The Rock: Face Or Heel?
5. Feuds
Face:
That 1999 face run yielded some right old dross elevated, like a mallet on the high striker, by the Rock's incandescent charisma. Nobody remembers anything about the Billy Gunn match at SummerSlam, only that some signature moves probably happened, but his verbal assassination of "Bob" was so legendarily scathing that it created an immortal moment from the most forgettable and very ambitious of programmes. To his obvious displeasure, he worked the British Bulldog in the autumn. That wasn't good, at all, and neither was his 2000 feud with Rikishi, built as it was on a flagrant lie and a Shyamalan plot twist.
His series with Triple H was legendary - seminal artistry and stratospheric box office - but it's to his credit that Rock was as much of a draw and as entertaining a fixture as he was, given what else he was lumbered with. And whisper it, since HHH is so vaunted, but Rock's series with Kurt Angle was far more entertaining, and the matches were just as compelling.
Heel:
You could understand then what is inconceivable now: unprotected chair shots to the head were so in vogue because they got heels over as pure sadists. The Rock has the brain trauma of Ken Shamrock and Mick Foley to thank for his meteoric rise as a serious main event player. The Steve Austin saga was just seminal in every mode of the game. The blowoff was what it was, but Rock was just exceptional value in his programme with Farooq: the gag in which he lavished the man he would replace with the gift of himself was the perfect distillation of Rock's laugh riot of a heel act.
Winner: Heel