A WrestleMania X-Seven Retrospective From Inside The Astrodome

“A Celebration Of Life”

Finally the show began with a brilliant opening video, albeit one that seems farcical in hindsight: as the voice of Freddie Blassie talked about “moments that resound through the ages” and “a night that carries us back to the enchanting world of our youth”, memorable clips from previous Wrestlemanias were interspersed with scenes of people from every walk of life crowding around portable TV sets that all seemed to be from the 1970s. A cowboy was watching one that was perched atop his pickup truck while he moved bales of hay; somewhere in East Asia a street vendor was stirring a pot of broth with one hand while watching a tiny screen that he was holding in the other; a teenage couple got cosy in the back of an old car to watch the show there for some reason. “This is Wrestlemania, a celebration of life!” declared Blassie as four women danced under a lone tree on a faraway plain, one of them holding a radio aloft. Yes, it was completely ridiculous, but also impossible to watch in that moment without getting goosebumps. Live in the Astrodome fireworks exploded near the stage, and we were underway.

The show began with a solid intercontinental title defence by Chris Jericho against William Regal – a match that had been set up purely because Y2J had urinated in the Englishman’s cup of tea a couple of weeks earlier. Then followed a throwaway six-man tag match before Kane, Big Show and Raven provided the night’s first memorable action in a triple threat for the hardcore title that spilled into the crowd and out to the stadium concourse, where Raven was thrown through a window and later commandeered a golf cart that he quickly crashed near some dangerous-looking cables. He later claimed that a crew member had told him the collision came “within millimetres of running over the cables that supplied power to the entire building” and could have abruptly ended the show, although the likelihood of such a calamity has since been questioned by Bruce Prichard among others. In any event, the match was fun and gave the sense of a card that was starting to gather steam.

Titles changed hands twice in the next three bouts with Eddie Guerrero taking the European title from Test, and Chyna winning her first women’s title in a squash against Ivory. Sandwiched between those two matches was a technical clinic between Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit that suffered slightly from its lack of build, the match having only been made on Raw six days earlier when both men seemed to realise that they did not yet have a match for the pay-per-view. As good as the match was, this must have been a disappointing conclusion to each man’s first full year in the company – Angle in particular had been a main event player and world champion until just weeks earlier but found himself the odd man out in Houston. Of course, many fans now find it difficult to watch back Benoit matches at all, but there is no doubt that he was one of the finest technicians of the era and he had exceptional in-ring chemistry with the Olympic Hero.

Up next was the Vince-Shane street fight, a showdown that over the previous week had become in danger of being weighed down by some of the more outlandish fantasy booking scenarios that fans cooked up about how WCW talent might get involved. In reality the sale had happened so soon before Wrestlemania that it would have been difficult to make any serious changes to the plans for this match, not least because the exorbitant contracts of most top WCW names had not been picked up by the McMahons in the deal. Ultimately the extent of WCW involvement here was that a few lower-tier wrestlers from the company were shown watching the action from a corporate box. With no disrespect intended towards the likes of Shawn Stasiak and Mark Jindrak, the lack of star power on display here did not exactly serve as an enticing prologue for the “invasion” that would follow – and in hindsight it was a harbinger of the limited success with which that storyline would play out. Luckily the McMahon showdown was a hoot, showcasing the most Jerry Springer-esque elements of the Attitude Era and producing a thunderous pop when Linda McMahon – supposedly drugged into a coma – stood up from her wheelchair to kick her husband between the legs. Shane-O-Mac followed up by planting a trash can in Vince’s face via a remarkable coast-to-coast dropkick that won the match – another nod to Heyman’s dying organisation, given that the move had been made famous by Rob Van Dam.

For many of those watching (me included) the next match was every bit as much of a selling point for Wrestlemania X-Seven as was the main event. Over the past eighteen months the daredevil Hardy Boyz had become wrestling’s hottest new babyface attraction, with Edge and Christian acting as the perfect antagonists and the madcap Dudleys adding an additional violent dynamic to arguably the greatest tag team feud the WWF had ever seen. Although dubbed “TLC 2” this was really the fourth ladder match involving at least some of these teams: Edge, Christian and the Hardys had blazed a trail at No Mercy in October 1999 before the Dudleys were added for a Tables and Ladders match at Wrestlemania 2000. Chairs were added to the mix at Summerslam 2000, hence the TLC initials, as all three tandems attempted to outdo the previous outing whenever they met. This time around, even with a relatively brief buildup that featured the barely-explained inclusion of debuting ECW alumni Rhyno and Spike Dudley, the anticipation was off the charts. Somehow the match lived up to the hype, providing the kind of chaotic demolition derby to which fans had become accustomed and including the genuinely jaw-dropping spectacle of an Edge spear off a ladder into a dangling Jeff Hardy – one of those clips that would be replayed endlessly in highlight packages for years to come. Rhyno, Spike and Lita all got involved too before Edge and Christian claimed victory for the third consecutive time in this kind of match. It was perhaps an odd creative decision but it barely mattered – this match alone was sufficient to place the whole event into the upper echelons of any Wrestlemania rankings.

After a brief but enjoyable trip down memory lane by way of a gimmick battle royal won by the Iron Sheik (apparently booked as such because he was unable to take an over-the-top-rope bump at this point in his career so could not be eliminated) it was time for the penultimate match. Much like Angle, Triple H had been main eventing for most of the year and was undoubtedly the top heel in the company in early 2001. He had even beaten Austin in a brilliant “Three Stages of Hell” match at February’s No Way Out pay-per-view, but in a year when an all-babyface match was destined to headline the Show of Shows he was a third wheel. Luckily the Undertaker, who had repackaged himself as the American Badass the previous May, was also at a loose end so there was an obvious opponent waiting in the wings. Even so, despite both men’s commendable efforts to make the showdown feel important this was yet another example of a marquee match on the card being built from scratch in less than a month, with no prior foreshadowing or other reason to think that the ill-will between the two rivals ran particularly deep. The Game got perhaps the coolest entrance of the night with Motorhead playing his theme song live, and the match itself was every bit as good as you would expect from two professionals of such pedigree (pardon the pun), aside from a sequence on a scaffold in the arena’s technical area where some unfortunate camera angles made it clear that an Undertaker choke slam and elbow drop both landed on a cosy-looking mattress rather than a hard arena floor. The Dead Man scored the victory – his first of three against Triple H at Wrestlemania and the ninth in what would eventually become the fabled 21-match streak.

As the show reset for the main event the wrestling world was about to be treated to one of the greatest pre-match promo videos ever produced. Although they had already faced off in the main event of Wrestlemania two years earlier there was no doubt that Stone Cold vs The Rock was the right choice to headline the Astrodome – the culmination of a year in which the People’s Champ had taken the top spot from an injured Austin who now wanted it back. There had been a nod to the eventual destination in December when the two men had a brief but electric exchange during the six-man Hell In A Cell match at Armageddon, shortly after which the Rattlesnake cemented his headline spot by winning the Royal Rumble. At No Way Out, itself one of the best pay-per-views in company history, Austin concluded his feud with Triple H while The Rock took the WWF title back from Angle, clearing the decks for the inevitable. Since then the groundwork laid on TV had been hit-and-miss, with the unnecessary insertion of Austin’s wife Debra into the storyline thankfully ignored at the show itself. Still, any misgivings about the build-up became an afterthought ten days before ‘Mania thanks to a brilliantly tense face-to-face interview in the locker room chaired by Ross – a textbook example of how to promote an all-babyface main event. Now, moments before the two men entered the Dome, soundbites from that interview were expertly worked into a package set to the Limp Bizkit track ‘My Way’ and the scene was perfectly set. These were the two biggest stars of the era (or possibly any era) colliding on the grandest stage. It could not get any bigger.

The first sign of something unusual being planned came immediately, with ring announcer Howard Finkel announcing that the match would be fought under no-disqualification rules. “When was that added?” JR asked the pay-per-view audience, as some of us in the arena wondered the same thing. We would soon learn it was the setup for one of the boldest booking decisions in WWF history – one that had been initiated by Stone Cold himself. According to Ross, who was head of talent development as well as his on-air role at the time, Austin had approached him in the months prior to the show and expressed concern that his character was losing steam. His solution? A heel turn in front of his home crowd at Wrestlemania. Ross was sceptical, believing it was too soon to make such a radical change while the Bionic Redneck’s merchandise sales were still huge and the audience was largely still in his corner. Vince McMahon was reportedly uncertain too but felt he owed it to Austin to let him give it a try. And so it happened: while the main event unfolded in front of a red-hot Texas crowd, McMahon strolled down to the ring and it gradually became apparent that he was in cahoots with the man who had been his mortal enemy for three years – with Vince’s help, Stone Cold pummelled the Rock repeatedly with a steel chair at the end of an almost half-hour classic before pinning him to reclaim the WWF Championship. He then stood up, looked McMahon in the eye, and shook his hand.

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