10 Fascinating WWE WrestleMania 15 Facts
The Attitude Era at its most excessively unbridled.
Ask a fan of WWE's during the riotous Attitude Era how much they enjoyed that period of time, and you're bound to get an enthusiastic response. With a gleam in their eye, that fan will do his or her best to convey just how much fun it was to have their Monday nights filled with sex, violence, chaos, and all of the sinful goodness that free-spirited late-nineties cable television would gleefully allow. Most likely, they'll have to stop and wipe away a gob of drool from the corner of their mouth in the midst of their regaling.
In hindsight, while the Attitude Era was wildly successful from a commercial standpoint, many creative elements of the run don't hold up today. As 1998 wore on and flipped over into 1999, the stories were more rushed, the ideas more far-fetched, and the title changes far more frequent. The matches themselves had been whittled down so much that they meant nothing.
That idea in itself meant nothing; WWE was king in 1999, beating WCW into dust and ash with one mighty blow after another. WrestleMania 15 is a show that in any other time would have been panned as ridiculous and largely unsatisfying, but in 1999, it exemplified a WWE that was so wildly popular, that it could do no wrong.
10. Billy Gunn Wasn't Comfortable Working The Hardcore Style
For the weeks building to WrestleMania 15, Gunn was feuding with Val Venis, Ken Shamrock, and Goldust in a story that included the Intercontinental title, Shamrock's sister Ryan as an object of affection, and residual hate between Gunn and Shamrock, owing to the Corporation-DX rivalry. Road Dogg, meanwhile, was firmly entrenched in the Hardcore title scene, working with Al Snow, and had a storyline beef with Hardcore Holly, who caused him to forfeit the belt after an attack.
The four-way and three-way matches wrote themselves headed into 'Mania and then...SWERVE! Dogg defeated Venis for the Intercontinental belt on Raw weeks before WrestleMania, and Gunn beat Holly for the Hardcore title the same night. The Outlaws swapped places in the respective WrestleMania title bouts, despite there being little story connection to their new opponents.
Holly remembers that Gunn wasn't happy with the abrupt switch, and didn't care for the plunder-laden style, as he felt like, "a fish out of water." But hey, you know, SWERVE!