Forgotten Goodness 11.21.06: 1998 Survivor Series

Posted by  on 11.21.2006

You can't look at this show like just another wrestling event. It was a three-hour movie with twists, turns and a shocking ending you couldn't believe. It was awesome.

First off, my apologies for missing last week's column. One of the elections I was covering in Connecticut ended up going to a week-long recount, thus I worked about 15 hours last Monday and had no time to rant about wrestling. I know, it was a sad day for O'Dog. With Survivor Series coming up, I had to go back to another Survivor Series I enjoyed. For another perspective on this show, check out J.D. Dunn's review. I agree with him that the wrestling sucked badly but I think he understated the genius of the booking. And away we go...

Forgotten Goodness 11.20.06: 1998 Survivor Series

Let me begin by stating that this show has a special place in my wrestling heart. Until this show, pro wrestling was a very personal experience for me. I watched Raw/Nitro by myself, I would watch WrestleMania and SummerSlam alone and never really discussed pro wrestling with anyone. It became apparent as I went back to high school in the fall of 1998 that I was no longer the only wrestling fan. My friends, also wrestling fans, had come out of the closet in large part due to the Rock and 1998's SummerSlam. So by the time Survivor Series rolled around, we were in a frenzy. About 10 of us piled into my basement and watched the show with the fervor of ten year-old marks. I'm talking about yelling at the screen, booing at Mr. McMahon and cheering like fanboys for the Rock to win the title. It was a good time.

The show itself was also the best piece of wrestling booking, from beginning to end, that I have ever seen in my life. Now most big wrestling shows – think WrestleMania III or 17 – are more like sporting events than a movie. It's about the athletic contest. It's about who wins and who loses. It's about the matches, the build to the matches and the ultimate conclusion. The 1998 Survivor Series was an entirely different animal altogether. It wasn't a sporting event, it was a three-hour movie with twists and turns. What happened in the first match ultimately led to what happened in the final match. It was, in a word, brilliant.

For those not familiar, there were about seven different feuds and storylines intertwined with a 14-man tournament for the WWF Title. Vince McMahon had screwed Steve Austin out of the title and it was vacant for about three months. You had Kane and the Undertaker on either side of Mr. McMahon's good graces. You had Mankind picked as Mr. McMahon's "corporate champion" while the Rock was gaining steam as a face champion that Mr. McMahon seemingly also wanted to destroy. Obviously, he wanted to destroy Austin. To the point he fired Austin only to have him re-hired by his son Shane McMahon, who had just appeared on WWF television as an announcer. So Mr. McMahon wanted him destroyed too. All of this came together in one glorious night.

I'm not going to go throw the entire night's matches but here's what happened – Shane McMahon ended up screwing Steve Austin by not counting a pinfall against Mankind, who was in turned screwed by Shane and Vince as their plan was to have Rocky be there "corporate champion" all along. Kane and the Undertaker were basically supporting cast members and the other people involved in the tournament were just filler.

So why was it so brilliant? For the first time in wrestling history, the wrestling was truly secondary. It didn't matter that none of the matches hit ** in my books. It didn't matter that most matches were over in less than five minutes. What mattered was the plot turns. What mattered was the actions of the principles involved, their alliances and what their ultimate goal was.

Take Mankind first. Hand-picked by Vince McMahon for months, he was actually a lovable babyface being manipulated by an evil owner. This is the type of angle you'd see in a real honest-to-goodness television show, not a wrasslin' show. It gave the characters involved depth. Foley had been literally killing himself against Kane, Austin and 'Taker for the entire year but everyone in the crowd saw what was going on. They knew McMahon was playing Foley but it was a matter of how it would end and what McMahon would have Foley do. This is heavy stuff for a wrestling show, no?

Then we have Austin. The superstar of the company, clearly involved in a hate-feud with Mr. McMahon that he seemingly could never win. The beauty of the angle is that Austin would somehow figure out one of McMahon's plot, forcing McMahon to come up with a new one. After Austin defeated the Undertaker at SummerSlam, McMahon made him face Kane and the Undertaker at the same time. It was a game of top this in reality. And, because Mr. McMahon was the boss, the crowd always assumed that he would get the best of Austin at some point. But because of Austin's stature at that point, it was then also assumed that Austin would figure something out. It was brilliant in its simplicity and beautiful for a wrestling fan because it kept escalating. From the beginning to the end of 1998, their feud just kept getting hotter and hotter. In reality, there was never a true blowoff to the feud until 2001, when Austin finally realized he could not get the better of McMahon and joined him.

As for Shane McMahon, it was another bit of brilliance that no one saw coming. As Vince's son, it seemed to the fans that he was the one figurehead, if you will, that could get the best of Vince. When he brought Austin back – and remember this was before a million Shane heel/face turns – we assumed he was the McMahon for good. He was the one to save the WWF from Vince's evil reign.

All four of these converging characters came together at one precise moment to produce, in my opinion, the most shocking moment the WWF provided in the Attitude era. Or at least booked moment, since Bret Hart getting screwed has to rank up there. In the semifinals, Foley and Austin wrestled a pretty forgettable affair until all heck broke loose. All of Vince's minions came down to beat up refs, beat up Austin and try to win the match for Austin. Austin, however, fought everyone off, stunned Foley and went for the three-count though there was no referee. And here came newly appointed referee Shane McMahon to count the three.

It was at this moment that Vince Russo reached the pinnacle of his booking prowess and, arguably, has been living off of every since. McMahon counted one...two...and then flipped Austin the double-bird. Watching it with my friends, we started celebrating Austin's victory for a few moments until we realized what happened. Shane had screwed Austin! I hate to write this like mark but you really have to understand that it completely came out of left field but, at the same time, made absolute, perfect sense. Shane was a McMahon. Of course, he was going to align himself with his father. And Vince was so evil, that it made perfect sense for him to bring Austin back only to humiliate him and again deny him the title.

There have been a lot of cases in wrestling history where heel turns are made for the sake of shock value or for the sake of just having something important happen. The great turns, however, have a backstory and give the heels a legitimate reason for doing so. Austin had been screwed but it was just part of a master McMahon plan. If you watch the show, the mouths on the faces in the crowd are literally agape. As if they cannot comprehend what has just happened. In one fell swoop, Shane McMahon became another top-level heel for the WWF to play with and Austin could continue playing his role as wronged hero.

Why is this Survivor Series so memorable to me? Because that was only the beginning of the McMahon master plan. As Rocky took on Mankind in the final, we got the conclusion. Rocky put Foley in the Sharpshooter – an ode to the 1997 Montreal screwjob at a point in time where that was okay and not overkill – and Vince wanted them to ring the f'in bell. They did, Rocky won the title and the master plan had been revealed. We knew all along that Foley was being played and here was the proof.

Again, the heel turn made perfect sense. Since Rocky arrived in 1996 as a face, he was Vince's boy. When he turned heel in 1997, it was newly-turned heel Vince McMahon that gave him the Intercontinental Title. It was already in our minds that Rocky was Vince's buddy. And in the months leading up to Survivor Series, while Rocky was getting cheered, he never made that full-fledged heel turn. He never beat up McMahon. He never helped Austin. He was just there, apparently biding his time.

So as the show concluded, it wasn't like dissecting a football game, it was dissecting a true drama. No one talked about the quality of the Rock/Mankind match, only the post-match shenanigans.

Great feuds and rivalries have marked the history of pro wrestling but rarely have different great feuds intersected at one moment. That was Survivor Series 1998. Look at today's WWE. There are just single feuds between two guys and that's that. There's no grand scheme. It's just booking for tomorrow with no direction and no impact on the future. What happens at this year's Survivor Series may not even impact what happens on the following night's Raw. What at the 1998 Survivor Series, it could be argued, impacted the WWF for almost a full year.

The mainstream media likes to describe the WWE's product as a soap opera for men. But when it's a soap opera, it loses its appeal to many fans. Males do not like soap operas. Heck, if they did then Terrell Owens wouldn't be the most despised professional athletes. Males and wrestling fans like drama. The 1998 Survivor Series did something different – instead of presenting drama specific to each match, it provided drama for three straight hours through many matches. It was unmatched at the time and it has yet to have been matched since.