Act 1
There is a large, 70 year old man with long grey hair sitting at a bar. The young bartender is cleaning a glass with a rag, obviously bored with the low turnout. The clock on the wall suggests that it is 2:00 AM. The door opens, and a shorter old man with long white hair walks into the bar. He is talking on his cell phone. The man sitting at the bar doesn’t react to the shorter man.
Old Man 2: Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Honey, no, come on! Trust me, even if I wanted to I wouldn’t be able to handle a rat. You’re paranoid. I’m at the bar down the street from the hotel, McGuinties or something like that. McGuinties, right?
Bartender: Yeah.
Old Man 2: Yeah, McGuinties. I’m just going to have a few drinks, see if anyone else turns up. Just get a good night’s sleep and have a good flight, okay baby? Okay. You can trust me. Honey, I’m not that man anymore. I’m not. There’s only one other guy in here, and unless I’m screwing the bartender or… (Old Man 2 takes a good look at Old Man 1 and realizes who it is.) Honey, I need to go. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? I love you very much. No, it’s nothing. Just something long overdue. Goodnight.
Old Man 2 hangs up the cell phone. He sits down at the bar, a few stools from Old Man 1. Old Man 2 signals for the bartender and takes out his wallet.
Old Man 2: Hey, sonny, what’s your name?
Bartender: Jim. What can I get for you?
Old Man 2: I’m fine with O’Douls, any non-alcoholic beer would be great. But hey, here is one hundred dollars, and I’d like you to take care of my friend over there for the rest of the night, okay?
Bartender: Yeah, wow, um, I think we have some O’Douls in the basement.
Old Man 1: You pocket that tip. I can pay for my own drinks.
Old Man 2: Come on, I insist.
Old Man 1: You serve me one drink that he paid for and I swear to God I’ll break your neck kid. I will snap it like a twig if you put one drop of alcohol on his tab in front of me.
Old Man 2: Fine, no beer. You want a soda? Some seltzer and lemon? What are you drinking these days, Bret?
Old Man 1: Whiskey. Whiskey you had nothing to do with.
Bartender: So, um, okay. You want the hundred back?
Old Man 2: Keep it. You gonna get me my beer or what?
Bartender: O’Doul’s. Right. Okay.
The bartender goes around the corner. The sound of a man going down the stairs is hear. Old Man 2 smirks at the man we now know to be named Bret.
Old Man 2: You know what? You want to harbor a grudge, be that way. You didn’t have to threaten the kid.
Bret: You care about people other than yourself all of a sudden?
Old Man 2: It’s not all of a sudden, but I wouldn’t expect you to know that. I’m not the man I once was.
Bret: Really? I might have been surprised if you hadn’t been screaming it to the high f*cking heavens for the past 30 years.
Old Man 2: I’m sorry if my trying to better others by explaining to them…
Bret: You’re not better, Shawn. You’re just more self righteous. I despised evangelicals before you became one, and that just fueled the fire.
Shawn: Well, now you’re just being a jerk.
Bret: You’d know.
Shawn: Yes. Yes I would.
Bartender: Offstage One second! They’re in one of these crates!
Shawn: Take your time! Kid is opening up crates for me and you’re going to break his neck if he serves you a free drink.
Bret: Nothing is free with you.
Shawn: What am I going to do, Bret? Am I going to buy you some free drinks and lull you into a false sense of security so I can pin you when you’re not expecting it?
Bret: Knowing you, you’ll run up a huge tab and then pretend to go to the bathroom and instead go to your hotel, screwing me again.
Shawn: Knees are shot. Back is finished. I’m a little too old to be climbing out bathroom windows.
Bret: Oh, I have faith you’ll find some way to completely screw me over.
Shawn: Paranoid old bastard. Hey, how are your kids?
Bret: Fine.
Shawn: Dallas must be making you so proud. I’m proud of him and he’s my “arch enemy’s” son.
Bret: He and Cameron work very well together.
Shawn: Yeah. There’s nothing like seeing your son out do his old man, you know?
Bret: Dallas can make anyone look like a million bucks.
Shawn: That’s a bit of a cheap shot.
Bret: I’m just stating facts.
Shawn: I come here, I offer to buy you some drinks, I compliment your son and you piss on mine?
Bret: You gonna do something about it?
Shawn: You’d love that.
Bret: I’ve been waiting since Montreal.
Shawn: Montreal. You’re something, Bret.
Bret: I’m right here. You can even have the first swing.
Shawn: I’m not going to attack you.
Bret: Still a pussy.
Shawn: That’s right, because I’ve always been a pussy, right?
Bret: That’s right.
Shawn: You’ve got so much nerve.
Bret: So do something about it!
Shawn starts to stand up, but then the bartender come back upstairs with two six packs of O’Douls. He places one in front of Shawn.
Bartender: Here you go, one O’Douls and we’ve got plenty stocked.
Shawn: It’s warm. Do me a favor and put it on ice for a while, okay?
Bartender: I have a chilled glass.
Shawn: Let the beer cool, kid.
Bartender: Of course, no problem.
Bret and Shawn stare angrily at one another. Shawn smirks.
Bartender: Is there going to be a problem here?
Shawn: No, no problem. I’m amazed kid.
Bartender: What?
Shawn: You have no idea who you’re serving right now, do you?
Bartender: Are you guys wrestlers? I know that convention is this weekend.
Shawn: Wrestlers? Kid, you are in the presence of artists. We were the finest of our generation. Others made more money, others sold more tickets, but no one performed the craft at a higher level than the Excellence of Execution, Bret “the Hitman” Hart and the Showstopper, the Heart Break Kid, Shawn Michaels.
Bartender: Oh! Which one are you?
Shawn: I’m not Bret. I’m pretty damn far from Bret.
Bret: Kid, you wanna hear a story?
Shawn: Oh, I think I should tell it. He’s pretty biased.
Bartender: What?
Bret: I’m telling the story. Kid, I was the most popular wrestler in the world.
Shawn: Canada is hardly the world.
Bret: Shut up.
Shawn: Hey, just keeping things fair and balanced.
Bret: I had a choice between the company I had been with all my life and the competition that was trying to destroy that company. The competition was offering me more money than any professional wrestler is worth, more money than I knew what to do with. On the other hand, my company was offering me a much lower figure, but they were also offering me what was pretty much a life time contract and creative control. Creative control means that I decide what happens to my character, I decide how I win and lose. Meanwhile, I had just lost the title in the biggest event of the year to that prick sitting right there…
Shawn: Of course, he didn’t job cleanly. He needed to set it up that if he had thirty more seconds in regulation, he would have beaten me. We both came out looking strong.
Bret: I’m telling the story. So I lose to this son of a bitch I hate more than any person on the planet, someone who couldn’t care less about the company, someone who’d rather feign injury than lay down…
Bartender: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Shawn: Too much wrestling terminology. Don’t worry, this is more for me than you.
Bret: And you know what I do? I take the lifetime contract. But this business, it’s not about good guys and bad guys all of a sudden. Shades of grey, right Shawn? So I form a little faction with my family, and we’re standing up for morality and decency…
Shawn: And Canada.
Bret: And we’re fighting against his little faction which stood for pornography and racism…
Shawn: It was just that one sketch. Kid, we didn’t stand for racism.
Bret: And guess who was booked, guess who was made to look like the bad guy?
Shawn: We were both bad guys. Stone Cold and Undertaker were the only real faces back then.
Bret: So, I speak up. I tell Vince, our boss, guy I looked at like he was a second father to me, that I want to exercise my creative control and be a good guy again. Stop working with this asshole. Vince tells me the company is going through financial trouble and he needs to release me from my contract.
Bartender: I thought it was a life time contract?
Bret: It was.
Bartender: That’s cold.
Bret: It gets worse. So I call up the competition and they offer me a very large amount of money. I take it, I’m out.
Bartender: Good. Hey, look, if you were unhappy and the competition was offering you more money, it worked out well for you. Right?
Shawn: HAH! Sorry, but no. No it did not.
Bret: You laugh one more time, I’ll shove your smile up your ass.
Shawn: I wasn’t laughing at you, it was the kid’s reaction.
Bret: The problem is that I’m currently the champion, and I have to lose the title. You think they ask me to drop it to Stone Cold? I mean, that would make sense. Top heel loses to the top face.
Shawn: Heel means bad guy, face good guy. He wasn’t the top heel though. That was me.
Bret: In your goddamned dreams. No, they want me to lose it in Canada to that piece of crap who wipes his ass with the Canadian flag.
Shawn: So, Bret reluctantly agreed to do so because as much as he hated me, he respected the business that much more. I pinned him, the next night on tv our company gave him a beautiful send off with a very tasteful and emotional video package. The same night, the competition announced Bret Hart was coming over. Riding this wave of good will from both companies, Bret Hart quickly became WCW champion and led them into a golden era of sports entertainment. The end.
Bartender: Oh. Okay. So why do you…
Bret: You think you’re funny?
Shawn: I know I’m funny. Do you think I’m wrong? Do you think that if you had swallowed your pride and done the job right that your life wouldn’t have turned out a million times better?
Bret: This man slandered me and cost me my marriage.
Shawn: Please! You cost yourself your marriage when you cheated on your wife.
Bret: Did you have proof? Did you have enough proof to go on national television and say that, with my kids watching, with my wife watching?
Shawn: Everyone knew…
Bret: Rumors! Did you have any proof?
Shawn: Not concrete evidence, no.
Bret: And even if you did, even if you had video tape, how dare you? That was my family. That was the love of my life, and you picked it apart so you could make one more smartass comment in a wrestling promo.
Shawn: You know what?
Bret: What?
Shawn: I used to think about that every day. I don’t anymore, not everyday, time changes the amount of guilt you carry. But I am sorry for that comment. You have my utmost apologies. I was young and stupid and I should’ve thought about it before I let it just fly out of my mouth.
Bret: Huh. (There’s a bit of a pause while Bret takes this in. The bartender places an O’Douls in front of Shawn.) Apology accepted.
Shawn: Good. Now can I buy you a drink?
Bret: I’d rip out my throat first.
Bartender: But you guys just made up?
Bret: I didn’t lay down for him. Not in my home country, not with my creative control. I volunteered to drop the title to any one else. There’s this jobber named Steve Lombardi, he lost all the time. That was his job, to lose to people and make them look better. I offered to lose the title to him in the most famous arena on the planet.
Bartender: The Sydney Opera house?
Bret: No. I never worked there. I don’t sing. Madison Square Garden. Finally the decision was reached that after not beating Shawn, just going to a draw with him, no one looks bad, I’d hand over the title the next night on television. I’d talk about how much the title and the company meant to me. Instead, Vince, my second father…
Shawn: I can’t believe you thought of Vince like that.
Bret: We were close.
Shawn: So some cheese with your wine, sir?
Bret: You haven’t changed one bit.
Bartender: So what’d Vince do?
Bret: Working with Shawn and a referee, one I considered to be a close friend, they ended the match without telling me it was going to happen. Shawn had me in a submission for 3 second, a little reversal spot, and the next thing I knew the bell was ringing. Shawn grabbed the title and ran to the back, first giving a little performance like he had nothing to do with it. So I destroyed the set, beat the crap out of my boss and went to the competition. While I was with the competition, my now former company created countless storylines for other wrestlers based upon my situation. They used my real life problems to make millions of dollars, and in doing so, they made me look like a joke and I was treated by the competition as such. Riding that momentum, Vince was able to over take the competition and eventually put them out of business, but not before my career was ended by an eyes shut errant kick and my former company killed my brother.
Bartender: They killed your brother?!
Shawn: You take that back.
Bret: They dropped him 50 feet.
Shawn: It was a tragedy. You can’t really feel that way after all of this time.
Bret: Then they exploited his death on national television the next night.
Shawn: I’m not Vince’s biggest fan, but he wept for Owen. We all did.
Bret: Uh huh. How long did they drag out the lawsuits?
Shawn: That’s business, it’s unfortunate, but your sister in law got her settlement. It wasn’t skimpy either.
Bret: Money solves everything, right?
Shawn: If you had been half the human being Owen was, Montreal never would have happened.
Bret: I was a good man before Montreal.
Bartender: What was Montreal?
Bret: Who the hell asked you to do anything besides pour the drinks?
Shawn: That’s where Vince and I changed the ending of the match so that he wouldn’t go to the competition as the current WWE champion.
Bret: I was going to hand the belt over. It was agreed upon.
Shawn: Even if Vince had stuck with the plan, I never would have let that happen. It would have killed the company, and it would have killed the other workers. Mick Foley sat out the next night on Raw in protest. He had burnt his bridges to WCW, and had they announced before we went on the air that current WWF champion Bret Hart was coming to Nitro, well, we would have been destroyed. We were at the brink, and that would have finished it. And Mick Foley, who stood up for you, arguably the most passionate wrestler in the history of the business, would have been out of a job.
Bret: I was destroyed. Me. And then the next night you brought out your Bret Hart midget…
Shawn: I had to hammer the point home.
Bartender: You had a midget?
Shawn: His name is Frank. Cool guy. He wouldn’t stop making jokes about the size of his junk.
Bret: I never said I had anything against Frank. But Vince built the next 3 years around being the evil boss and trying to fire various wrestlers while I was turned again and again.
Shawn: Blame Eric for that.
Bret: I do. But this isn’t about me and Eric.
Shawn: Nope.
Bret: It’s me and you. Never really been Vince. I can work things through with Vince. It’s us, it always has been and always will be until you apologize.
Shawn: I just did. The Sunny Days comment was too much.
Bret: For Montreal. I want to hear it, and I want to hear you mean it. Hit me again.
Shawn: What?
Bret: Kid, whiskey, hit me.
Bartender: Oh. Sure, yeah. Hey, if you don’t mind me asking, this stuff is all fake, right?
Bret: Not always.
Shawn: An apology for Montreal? I’ll accept one from you, but I’ll be dead and damned before you hear it from me.
Bret: Excuse me?
Shawn: Not since 1997, no. We were incredible together.
Bret: Yeah, we had some good matches. You ruined it.
Shawn: No, I mean we could have been the Flair-Steamboat of our generation. But I wasn’t moral enough for you. I didn’t live up to the high standard that no one told me professional wrestlers were supposed to follow. Bret, we weren’t politicians. We were supposed to drink and curse and party. You hated me because I was able to live that life and be better than you at my job, while you married young and a wild night for you was when you didn’t stick to your vows and then felt guilty about it for the next 3 months and drove everyone around you crazy.
Bret: You don’t get to lecture me, and you weren’t better than me.
Shawn: Yeah, I read the DVD cover. The Best There Was, Is and Will Be. Hey, you talk to fans and the debate is between Shawn Michaels and Ric Flair, with the occasional asshole mentioning Kurt. But that’s not really the point. The point is you refused to pass the torch to me. I NEVER wanted to hurt a wrestler the way we hurt you that night. You forced me to become a bad person, and only through the forgiveness of Jesus have I been able to forgive myself. He can forgive you, and I can forgive you, Bret. All you have to do is ask for it.
Bret throws the glass of whiskey at Shawn, but he doesn’t really throw it at Shawn. He misses over Shawn’s shoulder.
Bartender: HEY!
Bret: Fuck you. I need another hit.
Bartender: That’s it! I don’t care who pinned who, everyone out!
Shawn Michaels takes another hundred dollars out of his wallet and slaps it on the table.
Shawn: How much was that glass? Will this cover it? I need another one anyway and two old men need a place to speak.
The bartender hesitates, then picks up the money. He takes out a plastic cup and pours Bret another drink.
Bartender: I need to clean this crap up. Crazy… Jesus.
Bartender goes down to the basement.
Bret: You honestly don’t expect me to apologize, do you?
Shawn: Owen had such a wonderful sense of humor. Even after you left, he managed to retain it. He worked with me, he worked with Hunter.
Bret: You buried him.
Shawn: Don’t even joke about that.
Bret: I mean his career. Did he ever pick up a win against either of you? He lost over, and over, and you and Hunter made him look like a joke.
Shawn: Vince was building Hunter up to become the man. Owen was never going to be the man.
Bret: No. He was good enough. He was better on his worst day than Hunter on his best.
Shawn: Debatable, but it doesn’t matter. Owen never wanted it. He wanted more money, and he got more money, but he never had to be the champ. He never had to be the man. He never bitched about laying down, he fought and lost cleanly to people he hated in Canada and everywhere else. He knew what took me a long time to figure out, what you never figured out and I’m pretty sure you’ll die without having figured out. Our business is a joke, and no one likes the son of a bitch who takes the joke too seriously.
Bret: Shawn, are you trying to tell me wrestling is fake?
Shawn: Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, and that’s not what I was saying.
Bret: You’re not telling me something I don’t already know. Yeah, no one likes the guy who takes the joke too seriously, but no one likes the guy who laughs too loudly.
Shawn: Really? Because that wasn’t me. The reason you grew to hate me was because I was the guy who kept making the joke dirtier. Owen was the guy who laughed too loudly, and everyone loved the hell out of him for it.
Bret: He was, yeah.
The bartender returns with a broom and dust pan. He begins sweeping up the mess.
Bret: Sorry about the glass, kid.
Bartender: No problem. I’m just glad you didn’t bodyslam him.
Bret: My bodyslamming days are long past.
Shawn: You sure? You aged well, all things considered.
Bret: Shawn, professional wrestling was never a joke to me. It was life.
Shawn: I got that, yes.
Bret: And it was your life too.
Shawn: That’s pushing it.
Bret: I remember your match with Hogan. This was after you got back from the crusades. You bumped all over the place for the asshole when you knew he wasn’t going to return the favor.
Shawn: You watched? Bret, I’m flattered.
Bret: But then you went out the next night on RAW and you buried him. You mocked him. You announced to the world that it was a one man show in there. Why would you do that if you if you didn’t care about losing, if it was all a big joke with us as the punch line?
Shawn: I still cared about my place in history at the time. I still cared about my legacy. I didn’t get it yet. You know who remembers that I lost to Hogan and he didn’t return the job? You know who remembers how hard I bumped for a senior citizen who literally couldn’t bend over to lace my boots?
Bret: I do.
Shawn: And I do. And that’s about it. It is buried in the minds of our surviving fans. All of my accomplishments, everything I gave to the business, and I’m going to be remembered as the father of Cameron Michaels, at least until he stops wrestling.
Bret: You sound bitter.
Shawn: Quite the contrary, I love it. All of those great matches I had, all of the blood I left across the country, every moment that I was in unbearable pain that ring, and my son is my only legacy. No one is going to remember anything else about me or Ric or Kurt or Hunter except who our kids are.
Bret: I couldn’t be prouder of Dallas.
Shawn: Sorry, but you don’t get that obscurity. You had to make your documentary. You had to scream to the high heavens how the wrestling business f*cked you over. You get Montreal, and only Montreal. That’s what the fans are going to remember, that’s what going in your obituary.
Bret: I was the excellence…
Shawn: And I was the showstopper. No one gives a crap. (Bartender gets all the glass up and walks back towards the bar.) Kid, you have no idea who we are, right?
Bartender: You just told me…
Shawn: Do you watch wrestling?
Bartender: I’ve seen it on a few times, but I’m not really a fan.
Shawn: I want you to be brutally honest kid. If someone mentions professional wrestler to you, what do you think of?
Bartender: Um… well, it’s like a male ballet, right?
Shawn: Kid, what do you think of?
Bartender: I don’t want to be too offensive.
Shawn: How about another hundred for your full and complete honesty?
Bartender: That’s okay. Keep your money. Look, I think dumb. I think large guys, steroid users. I think fake fighters.
Shawn: Do you think any differently when I say professional wrestler Cameron Michaels?
Bartender: I don’t know who that is, so not really, no.
Shawn: Thanks. (Shawn throws another hundred on the bar.) Bret, we are all dumb, large, fake steroid users.
Bret: That’s just in the eyes of the rest of the world. Our fans remember who we were.
Shawn: Our fans die with us. Maybe a decade or two later, who knows, but they all die.
Bret: Our matches live on.
Shawn: Nobody wants to watch our matches anymore. Why should they?
Bret: Because they were great.
Shawn: Bret, there’s only so much you can do in that ring without killing yourself. Everything we’ve done has been done over and over by people almost as good as we were.
Bret: This isn’t about our place in history. The WWE will fold, or professional wrestling will be outlawed, or the human race will be wiped out. Even if people revered us as Gods, no one will care in five hundred years. I get it. Where are you going with this?
Shawn: I forget. But I’m an old man.
(They both take a drink.)
Shawn: I was sorry to hear about your wife.
Bret: I’m not going to confide in you about that.
Shawn: I didn’t ask you to.
Bret: Good, because I’m not going to.
Shawn: Nevertheless, I’m still sorry for your loss.
Bret: I’ve gotten two “I’m sorry”s out of you. You still haven’t said it for the right reason.
Shawn: You’re not getting that one out of me.
Bret: Don’t think I don’t appreciate where you’re coming from.
Shawn: You appreciate something about me? I’m touched.
Bret: Shut up. You think I didn’t spend nights wondering if it was all my fault? I did.
Shawn: You were right to.
Bret: No, I wasn’t. I know that now everything is fine and you’re laughing at the joke, but if Hogan had asked you for a second match in which you were going to do the job again, would you have accepted?
Shawn: What does that have to do with you and me?
Bret: Everything.
Shawn: Honestly? Probably not.
Bret: I let you beat me on the biggest stage in professional wrestling. Then it was my turn and you handed over the belt instead of doing the right thing for business.
Shawn: You have a point. I was a shit.
Bret: You still are.
Shawn: Nah.
Bret: You come to me pointing fingers, saying I’m the one who needs to ask for forgiveness because I refused to job to you when you did the same exact thing to me.
Shawn: Montreal was different.
Bret: You’re damn right it was. In Montreal, I had the contractual right to say I wouldn’t lose to you. I had the law on my side. I didn’t feign injury, I didn’t lose my smile, I stood up like a man and said I wouldn’t do you the courtesy you refused to do for me.
Shawn: What a tough guy! What a stand up individual.
Bret: Eat shit and die.
Shawn: You were leaving, and you wanted to leave with the title.
Bret: I offered it to Steve Lombardi!
Shawn: And that would have really cemented the legacy of Bret Hart as the best of all time, wouldn’t it have? To have lost the title to Lombardi.
Bret: Exactly! That proves this wasn’t about my legacy. It was about my willingness to do the right thing for anyone except you. I don’t need to apologize to you that when you did the same thing to me over and over again.
Shawn: How about if I apologize for the time I handed in the title instead of losing it to you? Bret, I’m sorry for the smile incident. Now you apologize for Montreal.
Bret: If I was ten years younger…
Shawn: You’d still do nothing. Bret, the difference between all my shenanigans and Montreal is that you were leaving. They didn’t ask you to lose to me because it would be a blow to your ego. They wanted you to lose to me because I was the top heel, and I was going to drop the title to Stone Cold at Wrestlemania. You say you thought of Vince like your second dad. Well, son, pops needed ya to swallow your pride and get pinned by me. You left him without a choice. You left me without a choice.
Bret: Everyone involved had a choice.
Shawn: Huge disaster or tiny disaster. History proves we made the right choice, and you made the wrong choice.
Bret: I gave them everything…
Shawn: So did I. That doesn’t make either of us right or wrong.
Bret: It should count for something.
Shawn: Nope. It kills me as much as it kills you, but it just doesn’t matter.
Bret: Well it should.
Shawn: How many times did we actually get in the ring together, huh? I’m not talking house shows or anything like that, how many televised matches did we have?
Bret: A bunch.
Shawn: And how many times did I lay down for you before we were big, huh?
Bret: That was different.
Shawn: Please. I helped make you what you are, I got pinned time and time again by you and you helped me by agreeing to lose your title to me while making me look as weak as possible.
Bret: I made you look like a star.
Shawn: We made it look like you got screwed, so you’ll excuse me if I wasn’t chomping at the bit to repay that courtesy. Ric Flair jobbed like a bitch for you to give you your first world title. You needed salt in the eyes to lose it to Yoko, then you had him look like an ass and just fall off the turnbuckle with no provocation when you won the title back. You lose the title to Bob Backlund and you need Owen there to screw you, but you win it back from Kevin and he needs to let you appear to outsmart him. You lose it to me, it needs to look like you got screwed by management because you had me beat. You go over three guys clean to win the title, but you need to get screwed by Stone Cold to lose it to Sid. You make me look like the jerk when you win the title from the Undertaker thanks to me smacking him with a chair, when, by the way, I was supposed to be playing the face, and then you get screwed over by me in Montreal to lose it.
Bret: What are you saying?
Shawn: You NEVER did the right thing. Everyone who won the belt from you had to look like a bs champion.
Bret: I had no control over the writers until the end.
Shawn: That’s crap, Bret. We both know the pull the champion has. You could have jobbed cleanly for me like I did for Sid and Stone Cold. You could have jobbed cleanly for any of those guys. It probably would have bought Bob a month as champ.
Bret: I made Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Shawn: By beating him.
Bret: Come on. If he won, he doesn’t become a star.
Shawn: You really believe that?
Bret: Steve does.
Shawn: Maybe it wasn’t the vulgarity or the comments about you screwing Sunny or my backstage politicking that made you hate me so much.
Bret: That’s exactly what it was.
Shawn: Maybe you knew that you were a bigger asshole than I was, and it made it difficult to portray yourself as such an insufferable, anal angel.
(Bret thinks about this. He looks at his drink, and it is empty.)
Bret: Kid, another drink. Hit me.
(The bartender pours Bret the drink. He immediately throws the drink in Shawn’s face. They both stand up.)
Shawn: You son of a bitch!
Bartender: Hey!
Bret: How dare you? I laid down for the f*cking Mountie!
Shawn: Yeah, your contract was almost up and you dropped the title! You still had to pretend you had a fever!
Bartender: I want you both out of here!
Bret: I was nothing like you! You lied, you screwed people over and you dressed like a homo!
Shawn: Says the man who wore nothing but pink!
(Bret charges at Shawn. The two men punch weakly at one another.)
Bret: I’LL KILL YOU YOU SKINNY SHIT!
Shawn: EVEN IF YOU LOSE, I’M SURE YOU’LL FIND A WAY TO PUT YOURSELF OVER!
Bartender: Knock it off or I’ll call the cops!
Bret: SHUT UP! (Bret gets Shawn in a headlock.) APOLOGIZE FOR MONTREAL!
Shawn: NEVER!
Bret: APOLOGIZE!
Shawn: NO!
(Shawn stomps on Bret’s foot. Bret releases the headlock.)
Bret: OW! GODDAMNIT, I HAVE ARTHRITIS IN THAT FOOT!
Shawn: SWEET CHIN MUSIC!
(Shawn tries to sidekick Bret Hart in the chin, but he only kicks him in the stomach. Shawn grabs his groin in pain and collapses on the floor, as does Bret. Bartender takes out a cell phone from his pants as Bret crawls towards Shawn.)
Bartender: That’s it! I’m calling the police!
Shawn: I pulled my groin! Time out, I pulled my groin!
Bret: I’ll time out you!
(Bret crawls on top of Shawn and punches him once before collapsing from exhaustion. The lights fade out. End of Act 1.)
