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.
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First, one has to acknowledge the marketing machine that is/was World Wrestling Entertainment. I was a WCW kid and generally prefer WCW’s product at its various high points, but their focus on a more realistic product meant sacrificing the sort of hook that an absurd number of WWF gimmicks. Here’s an example of how that works: once, when talking to my mom about wrestling, she brought up the Bushwhackers and did the Bushwhacker Bounce. She doesn’t know who the fuck the Sheepherders are, but she liked the Bushwhackers.
We paint the picture that WWE and the word “wrestling” came to mean the same thing after the death of WCW, but beyond the wrestling bubble, that’s not true. Vince McMahon is not the all-encompassing genius many who’ve worked for him claim, but he was fucking great at marketing, to the point that even the major stars from the WWF’s worst period financially are house hold names, and neither Bret Hart nor Shawn Michaels got to enjoy the benefits of being at the top of the card when the Attitude Era truly bloomed.
On January 4, 1999, the World Wrestling Federation had the following acts under contract: Mick Foley, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock, The Undertaker, D-Generation X, and Vince McMahon himself. Every single one of those acts, with the possible exception of McMahon, still has enough juice that WWE still squeezes them for anniversaries, podcasts, one man shows, and fun in the sun of Saudi Arabia. Except for The Undertaker, they all play a vital part in this match.
It starts with Mick Foley. Already a favorite of many, his Hell in a Cell match against The Undertaker at King of the Ring 1998 saw him transcend the barrier that exists between one’s wrestling persona and their personhood. Fans started showing up to arenas with signs that read “Foley Is God,” and, with Steve Austin wrapping up his feud against The Undertaker and focusing squarely on Vince McMahon, someone had to bridge the gap between The Rock’s title win at Survivor Series 1998 and WrestleMania XV, and if you could pick anybody from anywhere at that time, there’d be nobody more suited to the role than Mick Foley, Mankind specifically.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to The Rock to subscribe to the notion that Mankind’s role in late ‘98 and early ‘99 was to legitimize The Rock as WWF Champion — it is impossible to imagine that not happening, and, if I’m recalling his autobiography correctly, Foley felt like he was in a slump that fall, bailed out by the debut of Mr. Socko. But the circumstances were perfect — Mankind had become “like another son” to Vince McMahon, who created the Hardcore Championship — an old Winged Eagle belt as mutilated as Mankind himself — just for him.
Vince McMahon’s dream was to have a champion who listened to him and who could be molded in his image, someone who wasn’t “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. So he endured Socko and Mankind’s cheerfulness and manipulated the Deadly Game tournament at Survivor Series 1998 in Mankind’s favor, booking longtime jobber Duane Gill as his first round opponent. He wrestled Al Snow and Steve Austin in his path to the finals, beating Austin with the help of Pat Patterson, Gerald Brisco, and Shane McMahon. The Rock, comparatively, took on Triple H’s McMahon-mandated replacement Big Bossman and pinned him in three seconds, then Ken Shamrock and The Undertaker.
I haven’t gone back to see how the tournament works out in practice, but in theory it’s kind of brilliant. The Corporation force The Rock, The People’s Champion, to wrestle a member of their team and he loses suddenly. Mankind beats a jobber in 30 seconds. Because of how Rock came to fight Bossman, his short first round match comes across as luck and not conspiracy…
And then Mankind got screwed. Repeating the finish of Survivor Series 1997 in a controlled environment, The Rock put Mankind in the Sharpshooter (which doomed us to an eternity of terrible Dwayne Johnson sharpshooters) and Vince McMahon called for the bell. Fans were already behind Foley despite his allegiance with Vince McMahon, but in wrestling sympathy for a character does not beget more symphony — it prompts a desire for revenge. Only the McMahons screwed Mankind again at Rock Bottom, insisting that Mankind could only win the title if he made The Rock tap out. The Rock passed out, so he won the match and lost the war.
All of this is necessary preamble, because the events of the 1/4 edition of Monday Night Raw begin with Mankind asking for a match at the Royal Rumble and being denied by McMahon, who offers him table scraps, a match against Triple H to determine who would enter the Royal Rumble, with Shane McMahon, who was subject to an assault by Mankind, as the special guest referee.
Mankind and DX were somewhat cozy at the time, so he and Triple H wrestle their match earnestly, both men driven for the title shot at WrestleMania. On what would otherwise be a mid-match sunset flip, which Mankind was fighting off by holding the ropes, Shane kicked his arms away and made a fast count to give a stunned Triple H the win. He accepted the win, but it wasn’t a double cross: he gave Shane a Pedigree, wished Mankind a Happy New Year, and left the scene. Shouting out his middle school wrestling instructor, Mankind then put Shane in an amateur wrestling hold and threatened to break his shoulder.
Vince and the Stooges were not on the scene, apparently satisfied by the prospect of screwing Mankind over again. Vince was quick to get to ringside, screaming at Mankind to let him go. Mankind’s condition? A title shot against The Rock on that night. Mankind pushes for a no disqualification match. This doesn’t make The Rock happy — he’s in his training gear, damnit — but Vince has none of it. The match is on.
You don’t need all of this context — G-d knows I usually don’t watch months of Raw before putting this on — but these little details, even Billy Gunn and Ken Shamrock’s feud over the Intercontinental Championship, pay off during the course of the match. It’s a good arc and a great one night story. Add to that the bits and bobs of how televised wrestling works — a free title match? a title change? with DX and the Corporation at ringside? in a B market? on a pre-taped show? c’mon, no way! — and Michael Cole’s all-time great play-by-play calls, grounded in how deeply good Mick Foley is as a person despite his masochistic proclivities, and you have the makings of a classic match.
Here’s where I admit that this isn’t a classic match. I don’t care. It’s an emotional epic, the story of a man who loves wrestling with his whole being triumphing over a man who loves money, cars, and Versace shirts. It’s like if the Crockett family actively joined sides with Ric Flair against Dusty Rhodes. Not every match is a five star affair. Most five star matches fade from my memory relatively quickly. This one doesn’t just live in my memory, it lives in my heart.
The Rock and Foley have good chemistry. That will be taken to its brutal and comical extremes over the course of the month with the Royal Rumble and Halftime Heat in the future, but in the main event of Raw, with time working against them and all of those seeming limitations in mind, they economically work through their schtick, focusing on Mankind’s resilience in the face of the superior conditioning and athletic ability of his opponent. It’s one of the least violent no disqualification matches you’ll ever see.
This match isn’t about chairs or tables or blood — it’s about lifting a finger to Vince McMahon and The Rock. So with DX and the Corporation brawling at ringside after Gunn jumped an interfering Shamrock, the evening’s promised surprise (which was promised by Shawn Michaels, who was left laying in a parking lot before he could actually go get it) makes his presence felt.
The glass shatters, and it’s The Rock’s ass.
That pop, y’all. That pop. I just typed “wrestling pop” into YouTube and the third result is this fucking pop. The top two are compilations that feature this pop. You don’t need me to explain to you what a “Road Warrior pop” is, but this is not that. This is otherworldly. It is 10,000 or so people standing in unison and roaring like animals, an arena full of human beings who know what they’re seeing, and whose response to it is unadulterated joy.
“Stone Cold” Steve Austin is the ribbon that ties this present together. Icing on the cake. Ribbons and icing are extremely important in their respective arenas, so I don’t mean that like Austin “only” hit The Rock with a nasty chairshot and threw his hat at Vince McMahon. Someone had to do it, and Austin is the most effective chaos agent in WWE history. A Mankind title reign is chaos. There’s the chairshot, there’s the three count, and there’s your new WWF Champion. Chaos reigns.
If that was it, it’d be enough. But there is time on the clock, and they are determined to make this a capital-M Moment. It’s a study in contrasts, with Mankind’s joy clashing against Vince McMahon’s despair. McMahon is incredible here, “son of a bitch”-ing Austin and basically begging the universe to go back in time so The Rock could win. I’ve been watching a bit of 2002 lately, and in an interview with Jim Ross he says about his wanting to fight Ric Flair, he says that he’s turned on by ruining other people’s lives, and he’s not lying. So here he is, at his lowest, spewing his petty, spiteful bile while Mankind rides DX’s shoulders and runs celebratory laps around the ring.
And so I say to you, this match is perfect.
It’s perfect because it draws on the strengths of three of the most well-drawn characters in wrestling history (and DX). You have two wrestlers playing their hits, another whose entrance takes nothing away from Mankind’s moment, and Vince McMahon running through every facial expression at his command. You have a hot crowd who’ve witnessed something as unlikely in reality as it was in kayfabe, the culmination of a feel good story that began in the summer of 1997, and the tables turning against the heels in a massive way.
Wrestling never ends, but this moment stands frozen in time for me. I set out to explain why, but I honestly don’t know that it’s possible. From the moment Austin’s music hits to the final little exchange between Foley and McMahon, I can feel my brain pumping out dopamine as if through a firehose. “That makes me want to puke,” McMahon says of Foley’s dedication to his children. Me too, Vince, but only because I’m so fucking happy. Have a nice day.