How This Moment Killed WWE's Attitude Era

Back to Detroit, the - ahem - 'Motor City' for the "attempted vehicular homicide" of Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Well before 'The Rattlesnake' was mowed down in that car park, WWE knew they'd have to flatten the hopes and desires of the paying fanbase thanks to his bothersome neck. Eight days, in fact, was the bare minimum. The company knew a full eight days before 1999's Thanksgiving Classic that Austin absolutely wasn't good to go, yet left no clues to suggest anything otherwise on the night itself. Watching the last couple of weeks of television and the various video packages made around the match is maddening self-torture. Your writer did just that in an effort to see if memory had clouded objectivity, but no; WWE go above and beyond to talk up this enormous showdown between the three most powerful forces in the company.

So much so that they completely neglected the rest of the card. Survivor Series 1999 is 20 years old this year, yet still sends shivers down spines of those that lived through it or the poor fools unknowingly selecting it on the WWE Network. McMahon was a cheeky f*cker trying to poleaxe the event in 2010 - have a deeks at some of the stuff he considered worthy of a Big Four show a full decade earlier. Bantering off his own team on the pre-show, The Big Show defeated Big Boss Man, Viscera, Mideon and Prince Albert (in a match kept short for reasons that would later become apparent), an Eight-Woman Tag Team Match was beyond pitiful and won by The Fabulous Moolah and Mae Young, whilst a Survivor Series match pitting Gangrel, Mark Henry, Steve Blackman and Val Venis against The British Bulldog and The Mean Street Posse may be the most bizarre in concept, line-up and execution in the show's history. "Bizarre" because Davey Boy Smith was in it. But then he was also in a match with dogsh*t too, sooo...

From dogsh*t to bullsh*t, let's circle back to Austin getting hit by a car, the hows and whys of that moment, and where it all ended up just shy of one wild year later.

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