When the Montreal Screwjob happened at the 1997 Survivor Series, Jim Neidhart was right near the epicenter of it. He shared his first-person recollections of that night during an appearance on a recent episode of Chris Jericho's Talk Is Jericho podcast.
"I was like everybody else. I was going, 'what the hell's going on here?' So I basically just came out [to the ring] and watched Bret's back a little bit and that was about it," Neidhart said on the podcast. "I remember being in the ring watching Bret break everything."
Neidhart also said he had a proverbial front-row seat for the fight between Hart and WWE Chairman Vince McMahon in the backstage area after the pay-per-view went off the air.
"I was right next to him," Neidhart said. "It was like Bret was sitting over on one side of the locker room. Here comes Vince and they got right into it, right into a big fight there, so everybody piled on top. It was a huge dog pile. Yeah, in the dressing room."
After the incident at Survivor Series, Neidhart joined Davey Boy Smith and followed Hart to WCW, where "The Anvil" was used only sparingly. "I got paid a lot of money just to stand here in the locker room and drink beer at night," he recalled.
A former pro football player for the Raiders and Cowboys, Neidhart wrestled for almost a quarter century, enjoying the peak of his success in the WWF teaming with Hart in the Hart Foundation, which had two reigns as tag champions.
"Bret was a really, really great partner," Neidhart said, "I got along really [well] with Bret. In fact, we still are proud of this little thing, where no matter what happened out there, we never got in an argument and we never disagreed about anything."
Neidhart's daughter, Natalya, has been on the WWE roster for almost a decade.
