83 Weeks - King of the Ring 1998 [Show Notes] (Patreon)

We are going to watch back the memorable King of the Ring 1998 that Eric Bischoff has never seen!

Season 6 Episode 1. We’re going to start at 1 hour - 8 minutes and 32 seconds

We all know why we’re here - but first let’s get started with this Paul Bearer promo - setting up the main event. Now Eric you probably don’t know this - but the story was that if Kane didn’t defeat Austin in this match - he would set himself on fire.

KOR had to be considered a thumbs up due to the last three matches. Austin, weakened from a several day bout with a staph infection, still put on a good match with a well booked finish to headline the show. Ken Shamrock, who was the logical choice to win King of the Ring, was given his biggest WWF win to date and had a very good final match with Rocky Maivia. But up until that point, the show was typical WWF. A weak undercard plagued by disappointing work and an even more disappointing lack of crowd reactions, described by those live as until the last three matches being like a tomb.

The Civic Arena sold out more than one week in advance with 17,087 in the building, of which 15,505 were paid setting the all-time city gate record of $539,660 and also did another $148,569 in merchandise.

6. In an unannounced match added at the last minute, New Age Outlaws (Brian James & Monty Sopp) beat Midnight Express (Mike Polchlopek & Robert Howard) to retain the WWF tag titles in 9:54. Midnights were still acknowledged as NWA tag team champions even though the NWA gimmick is gone (Severn is no longer referred to as NWA heavyweight champion) and they are basically the lowest level jobber team on the roster. They did acknowledge Billy & Bart’s former incarnation as wrestling brothers. Match was fairly solid athletically but the fans didn’t care. Only pop was when Billy told Bart to suck it. Later Holly knocked down Billy and told him not only to suck it, but also said f-you but nobody reacted to that. Outlaws worked as the faces in that Jammes took punishment and hot tagged Billy, who even in his new incarnation as a star still hasn’t learned to throw a decent looking punch. Jim Cornette hit Billy with one of the NWA tag belts, but of course Billy kicked out as everyone knows a secondary tag title belt can’t knock anyone out. Cornette ran in to do the same spot a second time, but Billy got up and Chyna, as Cornette stalled, came from behind and gave Cornette a low blow. Both Outlaws then gave Bob Holly a double hotshot and Billy pinned him. *½

The NWA schtick - this didn’t work did it?

7. Shamrock beat Maivia in 14:09 to win the KOR tournament. Hunter Hearst Helmsley, last year’s winner, was at ringside doing color and trying to keep an angle with Maivia going. Helmsley was okay on color, not nearly as funny as he usually is doing promos. There was one spot where Helmsley spit in Maivia’s face, and Maivia pie-faced him down. When Helmsley got up, he said into the headset, “testes, 1-2-3” instead of testing. Shamrock sold his leg as the match started picking up. They traded near falls back-and-forth, with the ref counting the falls doing a hell of a job in building the drama. There were a couple of near misses that were great. Maivia reversed a huracanrana into a hotshot. However, seemingly out of nowhere, Shamrock trapped Maivia’s leg and used the ankle lock for the tap out submission. ***¼

Looking back - it definitely felt like Shamrock would be the bigger star but it never panned out.

“Mick Foley has long since established himself as one of the greats in the pro wrestling industry. And over the last year probably solidified whatever doubts their would be as to him being remembered when his career is over as Hall of Fame calibre wrestling legend. But whatever he has done, and whatever he will ever do within the pro wrestling business, he will always be remembered for June 28, 1998 and the match that will never be forgotten against The Undertaker in the Hell in the Cell in Pittsburgh.

Under the guise of his Mankind character, Foley became this generations’ version of Jimmy Snuka, only to a much larger audience thanks to the magic of international coverage and live PPV. In 1982, and again in 1984 in Madison Square Garden, in steel cage matches against Bob Backlund and Don Muraco, Snuka, in bare feet, climbed to the top of the cage for his patented superfly leap. He actually missed the one against Backlund, which led to Backlund crawling out of the cage and retaining his WWF title, but to everyone in the building that night and those watching the broadcast on the MSG network, it was a moment they would never forgot. If it wasn’t for all of Snuka’s personal problems, that moment could have wound up with him, and not Hulk Hogan, being the attempted standard bearer when the WWF went national. Two years later in front of a wider audience, Snuka again lost in the cage when challenging Muraco for the IC title, but after the match, Snuka climbed to the top of the cage again, stood up, and leaped off, this time hitting his target. It was another moment etched solidly in the memories of everyone in the sold out Garden that night, including a teenage ringside fan named Mick Foley, that they will never forget.

Wrestling has evolved greatly from the days of Jimmy Snuka. While even by today’s standards, what Snuka did was breathtaking and a more than a little bit psychotic, but there have been plenty of copycats who have upped the ante quite a bit. We’ve seen guys leap off higher heights, take more punishing falls, and go through stacks of tables. And despite those risks, in many cases, after seeing the bumps, not only are they not etched in everyone’s minds for decades and even generations, but most are truthfully forgotten within a few hours. How many people without prompting really remember the Pit Bull #2 taking the bump off the top of the truck, or any of New Jack’s dives in specific as opposed to a vague remembrance of the open of the ECW TV show, or the night Mascarita Sagrada at four feet tall came off the top of a cage that was a good four feet higher than the one Snuka came off? Hayabusa did a moonsault off the top of a cage the same height as Snuka splashed off last December, and really, how many people talk about that?

With Undertaker working with bone chips in his ankle that limited his mobility and theoretically would hamper the match, everyone figured Foley would be there to make it and save it. And that turned out to be correct, although few knew going in to what lengths he would go.

With both men brawling on top of the giant cage, Undertaker literally threw Mankind off the cage, from a height of several feet higher than the somewhat similar and off-repeated bump Shawn Michaels took from the same cage last October, through the spanish language announcers table. It was said to be a 16-foot fall, and while numbers like that in wrestling are usually ridiculously exaggerated, it looked every bit of it. Mankind laid their motionless for several minutes as they tried to give the impression he was crippled and his career was in jeopardy, a moment of attempting to pull the fakery into reality that’s cover was blown largely due to the overacting of several of the bystanders. So as he was carried away on a stretcher, he got up off the stretcher, climbed to the top of the cage and began brawling again. This time, a gimmicked part of the cage collapsed and he took another similar bump inside the ring. After another few minutes of selling, the match continued again. After some brawling, he pulled out a bag of thumb tacks from under the ring, dumped it all over the mat, took two bumps onto the thumb tacks and was hit with a tombstone piledriver and pinned. The thumb tacks, after all that had happened, were thought apparently to be necessary because after what Mankind had already gotten up from, what excuse could logically be given to keep him down. But they were also overkill that not only didn’t add to the drama, but ended the drama one minute prematurely with the feeling of not watching a courageous performance on a major league stage but watching a sick minor league bar room geek show. Although a stretcher was brought out again, Foley left the ring under his own power to a mystifying crowd reaction, as Jim Ross was proclaiming that if ever anyone deserved a standing ovation this was the time, an inarguable point, but aside from some relatively light “Foley” chants, the ovation would be described as somewhat polite but nothing more. The reports after the match we received on his medical condition is that he dislocated his jaw and had three teeth dislodged on the first bump. Luckily the teeth were all cleanly dislodged, so that they were all able to be re-inserted later that evening. The jaw was put back into place by Francois Petit, who was billed as the medical doctor on call on the broadcast, but is actually the Shiatsu Masseuse for Vince McMahon and Steve Austin. One of the teeth somehow wound up in his nose. He needed stitches in his mouth from a cut apparently when another errant tooth cut through his lip on the first bump, and was taken from the building after the show to the hospital, but not before coming back after his match for a run-in during the title match. Both bumps did at least momentarily knock him silly, there is also the possibility of internal injuries and he supposedly has little if any memory of the match.

So the question becomes, where does the business go from here? For Foley, sure, there’s a one-way ticket right into every mythical pro wrestling Hall of Fame and in one night he turned himself into a bonafide all-time pro wrestling legend, a status he was pretty well close to anyway.

Several hundred thousand people saw the match live around the world, and through the magic of videotape and endless replays, those bumps will be viewed by tens of millions before the end of the week and exponentially more before the end of time. Foley got up, and while to say he emerged unscathed would be far from the truth, but he didn’t break any bones and didn’t even wind up with a long hospital stay from blows that literally could have ended his life if he’d been a few inches off on landing the first time. The scary part is not what we just saw. But what we will witness next.

As is the case with the business, a whole bunch of guys will try to emulate what is permanently etched in their mind, just as Foley one-upped the memory of Snuka from his own childhood. We’ll see more balcony dives that nobody will remember. We’ll see minis take bumps off skyscrapers which will fade from everyone’s memories within hours. And one day, someone will suffer a terrible fate. Of course pro wrestling is dangerous and the injury rate seems to grow by the week even without people trying to up the ante. But realistically, this business has been very lucky. While wrestlers talk about literally risking their lives, and they definitely are risking their bodies, whenever they do suicidal stunts, when we talk about deaths of active young wrestlers, they are from overdoses or auto wrecks. With all the wrestling held nightly in Mexico and all the young inexperienced guys doing crazy moves, I can only recall one or two deaths in the ring over the past 20 years. There has only been one in-ring death in the history of Japanese wrestling and that appears not to have been from a dangerous move as much as a pre-existing condition. The few deaths in the ring in the U.S. were legends from the 60s and 70s, generally older guys who hung on past their prime and whose hearts gave out. But my last impression of the Undertaker-Mankind match was that as long as I live, I can stay with certainty that I will never forget the performance and there isn’t a lot about wrestling that I’d make that statement about. Mick Foley will be linked with the Hell in the Cell more than Shawn Michaels will ever be linked with the ladder match just as Bret Hart will never escape the link of the most disastrous night of his career no matter what he did before hand and what he’ll end up doing for the rest of his career. And whether it wins match of the year or it doesn’t, and in some ways it probably shouldn’t and in other ways how can you even argue against it because of the impression it created, when it was over it was the greatest match ever that left me sad when it was over. I really wish I had never seen it. Not because it wasn’t entertaining or that it wasn’t a great match. It was both. Until the thumb tacks, it was dramatic as all hell. It’s funny, because I’m happy for Foley, because he probably on this night finally accomplished what he set out to do with his life as a child and that is give millions of people a memory that they’ll always remember, and very few people in the world are fortunate enough to be able to live out their true dream. In that way, it’s a wonderful thing. Whether that euphoria is worth the pain he’ll suffer from this and all the other beatings in later life is something only he can decide and he’s a grown up who is intelligent enough to make his own value judgements. Maybe when he’s 70 he’ll be living with so much pain that he’ll think he was an idiot, and maybe he’ll think back and the feeling inside will be that it was all worth it. Terry Funk is still doing moonsaults off balconies long after logic would have told him to stop and in his own soul there must be a reason because his friends and family no doubt wish he’d stop. I’ve talked with enough older wrestlers who didn’t try anything of the sort and felt what they did wasn’t worth it, and others who no doubt would gladly go through it all again without being asked twice. But I’m sad and afraid. Not for Foley’s future. Not for the business which will survive the next set of tragedies a lot easier then the last set because fans are so desensitized. But I’m sad and afraid for someone, and nobody even knows who, that was watching this match on television this weekend and in five or even 15 years will try to live out the dream etched in their memory and won’t wind up being as lucky a man as Mick Foley.”

8. Undertaker (Mark Calaway) pinned Mankind (Mick Foley) in about 16:00 in the Hell in the Cell match. The match started with both on the top of the cage. Undertaker stepped in a spot on the cage that wasn’t well put together as it gave way and he really could have been hurt. There were a few hard chair shots to the back before Mankind took the first bump. After five minutes, they re-started the match and almost immediately he took the second bump into the ring. Terry Funk, who came out after the first bump, tried to stop Undertaker from continuing to destroy Mankind, but got choke slammed and knocked out of the way. Mankind was bleeding from the mouth at this point, although it’s possible that was gimmicked but it’s certainly believable that it wasn’t. Undertaker hit him a few times with the steps that Mankind tried to use, but in selling the shoulder, which took the brunt of the first bump, couldn’t lift the steps up. After some brutal punches, reminiscent of the ones Foley voluntarily took a few years back from Vader to get over a WCW angle, Undertaker went for a tope and crashed into the cage. Undertaker juiced. Mankind piledrove him on a chair for a near fall and did a legdrop onto a chair onto his face and a double arm DDT. He then poured the thumb tacks all over the ring. Mankind used the claw but Undertaker powered out and eventually gave him a fallaway onto the thumb tacks, a choke slam on the thumb tacks and the tombstone piledriver. ****½

How did you first hear about this? Were you called during it?

Was any of this a surprise to you after you said you had to let Mick Foley go for wanting to do stuff like this?

What would the reaction from Turner had been to something like this?

9. Kane (Glen Jacobs) captured the WWF title from Steve Austin (Steven Williams) in 14:52 of a first blood match. Austin did a great job under the circumstances since he couldn’t have been nearly 100% after spending three days in the hospital. He physically look weakened and seemed to tire quicker than usual, but still carried the match. Austin started by attacking Kane with the title belt and undoing a turnbuckle pad and running him into it. At this point I think we found out which company was copying which company when it came to the dueling cages on Monday a few weeks ago. Eric Bischoff, I mean Vince McMahon, was in the owners’ box with Elizabeth, I mean Sable. Between Nitro and Raw these days I have this feeling I’m watching a bunch of people going through a very public mid-life crisis. If that didn’t clinch who was doing the copying, the levitating cage, just two weeks after the same angle on Nitro, ended the speculation. All’s fair in love and a wrestling war, but please spare me any attempts at portraying either side in this war as the good guys or the bad guys. With Austin in trouble, the cage started coming down, with the illusion given that McMahon was behind it. As Austin would take control, the cage would be raised again. Austin took a cage shot in the head. Actually Austin was bleeding from the back early but it was ignored, but they also did give an explanation before the match with Earl Hebner saying basically it would take copious amounts of blood to end the match so an accidental unscripted cut, as took place on Austin’s back, could be ignored. At another point with Austin on the ground, they teased the cage coming down and basically beheading Austin. They brawled in the ramp area with Austin going for a piledriver but Kane reversing it, and Kane suplexed Austin on the ramp. Austin rammed Kane again into the unprotected turnbuckle and hit him in the face with a fan. Outside the ring, Hebner got squashed in the guard rail and was bumped. Kane hit a clothesline off the top, but missed a second one. Mankind came out. At this point the cage started lowering. Austin hit a stunner on both Mankind and then Kane, and at this point Undertaker showed up. Undertaker and Mankind played dueling chairs, but Mankind ducked a chair shot, causing Undertaker to hit Austin, who sliced his head open badly and was bleeding heavily. Undertaker poured what was purported to be gasoline (there for Kane to set himself on fire if he lost) all over Hebner to revive him. Austin was bleeding a river and Hebner saw it and ended the match, but not before Austin laid Kane out with a chair shot. The closing shot of the show was McMahon and Sable in the luxury box and under the visage of McMahon it read, “Kane: New WWF champion” as to signify McMahon had planned it all from the start and put the heat on the switch to McMahon and away from either Kane, Paul Bearer or Undertaker. ***1/4

COMING OFF THIS SHOW

THE NEXT NIGHT ON RAW 

The Monday night ratings on 6/29 were a total annihilation for the World Wrestling Federation in every sense of the word. The gap between the quality of the Raw and Nitro shows may have never been greater, and the ratings exemplified that from top-to-bottom. What was also impressive is that after two months of generally declining numbers overall, the overall audience was at a near record pace largely due to Raw, and being that it was in the summer with fewer people watching television, the actual audience share also broke records.

Raw drew its third highest rating in history for the show that was highlighted by Steve Austin beating Kane to regain the WWF title, and the highest mark in history for an opposed show, doing a 5.36 rating (5.17 first hour; 5.56 second hour) and an 8.83 share. As far as for an opposed show, these marks all broke the record set by the 4/20 Nitro with a 5.11 rating and 8.35 share although the all-time rating remains a 5.69 for the Raw episode on 4/27 going unopposed.

Nitro actually wound up doing a similar rating as it has the past several weeks with a 4.05 rating (4.42 first hour; 3.95 second hour; 3.78 third hour) and a 6.84 share. In addition, the Nitro replay did a 1.3 rating and a phenomenal 7.5 share. It shows that as bad as Nitro was, and it was really bad, that Raw drew a lot of regular Nitro viewers (Nitro dropped from a 4.9 to a 3.6 when Raw started which is a much larger drop than usual), since Nitro drew a very strong first hour, many of which stayed up until 4 a.m. to catch what they missed on Nitro by watching the replay.

The combined head-to-head two hours drew a 9.23 rating or 6,769,000 total homes, falling just short of the record 9.48 rating in 6,920,000 homes set on 4/20. Raw’s peak head-to-head quarter, which was the final quarter with the title change, drew a 5.94 rating and 10.2 share in 4,365,000 homes. The all-time Raw record was set on 4/13 for the Vince McMahon-Steve Austin non-match in Philadelphia with a 6.0 rating in 4,414,000 homes, and the all-time opposed rated quarter hour was set on 4/20 for the Hulk Hogan vs. Randy Savage WCW title change which drew a 6.53 rating and 10.7 share in 4,774,000 homes. Raw actually peaked with an amazing 6.90 rating in 5,070,000 homes for the three minute over-run after Nitro had gone off the air which most likely for that three minutes would be the largest audience ever watching any show at one point on a Monday night. WCW’s climax of the show with the Hulk Hogan angle with Karl Malone and Diamond Dallas Page drew a 3.99 rating, so the combined 9.93 final quarter was one of the highest in history as well but the combined 17.0 share in that 15 minutes was nothing short of mind-blowing and the average 15.1 share over the two-hours was also an all-time record.

Each side tried a major experiment, neither of which got over with the live crowd. WCW had Bischoff attempt to do a segment called NWO Late Night, with a Tonight show type set with a band (led by Reverent Billy Wirtz, a former pro wrestling manager in Florida many years back and nightclub comic), with a lengthy interview with Scott Steiner which bombed royally live and ranked as among the worst segments ever on a Nitro, which bombed doing a 3.4 rating.

WWF attempted to do matches without a predetermined finish, which is something I never thought I’d see in the WWF and wonder what that means if they run in states where pro wrestling isn’t regulated but where boxing or Tough Man contests are as far as tax laws and the like are concerned. They are trying to do a Tough Man type of tournament, with shoot matches, fighting with three one minute rounds to minimize the guys gassing out, with 20 ounce gloves to minimize the damages of the punches, and with takedowns legal but with the wrestlers immediately stood up to eliminate any ground fighting or submissions. They had corner men who could throw in the towel, and used wrestling legend Danny Hodge as the referee (interesting to note that Jim Ross made a much bigger deal of Hodge’s standing as an amateur wrestler and Golden gloves boxing champion as compared with his lengthy history as a major star in pro wrestling to where from a historical standpoint he’d probably have to rank along with Jushin Liger as the greatest junior heavyweight wrestler in history). The rules were that every takedown would be worth five points, a knockdown would be worth ten points, a knockout would end the match, no actual wrestling holds were legal (can you imagine the silliness that when pro wrestlers in the U.S. shoot they aren’t allowed to use any wrestling holds) and whoever delivered the most punches in a round would get five points. No tournament bracketing was announced, but two matches took place. Neither got over live, and in fact the normally receptive modern WWF crowd that accepts almost anything was chanting “We Want Wrestling” during the Marc Mero vs. Steve Blackman shoot, and delivering loud “boring” chants during the Mark Canterbury (formerly Henry Godwinn) vs. Bradshaw shoot. For the record, in the first two “matches” in WWF history where the outcomes weren’t pre-planned, Blackman continually took Mero down, and Mero wasn’t able to show any of his vaunted boxing skills (and, in fact, what of the fight was standing Blackman more then held his own as well) enroute to a one-sided decision that basically exposed that Mero couldn’t wrestle and that in a real situation against a wrestler, his boxing skills wouldn’t do him any good. Bradshaw was awarded the decision over Canterbury, although if you kept score, it should have been a draw as Bradshaw won two of the three rounds, giving him a 10-5 edge, but Canterbury did take him down once. There was a period in the second round where Bradshaw rocked Canterbury although he never knocked him down. That was more like watching a low level tough man contest as two big guys banged away with no form or skill, and even with the short one minute rounds, both were noticeably gassing 40 seconds into it. We don’t know much in the way of details of where this is going, although we did learn about it several days ahead of time when the WWF was basically asking a lot of its wrestlers that were going nowhere (they won’t let any of the top guys get exposed by showing they may lack skill fighting) on the roster to enter this cross between a bad Tough Man contest and an unskilled version of Draka or Shootboxing with the hopes that a good showing might make an impression on the fans and help get them over, and that they would be paid extra for doing the shoots. Neither Dan Severn or Ken Shamrock were allowed to enter. Under the rules they have, Severn in particular would destroy everyone in there because he’d be able to take them all down at will time after time and pile up an insurmountable lead in points and with those almost pillow like gloves, nobody is going to knock him out. Shamrock probably would as well and is probably more proficient with gloves than most of the guys they’d have there as well if he felt like standing, but since there are no submissions, the rules work away from his strength in real fighting. There was also the theory they are doing real matches to set up an eventual Severn-Shamrock showdown and try and push that it’s real, because it could do box office if both promoted correctly and if people believe it’s real but it’s doubtful after KOR that Severn can do any box office within the guise of what people believe as worked pro wrestling. Of course no matter how it’s hyped going in, Severn-Shamrock in the WWF is going to have a worked ending because they can’t take the risk of having a match like their second UFC bout. We did get one office report that while this would start out as shoots, that eventually angles would be done with it which lends credence to that theory. There is an argument that airing shoots exposes the rest of the show as works, but in this day and age when people have seen shoots and works and everyone knows wrestling is a work, that argument really doesn’t hold water. It does, however, risk exposing guys as not being good fighters in real life which is very different from participating in matches that are worked and the fact that big guys are pounding away without even staggering the other makes it weird when they bump for single punches in the future, but again, everyone knows pro wrestling itself is a work. But when none of the top guys are put at risk, there is really no harmful effect on box office to this (unlike RINGS which really hurt itself at the gate when its superstar Kiyoshi Tamura was routed by Valentijn Overeem). While people are talking about this as an idea being revolutionary in pro wrestling, and it is in the United States, this was done with regularity for years in the All Japan womens promotion where all the women in their early years had to prove themselves in kickboxing rule shoots as being able to handle legit combat to legitimize them before being pushed as wrestling stars, although that went out of vogue in the early 90s. In those days, the shoot matches were really dull as compared with the worked matches, but they also booked them with five three minute rounds because that promotions’ training emphasized stamina whereas in WWF it’s readily accepted that very few of these guys would be able to last if the rounds were long. Mero vs. Blackman started out with a 5.5, an exceptional number, and fell to a 5.4 for the third round, so those numbers had to be considered great particularly for those two. Bradshaw vs. Canterbury did a 5.2, which was a big drop from the 5.6 that the Helmsley-Shamrock-Hart three-way dance ended up at, so while it was a good number for any quarter, it was the second lowest of the show (Regal vs. Drosdov with the Sable interview clocked in at 4.7), I would have to call that as nothing to make a point with other than it probably was a hell of a lot better number than the two of them would have done had they worked a pro wrestling match in the same time slot. In that sense, after one week, from a ratings standpoint the experiment would be somewhat successful, although definitely not to the live audience.

Then the week after this - Hogan vs. Goldberg - announced on Thunder just 3 days after this - was that match announced on Thunder in response to the thumping WCW got on Nitro?