Montreal Screwjob

The Montreal Screwjob (also called the Montreal Incident) was a notorious professional wrestling incident where the outcome of a major match was changed without one of the wrestlers being informed – in order to "screw over" Bret Hart, who was in bitter conflict with his employer, WWE owner Vince McMahon at the time. It occurred on November 9, 1997, at the Survivor Series pay-per-view event produced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. During the WWF Championship match between Shawn Michaels and champion Hart, Vince McMahon, who was in charge of matches and storylines, and producer of the show – and a small number of WWF employees, most significantly the referee – covertly changed the predetermined outcome of the match in favor of Michaels; the screwjob occurred without Hart's knowledge, causing him to lose the Championship. Hart took the incident as a personal insult, because he did not wish to lose the title on "home soil" in Canada. Since this event, the term "screwjob" has come into wrestling parlance.

Hart had been WWF Champion since August 1997. A week prior to Survivor Series, Hart, who had performed for the WWF since 1984, agreed to join rival wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling (WCW) from December 1997. McMahon sought to prevent Hart from leaving the WWF as champion, but Hart was unwilling to lose to Michaels – with whom he had a legitimate feud – at Survivor Series, due to the match's location. The match was originally planned to end in disqualification, causing Hart to retain the title, and then losing or forfeiting it at a later date. Instead, as the match approached the 20th minute (a standard length for a televised WWF title match), under McMahon's direction, referee Earl Hebner ended the contest, as Michaels held Hart in the sharpshooter submission hold (Hart's signature move); although Hart did not submit, Michaels was declared the winner by submission and became WWF Champion.

As a result of the screwjob, McMahon and Michaels elicited angry responses from Canadian audiences and others for many years. McMahon was viewed by many fans to have betrayed Hart, who was one of the WWF's longest-tenured and most popular performers at the time. The screwjob impacted the professional wrestling industry in several ways; according to WWE, the incident is considered as one of the beginnings of the Attitude Era, while GiveMeSport notes the event is generally considered the end of the New Generation Era. This shift led to McMahon featuring as a villainous on-screen character on WWF television broadcasts, and has been used as a theme in matches and storylines across the wrestling industry. It was also partly chronicled in the documentary film Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows (1998).

The Montreal Screwjob has garnered a notorious legacy; accounts differ as to who exactly was involved in the plan and the extent of their involvement, while some wrestling fans, performers and bookers believe the incident was an elaborate work executed in collaboration with Hart, which he denies. Hart did not return to the WWE until his induction into the WWE Hall of Fame in April 2006, and he made his next live appearance on WWE programming in January 2010. Hart later said he legitimately reconciled with McMahon and Michaels, and the screwjob was used in a storyline between McMahon and Hart, leading to a match at WrestleMania XXVI in March 2010. Longtime industry writer Mike Johnson referred to the screwjob as "arguably the most talked-about [event] in the history of professional wrestling".