One of the greatest pro wrestlers of all-time, Bret ‘the Hitman’ Hart, has delivered huge praise for Aussie WWE champion Rhea Ripley while flagging his concerns about the state of the quasi-sport more broadly.

Hart spoke exclusively with Foxsports.com.au ahead of his first trip to Australia in over two decades, as he headlines the Starrcast wrestling convention coming to Ballarat, Victoria across April 11-14 – featuring past and present stars with multiple wrestling events plus live interviews, including with Hart himself.

The Hitman confirmed the first match for the event, which will see Chris Masters defend the Stu Hart Championship against Mike Rallis (FKA WWE’s Madcap Moss), in Rallis’ first match since being released by WWE last year. It will also be the first time the championship, named after Hart’s legendary father and featuring in the family-run Dungeon Wrestling promotion out of Calgary, will be contested outside of Canada.

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Hart, 66, will not be returning to the ring in Australia – he has wrestled just a handful of times since 2000, when an errant kick from Goldberg gave Hart a severe concussion which he mistakenly chose to wrestle through, while he suffered a stroke a couple of years later – but praised the country’s wrestling heritage.

“I wish WWF back in my day had gone there more often. Back in the day when I was champion, they didn’t go to Australia – right after I left, they started going to Australia again. So I kind of missed out on that opportunity, which is a shame,” Hart told Foxsports.com.au.

“I went there in 2001, for WWA, an organisation that I went with about a few months before I had my stroke.”

While he was unsure whether he was ever paid for the tour, Hart added: “But I got to see Australia.”

Hart also grew up loving The Fabulous Kangaroos, a Hall of Fame Aussie tag team which ran for almost 30 years in various forms across the world, but most notably featured Al Costello (an Italian-Australian immigrant named Giacomo Costa) and Roy Heffernan. The Wikipedia description of the team – “Ultra Australian, complete with boomerangs, bush hats, and the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’ as their entrance music” – sums up the idea.

“Maybe it was because of the costumes or the hats, or the boomerangs or I’m not sure but I was a big fan of the Kangaroos when I was a little kid – too young to really know what wrestling was yet, other than just being a mark,” Hart quipped.

Not since the territory era of pro wrestling, when Jim Barnett’s World Championship Wrestling was one of the hottest promotions on the planet with big paydays and strong attendance across the country, has Australia had as much influence as it does today.

That’s thanks to a talented generation of homegrown performers, most notably in WWE where Adelaide trio Rhea Ripley, Bronson Reed and Duke Hudson, Sydney’s Grayson Waller and Melbourne’s Indi Hartwell all currently feature.

Ripley is the clear standout, pushed as one of WWE’s top women and a genuine star; but it’s the way she blends her wrestling with her character which Hart praised the most.

“I really like her a lot. I really like her poise, her staying in character and sort of living her – she seems like she’s adapted a character that’s fun to play, and she’s playing into that, full tilt,” Hart said.

“She’s putting that realism into it; that’s what I miss in a lot of wrestling today, just making it feel more real, and she makes it feel pretty real all the time.”

It’s that realism, which Hart was known for as one of the greatest in-ring performers in pro wrestling history, which the Canadian great wants to see more of across the board.

“It’s hard to criticise something that seems to be going through the roof,” he conceded. “Wrestling has had a surge in the last little while, the last few years.

“And even in my case I seem to be as revered or popular as I’ve ever been – and it’s maybe because of the salutes I’ve been getting from guys like (CM) Punk, and FTR, different wrestlers have mentioned my name, or do something that I did in the ring as a nod or a salute to me, and I appreciate all that. I think CM Punk alone has done a lot to remind wrestling fans to take a look back at some of the stuff that I was doing, and how good it was.

“And I think it’s starting to stand out now where it’s like – in my honest opinion, without trying to sound too boastful, they’ve pulled the curtain back on wrestling so much. So now we know the whole thing’s a show, and they’re just really good physical actors, and that is what it is.

“But you watch my wrestling and you go, jeez, he was the best. I think I made it look more real than anybody all the time. I made your stuff look good, I made my own stuff look good, nothing looked rehearsed. There’s so much I think in today’s wrestling that’s so badly rehearsed, over and over.

“I saw something just a few days ago in a wrestling match where all the girls were lying in the middle of the ring together and they were doing the big belly flops on all of them. And you think they would get away from that kind of phony rehearsed kind of wrestling? Who wants to watch that? I don’t want to watch that, I know my kids don’t want to watch that.

“The best pro wrestling has to always pretend to be real, and that way it’s fun – but when you basically say it’s not real, and it’s all just a performance, it loses some of that what I think was in my style. My punches, my kicks, my dropkicks – if I dropkicked somebody I hit him right in the face, but I didn’t hurt him, but both feet pushed his face hard enough to know jeez, I’m guessing that might’ve hurt. And the thing I take so much pride in is every wrestler I ever worked, every single one, came back and he shook my hand to say thanks for the match.”

He added: “I was a technical wrestler that made you, you know, when I put a headlock on, it look like a real headlock. Not like John Cena or somebody that’s got a headlock that looks like he has it on a tire. The headlock has to be tightened – real. You know, I that’s what I pride myself on. And I also pride myself on the fact that I never injured anybody, ever.

“I find a lot of the wrestlers today are like, when they land where they land, they realise 30 seconds later that they’re in the wrong spot, and they start wiggling all the way across the ring to get in the right position. That’s a fail. You get an F in my wrestling academy when you do stuff like that.

“And when these guys dive over the top rope onto the 20 wrestlers on the floor – they’ve gotta stop doing that. It’s just not real … and with the chops, and everybody chopping themselves. What a bunch of baloney. Nobody ever won a match with a chop. All the wooing. It’s really taking away from the beauty and the art of great wrestling.

“There’s a lot of great wrestlers out there that can deliver great matches. But there’s so many wrestlers out there that are subpar in my opinion, that don’t know what they’re doing out there. And they allow themselves to rely on things like chops, which I think is sort of like cheap heat – you get a reaction, but what’s your reaction? You’re whipping a guy across the chest with your hand? Okay, so you’re hurting some guy for real, for some stupid reason. And the crowd sort of reacts to it.

“In my understanding of pro wrestling, anytime anyone does anything to you that hurts, for real – chopping, putting blisters on your chest when you go to your room or bed, anytime anyone does things to you for real, they’re in the wrong business. They’re doing it wrong. Because you’re not supposed to get hurt. You’re not supposed to come back to your dressing room that night, or to your hotel room and have a big lump on your head and a black eye and your teeth are knocked out. That’s Bill Goldberg wrestling. That’s not how it’s done.”

It’s not just the changes in the ring that drew Hart’s ire, but the way promos are cut and stories are told, particularly in the script-heavy WWE.

Hart revealed that during his early 2010s return to the company, he totally forgot a lengthy promo he was supposed to deliver in front of the crowd in Montreal – where he was famously the victim of the 1997 Survivor Series screwjob, documented in the film Wrestling with Shadows.

“In fact, I did it with Punk. And I remember I had to do an interview. And they gave me so much script, they gave me like, five pages of script to memorise; and I’m like, are you kidding me, five pages? I’m just gonna wing it, but they go no no, it’s gotta be word-for-word,” he said.

“So I started reading this thing all afternoon, and I’m getting ready to go out, and I’m kind of nervous about it – well, I don’t do this stuff anymore. And also they come up to me and tell me it’s a whole rewrite, five different pages. And I remember I went out there and I totally froze up in the ring. I forgot everything I was going to say. I was all ready to say hey, somebody in the back there, I’ve forgot all my script and I’m gonna have to wing this, like I was gonna break character. I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to.

“Somehow miraculously I remembered what I needed to say. But the pressure on these young wrestlers today, from an acting standpoint is so much more anything I ever had to do. And I respect that a lot.

“And I’ll give you an example – that same day that I had brain fog going out, John Cena was standing next to me doing something on his own. They handed him maybe 20 pages of script. And I remember looking at the pages, there were a lot of changes. And he was like ‘ohh’, he just groaned the same way I did.

“But I watched him, maybe 20 minutes after I went out, he went out there and did the whole thing word for word. Reading his script, he did it perfectly! He remembered all the changes and he did it perfectly. And I go, well that’s a real pro out there. Maybe I could’ve done that back 1992 or 1995 or something, but I mean the wrestlers today have a lot on their backs that guys in that era didn’t have.”