VINCE’S KICK MY ASS CLUB
Bret’s The Charter Member …
Anyone Else Care To Join?

By Dave Lenker

Picture it like one of those dunk tanks you see at fairs and carnivals. If it happens to be one put together by your local school, business tends to pick up if someone gets the brainy idea of asking the principal or one of the more prominent teachers to step inside it and take a seat. Yeah, make it the principal. Those guys are never popular, even the ones who act like they are benevolent dictators on school grounds.

With those dunk tanks, sometimes it just takes one bold contestant to step up, slap down a few bucks, take a handful of balls in hand, and start firing away at the target. Sooner or later, bang! Direct hit! Splash! To the bottom of the drink goes the poor sap sitting atop the tank.

Then watch them all line up with cash in hand. Everyone wants a shot. No amount of sweet talking or threats from the dirtbag inside the cage is going to dissuade anyone from joining in on the fun. Consequences be damned!

Well, line up, everybody. Bret Hart just opened up his version of the WWE dunk tank. He opened it, he’s selling the tickets, he’s revealing the secret to making it work just so, and he’s serving as the carnival barker himself.

“Step right up! Right this way! Take your shots! As many as you want!”

Only this really is no dunk tank, and nobody is really laughing. For Bret, this was 13 years filed with too much bitterness and angst that finally came to a cathartic end inside a WWE ring in Glendale, Arizona, at WrestleMania 26. Instead of dunking Vince McMahon in a tank of water, he pummeled the WWE CEO for what he did to him and his family 13 years ago on the night of that infamous Survivor Series screwjob in Montreal. We all know what happened. But it didn’t end that night or in the weeks, months, or even a few years later. Maybe Bret could have done his part to let it go, maybe the Hart family allowed it to divide them so bitterly, but McMahon, too, allowed it to linger and fester. There was seemingly some distasteful reference to it—be direct or veiled—at every televised WWE event in Canada since.

When Bret finally returned to WWE TV this past January, you just knew that somehow, he and Vince were going to end up settling up once and for all. The road to WrestleMania 26 for them was a bumpy, windy one for sure, and more than a few of us watching thought they took an inexplicable wrong turn here and there, but Bret got his revenge all right. He got it decisively and in a way that was satisfying to him. Although the match was universally panned almost by those who watched it, maybe to the extreme of worst match of the year, in the end, Bret was happy to close this chapter of his life in his own way. Perhaps that is what matters most.

However, this was no ordinary beating. We all know the bombastic and arrogant Mr. McMahon has taken many a beating in the ring since Steve Austin first called him out and forced him to don wrestling gear more than a dozen years ago. The Rock, Triple-H, Hulk Hogan, and Shawn Michaels were just a few to follow suit over the years. But this WrestleMania beating was meant for part Mr. McMahon and part Vince McMahon, the real man behind the caricature. Vince himself has admitted that the line between the two gets so very blurred at times.

So maybe they’re lining up already and we just don’t know it.

Maybe Austin wants one last chance to use a stunner to drop Vince on that stack of dimes he calls a neck. Maybe Mick Foley feels like he’s the one big star of the Attitude Era who never got a high-profile bout with McMahon and can find his way back home from TNA one of these days. If Stephanie ever tires of bringing additional heirs to the McMahon family fortune into this world, perhaps she could finally gain revenge for her dad’s win over her in an “I Quit” match at No Mercy seven years ago. Okay, none of us wants to see any McMahon vs. any other McMahon again. Instead, let’s invite some different names to join this new club.

We might start with John Cena. For the most part, he has only feuded tangentially with the boss, but there were signs of an Icelandic volcano–like eruption between the two just a few months ago. Remember, McMahon used Batista as a shield of sorts in his feud with Bret and paid him back by allowing Batista to take advantage of a beaten and weary Cena and win the title from him immediately after Cena had won it at the Elimination Chamber PPV in February. Come on now, a star of the magnitude of Cena simply has to have a drawn-out feud with Vinnie Mac at some point, right?

Go back less than a year to a chilly November night in New York when WWE invited “Rowdy” Roddy Piper to guest host Raw at Madison Square Garden, the building that played host to most of his biggest matches. For no apparent reason, McMahon took a lot of time to viciously berate Piper in the ring on that night, and yet it led, well, nowhere … thus far. Piper and McMahon certainly have had their ups and downs in recent years. And weren’t Piper and Bret pretty chummy at one point?

While Piper and WWE are on good terms at present, we can think of a few former megastars who aren’t on the speed dial of anyone inside WWE headquarters right now. One of them, conveniently enough, lives not all that far from the site of WrestleMania 26 in Arizona. It would have made sense for WWE to have invited The Ultimate Warrior to be the marquee inductee into its Hall of Fame this spring.

Rumor has it that it was under consideration. How close it came to becoming reality isn’t clear. Maybe that little DVD that WWE put out to much fanfare a few years back entitled The Self-Destruction Of The Ultimate Warrior had something to do with that. A total hatchet job, it set out to portray the former WWF World champion as a complete whack job and did so convincingly. This was no unbiased documentary. Vince wanted to rip Warrior. Maybe a ticket into the Hall of Fame isn’t something that interests the man formerly known as Jim Hellwig. Perhaps he has something less civilized involving McMahon inside a ring in mind.

Slightly less volatile is the relationship between McMahon and former superstar, commentator, actor, resident conspiracy theorist, and former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. It seems sort of comfortably antagonistic at best. Ventura isn’t shy about criticizing McMahon publicly when he feels it is warranted. He once sued WWE and won over videotape royalties and has advocated wrestlers forming a union, something the WWE CEO most certainly does not want to see happen. And yet, Ventura has appeared on WWE TV from time to time in recent years, most recently as Raw guest host a few months ago.
Perhaps the ultimate revenge could be had by the first uberstar in WWF history, the legendary Bruno Sammartino himself. No former WWF star has been more consistently critical of McMahon than “The Living Legend.” There isn’t too much about WWE that he likes these days, though he must at least be happy that the company has ditched the Attitude and gone back to being more family friendly in the past few years.

Sammartino at times insists he wants nothing to do with wrestling anymore, but he makes appearances at various shows from time to time and can’t seem to kick his habit of trashing McMahon. An attempt to get Bruno to put aside his differences with McMahon and WWE a few years ago yielded little progress, though Sammartino did meet with officials backstage before a show. How about Vince vs. Bruno—if Vince wins, Sammartino must agree to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame?

With Vince officially reaching senior citizen status late this summer, we’re not certain any of these feuds would be particularly pretty to watch, but they might do for these stars what the experience did for Bret Hart.

“It was kind of therapeutic in a way,” said Bret. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than seeing a shrink, too.”