I love both & in the 90’s it comes down to preference, Shawn pioneered the modern WWE style & how you should best work in gimmick matches, I know Bret says they work more like him then Hogan, but a lot of the time wrestlers try to be more like Shawn but with no psychology behind what they do, with Bret’s style there’s like a handful of wrestlers who have strived to perfect what he achieved, namely Benoit, Bryan etc but one of them killed himself literally in and out the ring, while the other got too hurt in my view to ever be too comparable to Bret, the closest thing to Bret weirdly is CM Punk when you consider his creativity in the ring. Bret took so much pride in not only bringing realism to wrestling, but protecting himself and others so I can understand his anger when an unprofessional git like Goldberg and 4/10 rodents got in the way of that.
However, for me personally, when you consider Shawn’s second run, there’s no competition, I think as great as Bret was & always will be, Shawn is the greatest in-ring performer ever / story teller in wrestling history and when I see some of the feuds he was involved in & how Michaels character work evolved in his twilight, he honestly is in a league of his own, he bought Academy Award level / Movie style narratives to wrestling and made it all work, Shakespearean wrestling. You go back to the RA era & it’s not Benoit or 4/10 or Cena or Edge no disrespect, but Shawn made that era, every epic storyline & he was a centre piece in each one.
And listening to his interview with CCV & how he views wrestling reinforces my belief, there is nobody in wrestling past or present who has such a forward view of what the product should be, a true master.
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