Happy 1/4 to All Who Celebrate
There are more important things in life than Wrestle Kingdom, like the night Mick Foley won his first WWF Championship.
I’ll spare us all the boredom of Monday Nitro. You have heard the story dozens of times, I’m sure, laughed at the folly of WCW or sympathized with Foley or questioned the metrics of exactly how many people flipped the channel in time for Mankind to take on The Rock for the WWF Championship. That stuff matters in a broad sense, I’m sure, but to me it’s all postscript, something nobody could have known would happen until it did. What are you left with without the finger poke of doom and Tony Schiavone’s butts in seats crack?
I don’t know, y’all — just the greatest moment in the history of World Wrestling Entertainment? The true peak of Vince McMahon’s vision of wrestling at the time, when wrestling was truly at the forefront of American popular culture and not just part of an ever-fractioning cable and streaming ecosystem that is willing to pay crazy money to capture a fraction of that audience?
If that sounds hyperbolic, believe me, I am being completely sincere. This is an opinion I have held for a very, very long time, so let’s dig in.