Owen Hart is rightly considered one of the greatest pro wrestlers to ever grace the ring; however, his career reached a tragic end when he died, live on air, at WWE's Over the Edge PPV in 1999.
Hart was being lowered to the ring from the rafters; however, the equipment malfunctioned and he fell to his death. Despite what happened, Vince McMahon decided the show must go on and the PPV continued as planned.
Hart had doubts about performing the stunt and WWE's handling of the situation remains incredibly controversial (the reason Hart has not been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, for example, is due to how Owen's widow, Martha Hart, feels towards the company).
During the latest edition of his podcast, WWE Hall of Famer Jim Ross shared his belief that McMahon likely has no regrets about the way things played out in the hours which followed Hart's death.
"I don’t think he had any regrets. He did what he thought was right, whether it was or it wasn’t. Somebody had to make the decision, and he was sitting in that chair—the emperor’s chair," Ross explained. "So, I don’t think he had any reservations at all. He may have privately; I don’t know. But we never discussed it. We discussed a lot of things over the years, but that was not one of them."
"I think Vince simply did what he felt in his gut was the right thing to do. Based on what we know about the whole scenario and how it eventually played out, I don’t know if there is a right answer. How do you? I just don’t know if there’s a right answer. When he was the boss, the sergeant, the general, the emperor—he was everything. You just try to support that mindset, and that’s what I did."
"I followed his lead. It was uncomfortable at times, no doubt, but I don’t know if there is a right answer to that whole situation," he continued. "It was just terrible what occurred, and what happened, and we had no precedent to go back and say, "Well, the last time this happened, we did this.'"
Ross concluded by saying, "I don’t know what the right answer is, and I was as close as anybody in the company to that whole scenario. I understood what was going on and tried to think through it, but I never had the ability to come to a clear conclusion about what we should do. It was a controversial topic, to say the least, and that might be an understatement."
The whole thing was unbelievably tragic, though Ross is right that it was an unprecedented situation. With McMahon gone from WWE, it remains to be seen whether Martha and the company will ever come to terms on a way Hart's work there can be paid tribute to.
You can hear Ross' comments in full in the player below.