How This Moment Killed WWE's Attitude Era

If Rikishi feels like a footnote in the story, it's because he didn't even really exist at the start of it.

Longtime failed pushed project Billy Gunn was notably kept out of the scene featuring Steve Austin and DX before the parking lot brawl. The Rock himself would have been an easy tie-in had WWE wanted to try and turn 'The Great One' whenever 'The Rattlesnake's real life neck surgery recovery time had concluded. Rikishi infamously "did it for The Rock" before the company retconned that hot bullsh*t and it turned out he'd done it for Triple H. The Survivor Series 1999 attack didn't kill WWE's Attitude Era, but it was the first shot from a firing squad that left it riddled with bullets.

Whilst Austin was convalescing at home, WWE somehow grew beyond prior heights to even bigger ones. Discounting 2018's Saudi Arabia cash and the unimaginable television rights fees the company now command, 2000 was - by all the old metrics at least - the most profitable year in the history of the organisation. More importantly, the show f*cking ruled. Hunter and The Rock had graduated to being topliners on their own terms with a money-sh*tting mega feud, whilst the midcard soared under the watchful storyboarding mind of head writer Chris Kreski. The man replaced by Stephanie McMahon right around the time Commissioner Mick Foley fingered the giant Samoan for the wrestling crime of the century.

They tried and failed to pay off the biggest whodunnit in a generation, and everybody got caught in the subsequent detritus. Rikishi's awesome babyface run was abruptly abandoned for a push that never materialised. Austin and Rock were cooled exponentially by working programmes with him that felt like backward steps, with 'The Rattlesnake's run in particular being tepid enough that his fiscally misjudged WrestleMania X-Seven heel turn genuinely looked like the most sensible solution. Triple H escaped the worst of it, of course. But then he still goes over on pay-per-views today, so was that ever in doubt?

Next time your YouTube trigger fingers cause you to ask exactly "What about the Attitude Era?!" during another PG Raw vs. SmackDown Survivor Series, consider how WWE couldn't ever really handle it anyway. The shows, by another f*cking McMahonist miracle are better out of their control than in it.