WWE Hall of Famer Bret “The Hitman” Hart appeared on an episode of the “1 Of A Kind” podcast to talk about a number of topics, including learning from Leo Burke and Dynamite Kid.
Hart said, “I learned so much from both Dynamite and Leo that when I think of like my style and my career and how I maybe blossomed as a wrestler in WWF, that it was all because of both those guys. I learned so much working against Dynamite and taking some of his better ideas and making them work in a sort of psychology that he had. English wrestlers have a lot of theatrical sort of thinking in their matches, which was always really different.”
On Leo Burke being a better in-ring wrestler than Ric Flair:
“You know, there’s other guys that worked with like Ric Flair. I love Ric Flair, but I wouldn’t put him in Leo Burke’s class. I’d put Ric Flair in a great worker class, he was a great worker of his generation… Let me put it this way, someone like Harley Race. I remember talking to Harley Race, Dory Funk, or Terry Funk, about Leo Burke. And they were talking about him like he was a god. He was one of the greatest, ‘What a worker,’ and they were always sold on. The only guy who ever [I] heard put him down and really kind of didn’t rate him was Ric. And I think that was just probably because of the way he was being used. He was probably just a guy making a check, and he didn’t really care, where Leo was never the kind of guy to cry about how he was being used… So I always think something like Ric Flair missed how great Leo Burke was and never understood how great he was.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
