10 Great Wrestling Matches (That Ruined Everything)
5. The Rock Vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin - WWF WrestleMania X-Seven
The Rock Vs. Steve Austin main event at WrestleMania X-Seven was such a killer match.
Violent brawling, finisher theft flexing, furious tone of competition: stylistically, it wasn't too dissimilar to a lot of crazed Attitude Era matches, but the sheer big time aura radiating from it was really something. It felt like the two biggest stars on earth were sharing the same ring, and in the past, this usually involved a bare minimum offering, action-wise. This was a great match that proved that the biggest could also be the best. It was, in every respect, essential.
And then Steve Austin turned heel, and the promotion never again reached the height of popularity it had half an hour before the bell rang. The heel turn itself was performed brilliantly - Austin looked psychotic, McMahon almost wary of what he had unleashed - and the chair assault was shockingly, relentlessly violent.
The reality is that there was no ideal finish to the only match that the WWF could have ran with at the biggest show of the year. Austin had cooled, cynical, murmuring, taste-making voices didn't think his indiscriminate run-ins were entertaining, and Rock was scheduled to shoot The Scorpion King. But surely, the solution wasn't to rid the promotion of its two biggest megastar babyfaces in one night. This left Kane as your next PPV headliner, which probably wasn't in and of itself the end of the boom period.
Then again, he was as effective at drawing a house as horse dewormer, so let's just say he was. It was all his fault, Professional wrestling died as a popular mainstream concern because Kane's sidewalk slam looked like absolute dig sh*t. Everybody I know who used to like wrestling told me that it was Kane headlining Backlash that did it.
It is my right to say that freely.
^That's barely even snark; Backlash 2001 drew a full 300,000 fewer buys than Backlash 2000.