RAW After Mania (March 29th, 1999): A Thing That Happened

It's been a good long while since we did these and after the past couple months, I needed a break from anything wrestling-related. Fortunately, a lot of these were in the can and ready to go. So the plan going forward is to continue these until the 2012 edition, which is the final two-hour edition of RAW and the end of our journey. I'm not sitting through 3-hour RAWs again.

Anyway, on with the show...

Whatever you want to say about Wrestlemania XV, it was rather eventful. A Rock/Austin confrontation that ended with Austin winning the WWF title again, the recently signed Big Show made his first of many turns in WWF, HHH turned on DX and joined the Corporation, there was a Hell In A Cell match that ended in a hanging, and Pete Rose got tombstoned again. Stuff happened on this Mania show, but the event itself... we'll revisit that one someday.

In the meantime, what happened the night after Mania?


Well... not much.

The show begins with Steve Austin giving Vince McMahon the WWF title belt back... because he wants his own Smoking Skull belt that Vince took from Austin back in the Breakdown PPV from September the year prior. Thus the whole framing deal is Vince wanting to get the belt back to Austin, but Shane decides to give it to the Rock instead to antagonize Austin further and give us a reason to have the rematch at Backlash (which ended up being better than Mania if I recall).

Funny thing about the Rock promo is that whenever Rock says something and the crowd reacts, he tells them not to do that. I think he does that every so often until he officially turns in a month or so. It's pretty clear that the people were ready to embrace the Rock (again) and it wouldn't be long before he says some smack to the bad guys and cover up ugly interviewers (and Kevin Kelly) in T-shirts over their heads.

Other than that... a lot of this show has been a blur for the most part and this was a year into my full fandom. I do recall Goldust beating Road Dogg for the Intercontinental title in a cluster of a match as well as X-Pac and HHH going at it before it ends in a DQ... but the rest of the stuff that happened? Nada.

This was just any other episode of RAW; exciting stuff happened and then you forget about it.