How This Moment Killed WWE's Attitude Era

So yes, WWE sold an entire pay-per-view on a match they had no intention of delivering - and absolutely f*ck all else on the card was selling it. For all the carnage and chaos of the beloved Attitude Era, welching on their output wasn't something the company made a habit of, just as it isn't now. Vince McMahon will take pelters then, now and forever for continuing on with Over The Edge 1999 after Owen Hart tragically fell to his death early in the show, but the promoter's son-done-good knows nothing else. A ghoulish example perhaps, but even stripped of the particular context, consider that McMahon had one of the most difficult decisions of his professional life to make, and the end result was wrestling matches.

Wrestling matches were wrapped around a horrifying interview with Melanie Pillman on the Monday Night Raw 24 hours removed from husband Brian's passing. McMahon believed, perhaps with some justification, that two nights after 9/11 the world needed his wrestling matches. Eddie Guerrero died the day of a double taping, but with so much television on the line, he turned that week's Raw and SmackDown into touching live tributes to his life with... wrestling matches. The highlight-only Raw following the Chris Benoit slayings was the rule-proving exception, triggering some theories that the company knew a little more about what had happened in Atlanta than what they were legally allowed to let on.

There are thankfully fewer case studies as dark as the ones above in the current era, but McMahon's pattern remains the same. He lost Roman Reigns and Bray Wyatt to mumps in 2017 and Becky Lynch to Nia Jax's clumsy right fist in 2018, and built in monumental changes to his pay-per-view wrestling matches in order to make good on the missing parties.

This was the promoter's son-done-good actually doing good, instead of bullsh*tting his paying audience and having Rikishi run over the era's biggest draw.

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