07/03/2026
Happy 69th birthday to Bret Sergeant Hart (born July 2, 1957). He is a Canadian-American retired professional wrestler. A member of the Hart wrestling family and a second-generation wrestler, he has an amateur wrestling background at Ernest Manning High School and Mount Royal College. A major international draw within professional wrestling, he is credited with changing the perception of mainstream North American professional wrestling in the early 1990s by bringing technical wrestling to the fore. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time; Sky Sports noted that his legacy is that of "one of, if not the greatest, to have ever graced the squared circle". For the majority of his career, he used the nickname "the Hitman".
Hart joined his father Stu Hart's promotion Stampede Wrestling in 1976 as a referee and made his in-ring debut in 1978. He gained championship success during the 1980s and 1990s in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE), where he helmed the Hart Foundation stable. He left for World Championship Wrestling (WCW) following the controversial "Montreal Screwjob" in November 1997, where he remained until October 2000. Having been inactive from in-ring competition since January 2000, owing to a December 1999 concussion, he officially retired in October 2000, shortly after his departure from the company. He returned to sporadic in-ring competition from 2010 to 2011 with WWE, where he won his final championship, headlined the 2010 SummerSlam event, and served as the general manager of Raw. Throughout his career, he headlined the respective premier events of the WWF and WCW, WrestleMania (9, 10, and 12) and Starrcade (in 1999). He was inducted into the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame upon its inception in 1996, while still an active performer.
Hart held championship titles in five decades from the 1970s to the 2010s, 32 throughout his career and 17 between the WWF/WWE and WCW. Among other accolades, he is a seven-time world champion; a five-time WWF Champion and a two-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion. He went the most combined days as WWF Champion during the 1990s (654) and was the first WCW World Heavyweight Champion born outside the United States. He is the second WWF Triple Crown Champion and fifth (with Goldberg) WCW Triple Crown Champion. He is also the 1994 Royal Rumble match winner (with Lex Luger), and the only two-time King of the Ring, winning the 1991 tournament and the first King of the Ring pay-per-view in 1993. He co-headlined multiple pay-per-view events as part of an acclaimed rivalry with Stone Cold Steve Austin from 1996 to 1997. He is the first wrestler to be inducted three times into the WWE Hall of Fame: in 2006 individually, in 2019 as a member of the Hart Foundation, and in 2025 when his Submission match with Stone Cold Steve Austin at WrestleMania 13 was inducted as the inaugural entry into the Immortal Moments category.
Outside of wrestling, Hart has appeared in numerous films and television shows such as The Simpsons as well as featuring in several documentaries, both about himself specifically and others about his family or the wrestling industry in general. He also helped found and lent his name to the major junior ice hockey team the Calgary Hitmen and has written two biographies along with a weekly column for the Calgary Sun for over a decade. After his retirement, he spent much of his time on charitable efforts concerning stroke recovery and cancer awareness, due to his experiences with the two.
Hart married Julie Smadu (born March 25, 1960) on July 8, 1982. They have four children. The four hearts located on the right thigh of his tights symbolize his children, as do the four dots following his signature.Bret and Julie separated in May 1998
Hart married Italian Cinzia Rota in September 2004, but they divorced in 2007 after failing to agree on where they should live. In 2010 he married Stephanie Washington who was 27 at the time. Although at first his children were wary of their new stepmother, they have since embraced her as they realized that despite their differences in age, the love between her and their father is deep and genuine
