Shawn Michaels vs. The Undertaker,1997
WWE In Your House: Badd Blood
St. Louis, Missouri - Kiel Center
October 5, 1997
I remember getting an Undertaker action figure for Christmas sometime in the early 90s.
My parents had a rule that you couldn’t open presents until everyone woke up, but stockings were fair game. And that’s when a bed-headed, bleary-eyed Christopher remarkably pulled the Dead Man from the oversized sock my grandma knitted. How did this puppy get in here?!? I also got a fresh 24 pack of Crayolas and construction paper. There I sat for the next four hours, waiting for my parents and brother to get up, drawing picture after picture of The Undertaker strangling people. I can almost hear me insufferably humming Christmas Carrols like an asshole with all the joy of a little boy’s heart when his Christmas miracle came true. It’s a touching image. Until you consider the WWE was then primarily marketed to pre-pubescent boys, and The Undertaker was such a macabre character transgressively unsuitable for children. It’s funny to look back at it now, but being big into The Undertaker, even as a five-year-old, gave me an understanding of such things as body bags, caskets, urns, morticians, rigor mortis, mass graves, embalming fluid, and vivisepulture. Thank you, Vince McMahon. Disney would have never taught me that shit.
And while we reminisce about transgressive content, to me in 1997, there was nothing more swaggeringly rebellious than the crotch chop. For the uninitiated, there was once a time when yeah, you could flip someone off, or you could do that “stick it up yours” hand gesture—all perfect poses for the iconoclast—but nothing said badass like crossing your arms in an x over your dink and inviting your most hated rival to put their mouth on your genitalia. The “Suck It” taunts were in wonderfully bad taste, much to my 11-year-old delight. Wrestling seemed to me to be coming of age as I was.
A pointless debate the Internet Wrestling Community loves to bicker about in comment sections is when they feel the Attitude Era legitimately began. Was it “Stone Cold” Steve Austin vs. Bret “The Hitman” Hart at WrestleMania 13 with the iconic image of Austin bleeding buckets, passed out in the sharpshooter? Was it when Austin first stunned McMahon at Madison Square Garden? Was it when Vince screwed Bret in Montreal? Was it when Austin won his first title from Michaels at WrestleMania XIV? Not as frequently nominated, was when WWE staged their first Hell In A Cell match in the fall of 1997. If nothing else, that night was the beginning of the era where—much like it was awkwardly as fuck declared in that clip from Beyond The Mat, where Vince swishes then chews water—WWE started to make movies.
It was not without trying previously. Vince wanted to make movies before. (Well, I guess, you can start with his actual movie, the high-brow and auteurist, No Holds Barred, clearly an inspiration to a budding Paul Thomas Anderson.) Vince envisioned making in-ring, cinematic, spectacles with an over-the-top finish. Vince would typically put The Undertaker in these absurd, monster movie matches such as fighting Mankind in a single camera, Boiler Room Brawl; Yokozuna in a Casket Match where he’d die(?) then levitate up to Heaven(?); and Buried Alive Matches where he’d be…um, buried alive. We forget because of The Streak that doing the honors to The Undertaker was a prestige position only reserved for the elite of the WWE, but in the 90s, that was not the case. The Phenom was paired with such turd sandwich-y lugs (Kamala, Mr. Hughes, Mabel, Underfaker, and the highest heap of shit, Giant Gonzales) that most smart fans hated The Undertaker because his matches became an embarrassment for you as a fan. This cycle of cornball matchups continued to perpetuate, one would project, because Vince wholeheartedly believed eventually they’d stumble upon a winning formula if only they had the right story. And here, on October 5th, 1997, was the perfect confluence of backstory, action, execution and cinematic finale.
The backstory of this match—like most cage matches that necessitate this stipulation as the blowoff—was that Shawn errantly hit Undertaker with a chairshot at SummerSlam 1997 to cost Taker the title, then Shawn was resigned to be an asshole since everyone thought he was an asshole anyways and created the new faction of DX (with Hunter Hearst Helmsley, Chyna and Rick Rude), from there, Shawn and Taker had a bonkers No Contest finish at IYH: Ground Zero 1997 with literally almost every referee assaulted and the whole locker room involved at the end. The natural culmination was a cage match, but cage matches lost the credibility of the stipulation where nobody could get in, when the last two previous WWE cage matches that year had interference written into the story of the matches themselves, from Chyna’s frequent run-ins during the Triple H/Mankind match at SummerSlam, to the go-home Raw before WrestleMania 13 where Austin and Undertaker endlessly infiltrated the Sid/Bret main event in hopes to make their match at Mania a title match. The aura of the gimmick had all been eroded so a new type of cage match made sense.
But what type of cage would it be? On the Raw after Ground Zero they said it was a special steel cage with a top on it. JR described it as, “standing past the ring,” but I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. Would it be like the Memphis cage that stood far outside the perimeter of the ring near the guardrails? Would they use those big blue bars from WrestleMania 2? I figured if the big blue bars had a top on that type of cage, there could be an opportunity for a cool spot where Shawn could swing across the iron like they were monkey bars, and drop a big elbow or splash or whatever. As the weeks built up to the match, we began to see B-roll of the WWE ring crew assembling the structure, using steel fence mesh, which hadn’t been used since maybe a 1989 Hulk Hogan/Big Boss Man house show match for a Coliseum Video release. Because the match became universally praised and adored, everyone took credit for its origin. Carnies love spinning yarns, so we’ll never truly know who had the most impetus: be it Bruce Prichard, Vince Russo, Shawn (who said in the WWE Network documentary “Untold” that he lifted the idea from the famed, Last Battle In Atlanta war between Tommy Rich and Buzz Sawyer), but general census says it was Jim Cornette who shepherded the vision to Vince.
The story of the match began with reinforcing the idea that there was no escape for Shawn. The announcing trio of Vince, Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler reiterated it. Commissioner Sgt. Slaughter waddled out with flashlights to peek under the ring to ensure no chicanery would occur with bad guys hiding underneath there. Undertaker made a point to pace methodically toward Shawn, as Shawn likewise made a point to endlessly look up at the cage to seek a way out and sell his anxiety to the furthest back row that he was in a shitty predicament.
The Undertaker dominated nearly the entire first third of the match. Even when Shawn had minor spurts of offense, Undertaker recovered, and continued to beat the everliving shit out of Shawn. Undertaker focused on Shawn’s back for this portion. The narrative around Shawn’s later back injury was that it was caused by an errant landing in a spot at Royal Rumble 1998, but in this match, with hindsight, you’ll see his back begin to fall apart to make that casket spot only a matter of time. It’s hard not to wince from his back bumps of reckless abandon. The way that Shawn took a back body drop at full speed, his feet hitting the top of the cell, and even when he got thrown over the top rope to the floor, he landed straight on his back. Later, he got caught in a powerbomb position on Undertaker’s shoulders in the corner of the cell, Taker dunked Shawn’s body against the cage with Shawn’s upper body amorphously plopped into the cell. Taker ping-ponged Shawn’s back into the cell’s corner to the ringpost repeatedly as the commentary trio sold Shawn’s suffering. It’s hard not to wince.
Once Shawn finally had momentum, his “shoot” personality came through. His fictional character was arrogant from his own self-awareness of his resilience, but the character they pushed in his new DX persona, winking to smart fans, was that he was a dick in real life. Fittingly, when Shawn got a flurry of offense in, and sent Undertaker sailing off the ring apron to the cell, he hit a tope, scaled the cage and dropped an elbow, it appeared he spit a wad of saliva at some kid in the crowd.
Dennis Rodman kicked a cameraman in the balls during a Bulls game earlier that summer. Shawn became agitated with the cameraman, too, after getting in the way of a piledriver, something he’d done in previous matches where his temper would blur the lines of reality and he’d have a legit meltdown. On commentary, Vince foreshadowed subtly that we’d lose the camera feed from time to time after a happy accident of the feed digitally hiccuping. Shawn assaulted a cameraman as an organic—depending on your tastes—means to earn a reason for the cell to be opened after all the hype of there being no escape. At the time, I, like everyone else in the moment, thought it was Too Cold Scorpio, The camera angles, blocking, and wide shots kept that illusion as you never got a good read of his protected face even as he was carried out of the cell.
Once free from the cell’s confines, Undertaker caught Shawn’s legs and slingshotted him into the cage. Shawn famously bladed at take-off of the spot, cementing his legacy as the esthete of cutting one’s forehead. Desperate to flee, Shawn climbed on top of the cage, where the Undertaker hunted him down, the announcers free again to shout there was nowhere for Shawn to escape to. Undertaker reversed a piledriver, then ground Shawn’s face into the mesh as someone shouted, “Oh shit!” as Shawn’s blood flew in droplets onto the camera lens. Taker scooped Shawn up for a massive body slam, with Shawn extending off Undertaker’s arms for more extension and a bigger landing. Who knows how much give the top of the cell actually had. When I’d climb the fence on a baseball diamond near my house I’d daydream about what it would feel like to get slammed by a seven-foot biker on that.
The final third of the match began after Shawn fell off the top of the cage through the Spanish announce table below. It wasn’t the first major table spot in WWE history, (it would later get dangerously and recklessly outdone by Mick Foley in the infamous Hell In A Cell match from King Of The Ring 1998), but it was a first of its kind. The footage would be rebroadcast in highlights and in the Raw signature for years to come. On repeat viewing of this match, one notices Shawn’s breathing after he hit. His stomach contorting and sucking in breath, his shoulders seizing. The wincing returns.
Undertaker tossed Shawn around the other table before dragging him lifelessly into the ring. In a first—I can’t recall a time where he did this previously—Undertaker chokeslammed Shawn from the top rope. With Shawn nearing certain death, Undertaker went outside to get a chair to pummel Shawn with. The story came full circle as Undertaker finally got his receipt for SummerSlam when Taker absolutely teed-the-fuck off on Shawn’s melon with a vicious and perfectly-timed unprotected chairshot. Shawn was dead. Then the lights went out.
The monster movie began. Eerie funeral organs bellowed. Red lights came on, fire exploded from the entrance, Vince screeched in his Vince hyperbolic way, “And that…that’s gotta be…that’s gotta be Kane!!!” That’s gotta be Issac Yankem, I remember thinking, judging by Fake Diesel’s identifiable lumbering walk. But this new shtick wasn’t god-awful cringe. Kane got instant credibility by tombstoning Undertaker to cost him the match, as Shawn had enough strength to impossibly lift an arm over the fallen and emotionally shellshocked Undertaker for the win. Who knew he would be one of the most convincing monsters in WWE’s history? Who knew this angle had a shelf-life past WrestleMania XIV and Kane would stick around for 20 years as the Big Red Machine? And who knew he’d be the mayor of a small town and go all No Mask Mandate Machine during a global pandemic?
Maybe the interference in the end takes it down a peg for someone, but to me, this is one of the greatest WWE matches of all time. It had masterful storytelling and was the completion of the vision for what Vince wanted WWE to be. It had its downside effect, Mick Foley nearly killed himself to top it, and Vince Russo and McMahon interpreted its artistic triumph to believe spectacle and story trumped a realistic depiction of an athletic contest. But this was the end of an era for Vince, too, as the Attitude era swept in. He would never be the humble play-by-play huckster on a PPV again. He would—initially reluctantly—become the greatest heel character in the history of professional wrestling.
Here’s a great moment for you to watch again: after Shawn crashed through the table and got tossed around ringside, as Undertaker and Shawn fought back towards the door, Vince had Angry Vince face on. It’s difficult to see in the wide shot. The camera only hung on this angle for a blip. Vince leaned in toward Shawn, overcome with emotion, his face red and grimacing. I like to think he was not mad about some insane Vince thing, but he was cheering them on like someone watching their favorite team run-in an implausible touchdown. He was vicariously living through his two most trusted performers that could make the movies he wanted to make.
