Bret has always had a complex about being liked. I bet 99.9% of the IWC that know Bret love him for his matches.....yet Bret doesn't know how to behave when someone doesn't give him the time of day. Shawn Michaels obviously wanted very little to do with Bret and some of the rest of the WWF in '97....really shouldn't be that big of a deal. I've always thought Bret made way too much fuss out of it...comes from an insecure place of needing people to love him and respect him all the time. Shawn certainly doesn't have much of that "wanting to be liked and loved all the time" in his IRL personality.

The problem with both Bret and HBK as the top guys in the mid-90s WWF was that neither of them were "man enough" to just step up and squash their personal beefs much sooner than 2010. Like when both Bret and HBK were told to stop jabbing through the dirt sheets....then HBK goes and both he and Bret get into a fight backstage at Hartford. Stuff like that is just immature and ruins workplace harmony across the entire locker room.

Shawn just wanted to be the best. He saw Bret as an obstacle roadblock to that. Hard to really blame him for feeling that way. Shawn could never be the technical wrestler he wanted to be because Bret was just better and more valuable than him during the five years they were on top together. It must have driven Shawn absolutely insane to see Bret goof off and not work as hard as he should have in 1996 and 1997...and then get out there and be one of the best and most valuable performers. For a guy with Shawn's work ethic, ambition and entertainment value...I can't imagine dealing with that.