owen Hart had said no to the stunt?

This seems to be the morbid part of the list so I might as well go ahead and discuss the tragic death of Owen Hart as well.

At this point in time, the Attitude Era in WWE was well underway. Hart had found success years before in a phenomenal feud with his brother, Bret, but really wasn’t a main player as others had ascended to the top of the card. Bret was gone to WCW and Owen was still reeling from having nearly paralyzed Stone Cold Steve Austin at SummerSlam in 1997. He joined the Nation of Domination in their feud against DX, something that couldn’t have been easy given the Hart family history with some of the members. He stayed with that for a while before returning to The Blue Blazer gimmick that he had used when he first debuted in WWE in the late 1980s.

Owen was always known to have been a prankster and one of the funniest guys in the locker room so he went ahead and made the storyline comical in nature. Alongside Jeff Jarrett, he would try and say that he wasn’t The Blue Blazer in what were actually some great segments. He was still fantastic in the ring and he and Jarrett actually won the tag titles. The Blue Blazer gimmick was supposed to be a “superhero”, which was completely opposite of what WWE was doing at the time. At Over The Edge in May 1999, Hart was supposed to be lowered into the ring via harness for a match with The Godfather but the device broke and Hart fell nearly 80 feet into the ring, hitting the ring post. He died a short time later.

So what would have happened had Owen said no to the stunt? Outside of the obvious grief his death caused his family, the wrestling world lost one of its greatest performers. Owen was one of the best to ever lace up a pair of boots and “The Game” moniker that Triple H took on was actually meant for Hart, which leads me to believe that once the Blue Blazer storyline came to a close, Owen was set for a nice push. Owen had been booked to win the Intercontinental Championship the night he died and it could have catapulted him back towards the top of the card, a place he richly deserved to be.