Cactus Jack Plays The Game

Hello! Thank you for getting BIG EGG over the 1,000 subscribers mark! As a thank you, I said I’d review another Triple H match from a group that included three of his best and one of his worst. You chose this one, the Cactus Jack/Triple H street fight from Royal Rumble 2000, and for that I say thank you for not making me watch Triple H wrestle Sting.

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It’s cliche to call the WWF Championship Street Fight between Cactus Jack and Triple H from Royal Rumble 2000 a great match, so I won’t. At least not now.

This doesn’t come from a sense of contrarianism or an intensified dislike of one of the men involved — in many ways, this match, the beginning of the end of Mick Foley’s career as an every-day wrestler, is the pinnacle of its era. The blood, the hyperbolic Jim Ross call, the “Mick Foley legitimizes another world champion” angle, the fact that it is the payoff to years of animosity between two wrestlers who couldn’t be any more philosophically opposed to each other, including arguably the greatest t-shirt reveal in wrestling history — this is a designed epic, a statement match during a time in which both wrestlers were trying to make a statement for very different reasons, executed to perfection. Because of that, you get the next near-quarter century of Triple H, the beneficiary of Foley’s (almost) gracious exit from the spotlight, who never really became the man regardless of what history tells you or how many people had to eat the Pedigree to inch the man closer to his impossible dream. In spite of it, Mick Foley will continue to chase (and may still be chasing, if his recent tweets about wrestling again are any indication) closure to his life in professional wrestling long into the future.

This street fight is a stepping stone into the void, a realm of chaos that the WWF soon enters due to a legitimately botched finish to the Royal Rumble and the company’s fear of truly coronating either Triple H or The Rock in the absence of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. It is neither the first time nor the most costly instance of Vince McMahon’s occasional inability to choose a top guy — a pattern of behavior Triple H would later inherit as head of WWE creative — if this match is a test of Triple H’s ability to carry the ball, what happens between here and the establishment of the World Heavyweight Championship on Raw some years later suggests that he wasn’t ready yet.

The match isn’t at fault for any of that, but it is booked to lean into the WWF’s self-mandated entropy, beginning with referee Earl Hebner’s running interference on Triple H’s behalf because a 2x4 covered in barbed wire was too violent for his little heart, continuing with the sagging transition towards the later third of the match where The Rock and a cop save Cactus Jack from going through Royal Rumble 1999 all over again, to the way Jack gets his heat back at the conclusion of the match despite the fact that his loss is essentially clean — even set aside from its place in WWE’s mythical story that never ends, those designed imperfections are too much for me to rank this as true, peak Mick Foley. His best match against Triple H is at the Garden in 1997. His best WWF street fight is against Randy Orton. His most memorable bumps are scattered across time.

All of this is fine, as Royal Rumble 2000 is not his story, but his opponent’s. And for his part, Triple H is fantastic here, truly gutting out a career high performance after suffering a puncture wound to his calf after a spot on some wooden pallets. It’s an understated, gnarly injury, and the way Helmsley incorporates his inability to really place any weight on that leg on the fly, making his fight against Jack more desperate with every second, is the kind of brief flash of true brilliance that makes so much of his in-ring career so fucking frustrating. He’s so put together here that he’s able to play the role of NWA World’s Heavyweight Champion against a Cactus Jack who is the better angels of his ECW and WCW experience, despite a legitimate limp. It’d almost be heroic if he wasn’t so hatable.

The 24th anniversary of this match and the angle that preceded it just passed, and what I find interesting now is how my reaction to Mankind’s transformation into Cactus Jack hasn’t changed (if anything, my adoration for it has grown over the years) while my appreciation for the match itself has dimmed. I think it has to do with the way they approach the past. The angle, which features Mankind “naming a substitute” for the Royal Rumble street fight after Triple H kicks his ass on an episode of Monday Night Raw, turns entirely on Triple H’s facial expressions, the way his confidence in his ability to beat Mankind, which goes back years now, turns to horror when said replacement is a ghost of his past.

I love the angle because it suggests a kind of violence that isn’t there in the match itself, something entirely new to Triple H. That’s what Cactus Jack’s WWF debut in 1997 meant for Hunter, but in 2000 we are facing an entirely different world, one in which Mick Foley is on a mission, true, but is also on something of a victory lap. He is exhausted, and even though he is able to gut it out over the course of the next two months, he does not resemble the Mick Foley of a year ago, and without the grace of a couple of years to figure out how to marry his particular kind of magic to the reality of a body that, at just 35-years-old, is already beginning to fail him, he and Triple H have to play the hits.

Don’t misunderstand me: I love the hits, but despite a couple of gruesome chairshots and the iconic Pedigree into the thumbtacks, Royal Rumble 2000 plays out like a match where Cactus Jack is being protected rather than allowed to go out in a blaze of glory. They do this by inverting Mick Foley’s whole thing, both as Cactus Jack and Mankind, which was never about the punishment he could dish out, but the horror he was willing to put himself through to make a point, if not win the match. It would be satisfying if it came to a proper conclusion, if Hunter just straight up beat Jack, let’s say, but Mick Foley still has a couple of jobs to do (onboarding the Radicalz, Hell in a Cell), so what we get is compromise: Cactus Jack is well and truly beaten, but he’s not quite ready to go. It’s a great story in theory, but not one the company is set up to tell properly.

Despite that, this is a great wrestling match. Watching it takes me back to a time and a place in my wrestling education where things were really starting to break open, when you could buy a clutch of used WWE DVDs at GameStop for $20, download a bunch of shit from MegaUpload links on whatever forum you belonged to, and begin to understand what makes certain wrestlers so great. This isn’t my favorite Mick Foley match, but it’s probably the one I’m going to show my boyfriend when we get around to him. It was also a nice watch on a day that I was miserably ill, when trying to watch something new would have frankly mystified my COVID-rocked little brain. What am I complaining about? That it’s not rough enough around the edges? That it feels a little like the No Way Out Hell in a Cell in how it calls back to the past without doing much new with it? That it suggests a better Triple H was possible?

Honestly, I don’t think any of that would matter to me were it not for the fact that I’ve seen this match dozens of times. If you can stop yourself from asking why Howard Finkle has a little velvet bag with a pair of long-chain handcuffs in them, this street fight is an eternal blast. If not, I’ve got some sour news for you on the internal logic of 99/100 great American brawls.

Rating: ****

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