In 2000, the WWE started off with some OK at best shows. When compared to WCW’s PPVs from the same period—meh, the WWE shows just come off as more enjoyable throughout. WrestleMania 2000 doesn’t start off like that but there are definitely some thrills and spills on this show.
The 2000 edition of WrestleMania came from Anaheim, California and drew almost 19,800 fans for a big four-way WWE Championship main event with Triple H defending against Mick Foley, Big Show, and The Rock.
The Undercard (Thumbs in the Middle)
WM2000 opened with Big Boss Man and Bull Buchanan defeating D’Lo Brown and The Godfather in a match that had plenty of room to groove for both teams. Unfortunately, that room wasn’t used in the most interesting fashion. It’s unfortunate I was feeling the Boss Man-Buchanan tandem. As for D’Lo and The Godfather, it was never an interesting team.
The Hardcore title battle royal was pretty entertaining in a chaotic sense. What it suffered from was that hardcore matches shouldn’t run that long. Of course, it was a battle royal and I feel 10-15 minutes is warranted for a battle royal. There’s a clash here for sure.
As a result, the match peters off at a point and it falls into “longer than it actually was” territory. After that, we have a bleh match between two Attitude Era teams that I enjoyed as Head Cheese took on T&A. As a match, there was nothing wrong with this bout, it was just really uninteresting for a WrestleMania.
Business picks up with a triple threat ladder match for the WWE Tag Team titles. You can guess the usual suspects: the Hardy Boyz, Edge & Christian, and the Dudley Boyz. This match has a good amount of room to groove and was basically your spectacle match. It had all your thrills and spills, dives and danger that you’d expect from the names involved.
It was one of two bright points in the undercard. The other wasn’t the catfight between Terri Runnels and The Kat. In intergender tag action, Chyna teamed up with Too Cool to take on the Radicalz. It was a match with enough time to breathe featuring the right wrestlers. Chyna’s now mixing it up with the guys outside of the lengthy program with Chris Jericho.
Following that match was an interesting two-fall triple these match between Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, and Kurt Angle. Now Angle had rapid growth out of the gate and was both the Intercontinental and the European champion. The first fall went to Benoit after he defeated Angle for the Intercontinental title.
In the second fall saw Jericho pick up the European title after pinning Benoit. Overall, it was a strong match with decent placement. This seemed like one of those matches where someone just places all of the athletic in-ring talents in one match—and you get a good match.
Closing out the undercard was Kane and Rikishi taking on D-Generation X. The DX team at this point was Road Dogg and X-Pad which made for an interesting tandem. However, this wasn’t an interesting bout at all. Fortunately, it wasn’t long either. If anything, this could’ve been a pre-show HeAT bout and it wouldn’t be out of place.
This is WrestleMania 2000, you want to be wowed throughout the show since it’s a WM but at the same time you don’t want to be burned out. So, this match had its place on the show but I don’t know about it being this deep into the program. Yeah, you’d need a cool down after Angle-Benoit-Jericho but you’d want an entertaining cool down.
The two main pros of this bout are the length and the teams involved. No one was going to mess up anything. It avoided that space of being a boring match with blown spots that is eating up PPV time.
The Main Event (Thumbs Up)
Now for our main event epic of the evening. This was a special match in that it was Mick Foley’s last shot at Triple H’s WWE Championship. Also hungry for the belt were The Rock and Big Show. For some reason, the feud between Triple H and Foley was the more interesting story here.
For many who became fans in this era—like myself—it was also the first time we saw something that seemed like a definite retirement in wrestling. We’d seen wrestlers leave and appear in the competition, we learned that they sometimes wrestle locally, we’ve seen injuries that should’ve forced retirements, seen ten-bell salutes, and a few fans have even seen an in-ring death.
That’s all before the Ruthless Aggression era in WWE. This being promoted as Foley’s final shot seemed real. We’ve seen what Foley put his body through just in WWE and his previous matches were mentioned. This is a guy who was duking it out and always brought the danger.
While Triple H is driven to be the ultimate wrestler in WWE, he just can’t seem to flush Mick Foley. He’s beaten and battered him but Foley keeps coming back for more. However, Foley doesn’t have much more left in him.
The match itself is your standard PPV main event brawl with some extra bodies thrown in. I hate to refer to The Rock and Big Show as “extra bodies” but this is more of the Triple H-Foley swansong. That isn’t to say that The Rock and Big Show were just there, they were definitely in the mix and slugged it out.
If there was one flaw to this match—and It’s an issue with some of Triple H’s matches throughout his career—is that the match guns for being an epic bout. It’s the length of the match. A match doesn’t have to be 30 or 40 minutes to be an epic, it just has to tell a story that this larger than the other stories on the show.
This main event was going to be an epic match once you saw it on paper. It looked like an epic clash but it didn’t need to be wrestling’s version of The Odyssey.
WWE WrestleMania 2000 Verdict: Silver Medal (Thumbs in the Middle)
The middle card had two matches that were strong enough to float the whole thing: Angle-Benoit-Jericho and Hardy Boyz-E&C-Dudley Boyz. With those two matches, the main event didn’t have the juice to make this a silver medal show. It would’ve been like sitting through an episode of HeAT to get to a PPV main event.
Match of the Show: Ladder Match – The Hardy Boyz vs. The Dudley Boyz vs. Edge & Christian
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