OK, so I said look forward to Part 3 in 2017. When you become a parent, time speeds up…
1999
The road to WrestleMania XV should have been a simple one.
On one hand, you had Stone Cold Steve Austin, the peoples favourite, the blue collar working making a stand against his corrupt bosses. He was the World Champion, but had the belt stolen in controversial circumstances. Now, he was going through every obstacle to get the title back.
On the other hand, you had The Rock. Still a relative newcomer but one who had gained in expnential popularity until he turned to the dark side to win the Word title, and joined forces with Vince McMahon, the very boss Austin despised.
The Royal Rumble determines who faces the champion at the biggest show of the year. And Steve Austin’s run on top had left him friendless and alone, among a sea of gangs and associates.
So I know what you are thinking here. The simple and sensible route would be for Stone Cold Steve Austin to win the Royal Rumble match, and take on his big enemy at the big show. To survive the slings and arrows of stablemates and foes via his street smarts and undying will to win.
That, however, would be the sensible route. And sensibility is not a word that can be found in any dictionary belonging to then head writer Vince Russo. He decided to convolute things.
The match started with Austin and Vince McMahon (not a wrestler) as numbers 1 and 2. It ended with the same duo. Whilst Austin had the stamina to perform 60 minutes, McMahon did not. So we call shenanigans. Vince Russo’s writing style is summed up as thus: the McMahon family lead Austin, mid-match, into the womens loos where all of the bosses allies beat him up. Stone Cold is then sent away in ambulance, only to hijack said ambulance and drive back to the arena. Then he re-enters the match, and deals with every foe until a momentary distraction by The Rock allows Vince McMahon to win the Royal Rumble match.
Yes, that’s right, the non-wrestler.
The number one contendership changed hands twice more before it finally settled on Austin vs The Rock. Sometimes, simple is best?
Vince McMahon learned his lesson and later in the year, took over as head writer for his own show, whereupon one of his first acts was to write himself winning the World title…
Elsewhere in a match which twice had an empty ring – great time management, guys – we saw short but impressive runs by youngsters Droz and Edge. Edge would go onto a Hall of Fame career and win multiple World titles. Droz, alas, broke his neck in a freak in-ring accident months later, and has been in a wheelchair ever since. Despite the match containing martial arts expert Steve Blackman (now a legit bounty hunter), MMA legend Ken Shamrock, one 500 pound man and the first women to ever compete alongside the men in wrestling – the late, lamented Chyna – the match never got going. It tried to overcomplicate.
Worse, bad omens approached the horizon. This was Owen Hart's final Rumble appearance. In May 1999, Kansas City, Russo’s latest overcomplicated storyline involved Hart travelling by zipline from the roof of the Kemper Arena to the ring. Instead, thanks to a dozen people making mistakes that by themselves wouldn’t be an issue, Owen Hart fell 100 feet to the arena floor. In a needlessly and avoidable stunt, wrestling’s great family man and teetotaller was dead. It wasn’t the first or last wrestling tragedy, but it remains the most pointless.
2000
One year later, The Rock was the obvious choice to win the Royal Rumble, and… he won it. Shocking, I know. (The storyline complications, of which there were too numerous to describe, came after the fact.) In 1995, when Dwayne Johnson announced he wanted to train as a pro-wrestler, he wrote a list of his most outlandish dreams for the next five years, including winning the WWF Championship.
He successfully achieved every single one of those dreams!
Nowadays he’s a major film star, one of the biggest in the world, and an oft mentioned dream name for President.
By this point, he could write down his outlandish dreams of winning the Oscar, the Presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize and a trip to the moon, and I wouldn’t put it past him achieving the lot…
Rock enters this match at the 24th of 30 entries, and dominates from then on. His only real threat was the legit 7 foot athlete The Big Show. The real life Paul Wight had acromegaly like Andre the Giant, but unlike Andre, by the time Paul was a teenager, life saving surgery existed.. As a 7 foot, 500 pound man who can do menacing or comedy in equal measure, and is no slouch as an in-ring performer, he has been the elephant in the room for the last two decades of wrestling, with writers genuinely not knowing what to do with this gift horse.
Here he had recently turned villain, and was runner up. In 2021, WWE have changed Big Show from hero to villain and back again so many times (in the region of 30-40 times in 17 years!) that his constant changing allegiances have become a fan meme. However, in 2021, Wight has slimmed down considerably – he lost 180 pounds through exercise and diet – and the mostly retired giant looks the better for it.
He even got a Netflix show.
It was dire.
Elsewhere, the early match was dominated by Rikishi. A 400 pound cousin of The Rock, Rikishi was surprisingly agile for his size, and had recently taken on a dancing gimmick which was very popular. So popular, in fact, that he got cheered eliminating his own dance partners. In a memorable segment, Rikishi was left alone with the 500 pound monster Viscera, and managed, with great effort, to eliminate Big Vis from the match by himself, earning a standing ovation from the Madison Square Garden crowd.
Next out was The Big Bossman, who had spent his previous few months bullying The Big Show over his father dying with antics including mocking poetry and repossessing the coffin with the dead father inside, in a storyline that verged from serious bad taste to hilariously unintentional black comedy. Here he abuses the loopholes in the Rumble match by waiting outside the ring for backup, instead of getting in there with the dominating Samoan elimination machine.
The crowd hated it, but as Bossman later became the night’s Ironman (the individual who lasts the longest time in the match) he perhaps proved himself one of the smarter knives in the drawer.
We also saw Rumble appearances from Christian (a future
World champion who lasts two minutes against Rikishi!), Bob Backlund (World
Champ from the 1970s), Val Venis (now a Qanon goon), The Godfather (the
cheeriest man in wrestling history and a legit martial arts badass playing a pimp here and loving it) and future FOX analyst John “Bradshaw”
Layfield. Grimly, two decades on, seven of the thirty competitors are no longer
with us. There’s a continous sequence of four entrants (Viscera, Bossman, Test,
Bulldog) gone, as well as 2 suicides (Grandmaster Sexay, Crash Holly) and
Chyna. Of those, Bulldog appears in this thing looking drugged out of his tiny,
his own painkiller addiction starting to spiral out of control after the death
of his beloved brother in law, Owen Hart. He died in 2002, aged 39. Each tragedy in life connects to another, creating wave of horror after each other.
2001
Steve Austin missed out on most of the wrestling year in 2000 through neck surgery. In his place, The Rock cemented himself as one of the most popular wrestlers on the planet. A showdown between the two at the next WrestleMania seemed likely. And, in an amusing mirror image of 1999, whilst this time fans assumed a convoluted path involving multiple other wrestlers, this time the WWF stuck solidly to their plan, producing one of the biggest selling main events in wrestling history.
Austin arrived late in the fray, at number 27. By this point, the story of the match had been set, with the alliance of “brothers” Kane and The Undertaker. (Arguably, the ongoing storyline since 1997 of Kane and Taker turning on each other violently over and over again only to reunite like nothing happened later on actually makes them one of the most realistic portrayals of siblings in wrestling!) Undertaker arrived late in the match and saved his brother by eliminating a bunch of lower card wrestlers.
Kane, on the other hand, had drawn the number six, and first shown up, circling the ring as TV legend Drew Carrey stood dumbfounded in the centre of the ring. Yes, he was one of the competitors this year. No, he didn’t bust out a Tombstone Piledriver or 650 Degree Frog Splash, sadly. Kane had been wandering aimlessly through the show throughout 2000, but here he started by scaring the bejesus out of Carrey. Then, he outlasted the Hardcore Division and their love of weaponry, a brief return by The Honky Tonk Man (he had a nasty accident involving Kane and a guitar to the noggin) and the best of the midcard. By the end of the match, Kane was runner up, and had lasted fifty-six minutes, which as a legit 7 foot man wearing a large mask, is a hell of a feat.
Glenn Jacobs, who spent 20 years of his life playing the masked firestarter, now has a large phobia of wearing masks, incidentally, which came up during the covid pandemic. I wonder if matches like this didn’t help!
If the 2001 Rumble match turned Kane into a made man in the WWE for life, then it continued the role to icon for another legend. “The Royal Rumble match is like a pot of jambalaya”, said The Rock in a pre-match interview (they were in New Orleans, the crowd lapped up the future moonwalking President's shoutout!), before lasting 40 minutes in the match. In a great example of The Rock’s general attitude to wrestling, he played Kane’s main foil for over half an hour before allowing Kane to get the final say on the night and eliminate him. Ironically, given The Rock character is all about ego, Dwayne Johnson was one of the least egotistical main event wrestlers they had.
And the moment when Austin and Rock, from different corners of the ring, locked eyes and the crowd went unglued, remains a magical moment two decades later. It was, if you will, a licence to print money.
Elsewhere the Hardy brothers made their Rumble debuts in 1st and 3rd place, and proved to be as sensible as Demolition, beating each other up and leaving themselves open to early elimination. Bradshaw was still one half of the Acolytes, the favourite tag team of hipsters. I should know, I was that hipster. He lasted nearly 20 minutes in the match, however, and was showcased in a way that suggested big things ahead. He’d have to wait a few years, however.
It’s also the only Rumble appearance for actual criminology doctorate owner Scott Levy, better known as pro-wrestler Raven. As a Poe inspired gothic character, he was one of the mainstays of ECW, and a huge favourite for teenage me. He never did much in WWF – rumours persist Vince McMahon doesn’t like Levy because he used to smoke wacky tobacco with Vince’s son Shane! British wrestling royalty William Regal made a rare – and brief – Rumble appearance too. As did Haku! The crowd had no idea who Haku was.
Haku, who once waded into a thirty man bar brawl after someone stabbed him in the face with a fork, and ended it victorious with three moves, is a walking, talking wrestling meme. If you see him at a fan convention he seems the sweetest and nicest of men, yet he played a tough guy on screen, and there is unanimity amongst older wrestlers that Haku is by far the toughest guy to ever take up pro-wrestling. I mean, you bite the nose off one racist (Haku is Tongan) and no sell being tasered by police one time…
Jake the Snake was once asked about real life tough guys and quipped: "If its me and Haku's 20 miles away, and I've got a gun, and a nuke, I'm shooting myself, because I don't want that nuke to piss him off!"
If you want to know how widespread the legend of Haku is, he recently showed up in New Japan wrestling for a cameo. He’s now in his 60s and retired, and Japan is home to some of the genuine toughest wrestlers in the world (because their style is harder on the spine and head and more intense than the theatrical style we are used to in Europe and the WWE). The audiences saw this older man walk down to the ring, and immediately bought into the idea he could easily beat the shit out of their favourites if he wanted to. Such is the man, the myth, the legend.
Now, I remember a story my Latin teacher Dan Divers once told me about corporal punishment in schools. He had been taught at St Als before he became a teacher, and experienced the belt himself. But he linked usage of the belt to the quality of a teacher. Time and again, teachers who lacked class control would try to substitute it with the belt, hoping fear would be an adequate replacement for competence. Whereas Mrs Burns, the Chemistry teacher who taught both me and my uncle Rob, was a terrifying woman. She had a presence. I once saw her silence an entire auditorium with one look. But she was also a very good science teacher and believed utterly in fairness. To finish the Divers story, Mrs Burns “was here when we had the belt and never sent anyone to get it. Because she never needed it.” His point was that those comfortable with their skills never needed to demonstrate their power.
Which returns us to Haku, wrestling’s toughest bastard, who has 2 minutes in this match before happily putting over Stone Cold Steve Austin. The more legit tough you are in real life, the less you need to make a big song and dance you need to make about it in public.
Next time (2025?) - Michael's favourite wrestler shows up (and dies), the Greatest Rumble ever is ruined by murder, and the next two mega-stars are born...
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