10 Sweetest Examples Of WWE Payback
3. What Goes Around, Comes Around
"Success is the best revenge." - Anon
One of my personal favourite moments of payback wasn’t just against one man. It was a vindication of a fan favourite’s career, personal revenge against a man who’d betrayed and deeply hurt him, and pure, visceral payback to the guy that kept laying the smack down on him for no good reason.
That’s right: it’s January 4th, 1999, one of the most infamous nights in pro wrestling’s long, infamous history. It’s the night Mrs. Foley’s baby boy won the WWF Championship.
As a subservient, gormless lackey to the eeevil Mr. McMahon, Mankind had come to see the horrible old b*stard as kind of a father figure. An abusive, distant father figure, true - but beggars can’t be choosers. And McMahon finally seemed like he was beginning to appreciate poor old Mick, appearing to groom him as his hand-picked champion.
Of course, it was all a horrible lie. At the tournament final to crown a new WWF Champion at Survivor Series 1998, McMahon repeated the events of the previous year’s Montreal Screwjob and, with Mankind in The Rock’s lame version of the sharpshooter, ordered the bell rung without a submission and the title awarded to the new Corporate Champion: The Rock.
The crowd surged to rally around the new underdog babyface over the coming weeks as he sought vengeance. He finally found it at the RAW taping on December 29th 1998, when (with a little help from his friends) he beat his hated rival for the title he’d been robbed of, and screwed McMahon over in the process.
Foley was hoisted into the air and carried around the ring in celebration. Unbeknownst to him that night, a few days later there’d be cause for even more. When that night’s RAW was finally broadcast in the new year, WCW - Foley’s old employers, who’d never seen anything in him or his Cactus Jack character sufficient to warrant stardom - carried on their usual practice of spoiling the taped results of RAW on their live Nitro show.
Announcer Tony Schiavone was instructed to tell the WCW audience at home the results of the WWF’s main event, and sarcastically added, "That'll put a lot of butts in seats." And so it did: estimates are that 600,000 households turned over to watch Foley’s moment of triumph, thanks to WCW’s gaffe.