The Rock Bounces Back From Mania Loss With Raw Main Event Win

Following a lackluster WrestleMania 2000, the WWF looked to get things back into full gear with a ravenous Monday Night Raw the following night. The show began with Stephanie, HHH and Shane McMahon all airing their grievances with The Rock.

Vince McMahon would eventually come down and shake hands with all three, reuniting them. This would eventually lead to a main event between Shane and The Rock to close the show after Vince, Shane and HHH all challenged him for a match.

As mentioned, several times over, the night following WrestleMania is typically flooded with returns, debuts and turns.  The first match of the night had exactly that as Chyna turned on Chris Jericho to assist Eddie Guerrero in winning the European Championship.  This was the payoff to Eddie flirting with Chyna, months on end, trying to get her to try some of his Latino Heat.

Now, reasonable thinking would lead to this turning Chyna heel, by her joining Eddie.  But the problem was that Guerrero was so damn entertaining that it would only take weeks before both where cheered and spent the summer together going on dates, even including Eddie’s senior prom!  Her joining Eddie and then posing for Playboy, pretty much assured there was no way anyone was booing Chyna.

Speaking of confusion between what was a heel and what a face, they had the ever in between getting booed and cheered team of DX taking on T&A next.  The fans seemed eager to cheer Trish Stratus, but not exactly Test and Albert. The DX combination of Road Dogg and X-Pac would put them away in less than 4 minutes flat.

Taz, who came in with gigantic hype by January, but was squashed quickly and turned into a joke by March, took on Chris Benoit next.  The Crippler had little to no issue as the former WCW champion took out the former ECW champion in dominant fashion.  WWF fans were still getting used to seeing Benoit in the WWF at this point but were slowly starting to cheer him no matter how he was booked.

From there, Michael Cole introduced Edge and Christian to the ring for an interview.  This was only one night after one of the greatest tag team ladder matches of all time. At this point, Edge and Christian were fiercely over as babyfaces, but this interview would change everything!  They went total heel and did it in hilarious fashion as they praised themselves and ripped on everyone else.

This was turn two on the night, and also the start of one of the most entertaining heel runs in tag team history.  Not only did they stay on top for the next year straight, but also mixed in hilarious sketches to go along with their numerous title runs as well. They’d go on to win the rematch between them, the Hardy’s and the Dudleys at SummerSlam 2000, and then again at WrestleMania X7.

It had been 37.5 days since The Big Show had a heel or face turn, but this time around it wasn’t so much a turn as it was a personality change.  He strutted down to the ring for his match with Rikishi with new entrance music, half dancing and half walking with a huge grin on his face.  This was all part of his new, “fun Hollywood” image.  He literally did a moonwalk and a worm dance move in the middle of the match.

The match itself lasted all of 1:37 until Rikishi got DQ’d from interference by Too Cool.  While the winner or loser in this match didn’t matter, what did was the clear choice that The Big Show was headed in a brand new direction with his personality.  Sadly, for him, it led to him being shipped to Ohio Valley Wrestling for “re-tooling” within 60 days. Apparently, no one wanted to watch someone 7-foot 4 dance. They would try the same thing years later with The Great Khali to even worse results.

The 13-man Hardcore Battle Royal at WrestleMania was a total joke.  Making matters worse, the ending was botched.  It was supposed to be Crash Holly pinning his cousin Hardcore Holly but the referee and timekeeper completely screwed it up.  This led to a singles match between the two on Raw that saw the error fixed, and Crash go over for the gold.

Up next was Val Venis who walked down to the ring making stupid hang gestures as the cameramen desperately looked for even somewhat attractive women in the crowd pretending to cheer the “Big Valbowski”.  Luckily for all fans, Kurt Angle came out and took him apart for the win. We were starting to realize just how incredible Kurt Angle was and just how much of a bust Venis was.

A HHH beatdown of The Rock at ringside before the main event, didn’t help Shane McMahon nearly enough as The Rock walked away with the expected win.  A few weeks later, HHH would drop the belt back to The Rock at Backlash. They would go on to exchange it to more times that summer after that as well.