10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Triple H
5. Just How Many People It Took To Get Him To The Top...
The picture above finds Mick Foley staring at the Madison Square Garden lights at the climax of his epic Royal Rumble 2000 showdown with Triple H.
He's lucky he can see anything at all, looking at how close that drawing pin sticking out of his head is to his eyeball. Foley - as the psychotic Cactus Jack - had survived a Pedigree following a brutal street fight, but only because Foley called an audible and rolled his shoulder at two so Hunter could plant him in the tacks. Was that bit of improv what really soured latter-years Paul Levesque on the 'Hardcore Legend' perhaps? There must be some reason he doesn't publicly thank him every day.
Foley made Hunter, but it wasn't for the want of loads of others trying in 1999. Mick lost the WWE Championship to him the night after SummerSlam 1999 because Steve Austin didn't see it in 'The Game', but even he did the honours in October. As did The Rock in 1999 and 2000, more times than any normal main eventer could have sustained. In a preposterous build for an Unforgiven six-pack match (that he won), he beat Mankind, The Rock and Kane in separate matches on a deranged edition of SmackDown. He beat Vince McMahon and corrupted his daughter on the same night in the main event of Armageddon '99. He dethroned The Big Show for the WWE Championship on a January Raw like it was nothing as part of an ownership story for the new happy couple. He couldn't be stopped, and he still wasn't that good, nor bought into as the company's newest star.
From an in-ring point of view, the growth in confidence afforded to him by the wins over Foley gave him the security to work up to his spot and argue his status as the very best in the industry by the summer of 2000. It was as good as he ever got, and when he returned hyper-inflated in 2002 after months on the shelf with a torn quad, he appeared to know it.
It was time to stack some more wins up...