D-Generation X vs. The Nation of Domination (Mar 1998 – Sep 1998)

Background

D-Generation X formed in 1997 around Shawn Michaels, Hunter Hearst Helmsley, Chyna, and Rick Rude, a stable known for pushing the envelope with "Suck It" and the crotch chop and for deriding Bret Hart and Canada. Helmsley, who had won the 1997 King of the Ring, dropped the blueblood gimmick and was soon just Triple H.[2] He won the European Championship in December 1997 when Michaels lay down for him, lost it to Owen Hart in January, and won it back on the March 16, 1998 Raw.[2]

At WrestleMania XIV on March 29, Triple H kept the European title against Owen in a rematch where Chyna was handcuffed to Commissioner Sgt. Slaughter; she threw powder in Slaughter's eyes and got involved anyway.[2] On the same show, The Rock kept the Intercontinental title against Ken Shamrock when the result was reversed: Shamrock won with the ankle lock at 4:49, refused to let go and fought off officials, and the decision went to Rock.[1]

After WrestleMania, a real back injury from that January's Royal Rumble forced Michaels into temporary retirement, and Triple H took over DX, saying his old partner had "dropped the ball."[2]

The Nation of Domination had debuted at the 1996 Survivor Series under Faarooq. It was loosely based on the Nation of Islam, street gang life, and the Black Panther Party.[3] On the March 30 Raw in Albany, the night after WrestleMania, The Rock refused a tag from Faarooq in a match against Ken Shamrock and Steve Blackman, and Shamrock pinned Faarooq.[1] Rock took the group over, and it dropped "of Domination" from its name and its militant focus.[3] Faarooq was on the other side within weeks, pinning Kama in a street fight on the April 20 Raw.[1]

The two new leaders had been rivals before. Triple H has said, "I come in a little bit before he does as a talent, I'm Hunter Hearst Helmsley and he comes in as Rocky Maivia. We wrestle over the Intercontinental title." Then, "He becomes the Rock, goes with the Nation of Domination, I transformed into Triple H."[13]

Build-up

DX rebuilt the same night Rock took the Nation. On the March 30 Raw, Triple H, Chyna, and a returning X-Pac came out during a cage match, and X-Pac climbed the cage and hit Cactus Jack with a chair so the New Age Outlaws could win. Afterward, Road Dogg and Billy Gunn joined in the beating and threw up the DX crotch chop.[1]

DX spent part of the spring on comedy. On the April 27 Raw, the group put on army gear and drove to the Norfolk Scope, where WCW was broadcasting Nitro live, to heckle the competition through a megaphone outside the building.[1]

Owen Hart was Triple H's other problem. At Unforgiven on April 26 in Greensboro, in front of 21,427, Owen challenged for the European title with Chyna suspended above the ring in a cage. While officials were trying to restrain Chyna, X-Pac hit Owen with a fire extinguisher, and Triple H pinned him at 12:26.[1] The next night, in a tag match against Rock and Mark Henry, Owen turned on his partner Ken Shamrock, hurt his ankle, locked him in the Sharpshooter, and joined the Nation.[1]

At Over the Edge on May 31 in Milwaukee, Owen, D'Lo Brown, and Kama beat Triple H and the New Age Outlaws at 18:34, and Owen pinned Triple H after hitting DX's own Pedigree on him onto the European title belt.[1] On the June 1 Raw in Chicago, Rock, Owen, and D'Lo won the rematch in an elimination format; Triple H pinned Rock, then was disqualified when Shamrock interfered.[1]

The King of the Ring gave the two leaders a singles match. Triple H got into the tournament by beating his own stablemate X-Pac by count-out on the June 15 Raw, after Owen came through the crowd and dropped X-Pac on the barricade.[1] In the quarterfinals, taped June 16 in Austin, Texas, Rock pinned Triple H at 8:08 with a fisherman suplex after a low blow behind the referee's back.[1] At the pay-per-view on June 28, Rock beat Dan Severn in the semifinals when D'Lo hit Severn with a frog splash, then lost the final to Shamrock by ankle lock.[1]

On the July 6 Raw from the Bryce Jordan Center in State College, Pennsylvania, DX answered with a parody of the Nation.[7] Triple H was "The Crock," Road Dogg was "B-Lo," X-Pac was "Mizark" in black makeup as Mark Henry, Billy Gunn was The Godfather, and Jason Sensation played Owen Hart.[7] The group performed it in blackface.[5] A week later, Owen came out and attacked Sensation for impersonating him, which led to a tag match that night in which X-Pac pinned Rock.[1]

The same July 13 show set a title-for-title match for Fully Loaded: Rock's Intercontinental Championship against Triple H's European title.[1] Triple H lost his half first. On the July 20 Raw, D'Lo pinned him for the European title at 6:05 after Mark Henry distracted the referee and Chyna, and Rock slid in with a Rock Bottom.[1]

Fully Loaded was on July 26 in Fresno, in front of 9,855.[1] Sgt. Slaughter sent everyone to the back before the bell except Chyna.[1] Rock won the first fall at 20:17 with a Rock Bottom after Triple H knocked D'Lo off the apron with the European belt. Chyna tied it at 26:29 with a DDT onto a steel chair, and the 30-minute limit ran out with Triple H covering Rock after a Pedigree.[1]

The stables settled things their own way on the August 17 Raw from Des Moines, in a street fight where everyone could bring whatever weapons they liked. Jeff Jarrett and Southern Justice ran in, attacked X-Pac, and cut off some of his hair.[8] The Nation isolated Triple H, beat him down with a ladder, and walked out instead of pinning him, and the match was called a no contest at 6:24.[8]

The Matches

SummerSlam on August 30 at Madison Square Garden drew 19,066, with 2,522 more watching in the theater next door.[1] The ladder match was on before the main event, in which Steve Austin kept the WWF title by pinning The Undertaker with a Stunner at 20:50.[1] Rock came out with Mark Henry. Triple H and Chyna came out to the Chris Warren Band playing the DX theme live.[1]

The match came out of the street fight, in which Rock had busted Triple H's mouth open with the ladder, and Triple H answered by challenging him to a ladder match.[9] At the opening exchange, Rock clearly mouthed an obscenity at Triple H as he threw the first punch, and Triple H dropped him with a jumping knee.[9] Rock set up the ladder first and started to climb, but Triple H knocked him off with a double axe handle.[9]

Triple H went in with an injured leg, and Rock went after the right knee with kicks and dropped the ladder on it.[9] The New York crowd started out chanting "Rocky sucks" and came around to cheering him as the match went on.[9] Mark Henry slid a second ladder into the ring. Rock set it up, Triple H knocked it over and sent him out of the ring, and Rock bled after Triple H dropkicked a ladder into his face, and later Rock scoop-slammed Triple H onto the ladder and followed with a People's Elbow.[9] Late in the match, Henry threw powder in Triple H's face and blinded him, and Triple H felt his way around the ring until he found the ladder and started climbing.[1][9]

The finish came with both men reaching for the belt. Chyna, at ringside the whole match, hit Rock with a low blow, and Triple H took the title down at 26:03.[1][9] X-Pac and the New Age Outlaws came out to celebrate and helped him to the back.[1] Dave Meltzer gave the match four and a quarter stars in the Wrestling Observer, more than the Steve Austin and Undertaker main event got that night.[10]

Aftermath

The knee didn't hold up. By the September 28 Raw in Detroit, Triple H was in a wheelchair, trying with Chyna to talk to Billy Gunn in the aisle as Gunn walked off after an argument with Road Dogg.[1]

The Nation came apart the same fall. On that September 28 show, Owen Hart fought Dan Severn in a submission match that was stopped at 2:14 when Severn took a modified piledriver and couldn't move. He was carried out on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance.[1] The guilt written into that storyline led Owen to "retire" and then come back as the Blue Blazer, which ended his time in the Nation.[3]

The two groups kept fighting over the European title. X-Pac beat D'Lo for it at 5:16 on the September 21 Raw, taped in Sacramento, with a facebuster as D'Lo came off the top.[1] D'Lo won it back at a taping in East Lansing at the end of September with a frog splash, grabbing the tights, after Mark Henry rammed X-Pac into the ringpost.[1] At Judgment Day on October 18 at the Rosemont Horizon, in front of 18,153, X-Pac won it again at 14:36 with the X-Factor as D'Lo came off the top, despite Henry's interference.[1]

Triple H needed surgery that fall and didn't wrestle again until a November 28 house show at the FleetCenter in Boston, where he pinned Al Snow.[1] D'Lo Brown and Mark Henry stayed together as a tag team after the group was done.[3] Rock went his own way. He joined Vince McMahon's Corporation and won his first WWF Championship at Survivor Series on November 15 in St. Louis, beating Mankind in the tournament final.[11] He won it at 17:15 when Vince called for the bell with Mankind in Rock's Sharpshooter, though Mankind never submitted. The McMahons handed Rock the belt and hugged him in the ring, and Vince told the crowd of 19,322 that "the people screwed the people."[1] Triple H kept leading DX, and before long the two men were fighting over the WWF Championship.[13]

Behind the Scenes

The parody is the part of this feud people still argue about. D'Lo Brown, who was in the Nation at the time, said in 2022 that nobody raised a concern when it was put together. "I can tell you that none of us had any big concern about it," he said. "In retrospect, we could have done that segment without the blackface and I wish we hadn't. It would have been just as good."[6]

He explained the thinking at the time without defending it. "In 1997-98 eyes, it was a way of getting these two factions to war because we knew both of our factions were over enough, or connected with the fans enough that we could go out there and draw money and fill houses with it and put up ratings on TV."[6] He added that "you couldn't pitch that idea three years later. You'd get laughed out of the building three years later," and said, "I wish we could go back and retro book it and have it a different way." The segment has been removed from the WWE Network section of Peacock.[6]

Triple H's rise that year came two years after the most famous punishment story of his career. On May 19, 1996, at Madison Square Garden, Michaels, Triple H, Kevin Nash, and Scott Hall broke character in the ring to say goodbye to the departing Nash and Hall, the "Curtain Call."[4][2] It is widely believed Triple H had been set to win the 1996 King of the Ring, and Steve Austin won it instead.[2] The usual account also has him missing four straight pay-per-views and losing an estimated $250,000.[4]

Not everyone buys the full version. Rich Kraetsch of Voices of Wrestling looked at the numbers in 2015 and called much of the punishment story "WWE narrative/propaganda." He pointed out that the quality of Triple H's opponents stayed fairly steady, and that he held the Intercontinental title by October 1996: "If anything, he seems to have been elevated above the mid-card for a title."[4]

The rivalry at the top of the two stables had its own backstage edge. Rock's father, Rocky Johnson, said in 2017 that when his son was a teenager, Shawn Michaels, who would later lead DX, landed a stiff kick on him and told him, "If you can't take it, you shouldn't be in the business," and described what followed as his son nearly killing Michaels. Michaels has downplayed the story, saying he got along fine with Rock.[12] Bruce Prichard has put it down to "simple jealousy," saying Triple H would go off script in shared promos to take shots at Rock until Prichard told Rock to fire back.[12] Triple H has said only that they "weren't always on good terms" and were "very competitive."[12]

Billy Gunn, who played The Godfather in the parody, has taken a harder line than D'Lo. In a 2026 interview he called it "the big controversial thing that nobody understands that I'm just so tired of hearing about." He said, "Back then it was a different time, and we were asked to do it," and that "nobody that we imitated had a problem with it because everybody that we imitated had a hand in helping us dress up like them." Asked whether anyone objected, he said, "Nobody, because it was just all done in fun and, like, a sense of humor. But nowadays? No."[15] D'Lo's account, that nobody raised a concern at the time and that he now wishes they hadn't done it, sits alongside his.[6]

Legacy

The SummerSlam ladder match is the part of this feud that lasted. Meltzer's four and a quarter stars topped the rest of the card.[10] A 2024 review gave it four and a half stars and noted how the Garden crowd turned from "Rocky sucks" to cheering Rock over the course of it.[9]

Both leaders came out of the summer on the way up. Rock was WWF Champion within three months.[11] Triple H won his first WWF Championship on the August 23, 1999 Raw in Ames, Iowa, pinning Mankind with the Pedigree after hitting Rock, who was on commentary, with a chair.[14][2] "Like our careers sort of, in a way, marry each other and are intertwined with each other along the way," Triple H said in 2022.[13]

The parody has not aged the same way. It has been pulled from the streaming archive, and the Nation member who has talked about it most, D'Lo Brown, says it never needed the blackface: "If there was never any blackface, you would have never known the difference and it would have been just as entertaining."[6] He has also said that looking back "with 2022 eyes," he is "not a fan."[6]

The last title the two groups fought over was the European Championship, and after three changes in a month it ended up with X-Pac at Judgment Day.[1]

For the Nation's members, the end of the group was a beginning. Owen went back to the Blue Blazer and later a tag team with Jeff Jarrett, D'Lo and Henry kept teaming, and Rock became the company's biggest star.[3][11]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. WWF 1998 results (event results, attendance, and TV segment details) — The History of WWE. http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/98.htm
2. Triple H — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_H
3. Nation of Domination — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Domination
4. Rich Kraetsch, "Was Triple H actually punished after the Curtain Call?" — Voices of Wrestling, September 2015. https://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2015/09/01/was-triple-h-actually-punished-after-the-curtain-call/
5. "D-Lo Brown Addresses DX's 'Blackface' Nation Of Domination Parody" — Wrestling Inc., March 2022 (D'Lo Brown podcast interview on Insight with Chris Van Vliet). https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2022/03/d-lo-brown-comments-on-dxs-blackface-nation-of-domination-parody/
6. Jeremy Lambert, "D'Lo Brown Says DX Parody Of Nation Would Have Been Just As Entertaining Without Blackface" — Fightful, March 8, 2022 (transcription of D'Lo Brown podcast interview). https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/d-lo-brown-says-dx-parody-nation-would-have-been-just-entertaining-without-blackface/
7. "WWF Raw – July 6th, 1998" (DX parody segment, venue and cast) — WrestleCrap. https://www.wrestlecrap.com/art-is-war/wwf-raw-267/
8. Logan Scisco, "What the World Was Watching: Monday Night Raw – August 17, 1998" — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2014/08/19/what-world-was-watching-monday-night_19/
9. Alex Podgorski, "(Almost) 5-Star Match Reviews: The Rock vs. Triple H – WWF SummerSlam 1998" — Scott's Blog of Doom, July 31, 2024. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2024/07/31/match-review-the-rock-triple-h-wwf-1998/
10. "Dave Meltzer Star Ratings – WWE SummerSlam 1998" — IWNerd (Wrestling Observer Newsletter ratings). https://www.iwnerd.com/dave-meltzer-star-ratings-wwe-summerslam-1998/
11. Dwayne Johnson — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayne_Johnson
12. "Why Triple H And The Rock Had A Feud That Extended Beyond The Ring" — Wrestling Inc. (Bruce Prichard on the Something to Wrestle podcast; Triple H interview). https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1120910/why-triple-h-and-the-rock-had-a-feud-that-extended-beyond-the-ring/
13. Ryan Sidle, "Triple H reveals The Rock was his biggest rival in WWE" — SPORTbible, September 22, 2022 (Triple H interview). https://www.sportbible.com/wrestling/triple-h-wwe-rivalry-the-rock-stone-cold-steve-austin-attitude-era-20220921
14. WWF 1999 results — The History of WWE. http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/99.htm
15. Faden Cloete, "WWE HOFer Billy Gunn Looks Back On Infamous Blackface Promo" — Wrestling Inc., July 26, 2026 (Billy Gunn interview with Denise Salcedo). https://www.wrestlinginc.com/2221439/wwe-hofer-billy-gunn-looks-back-infamous-blackface-promo/

Further Listening

• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — the 1998 Curtain Call aftermath and Triple H's slow climb back to the main event
• D'Lo Brown on Insight with Chris Van Vliet (2022) — his full account of the blackface parody segment and how he views it now
• The Corporate Nation retrospective specials, WWE Network/Peacock — Nation of Domination profile pieces covering the group's formation and breakup