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

Background

D-Generation X started in the fall of 1997 as Shawn Michaels' vanity project, a small clique built around Michaels, Triple H, Chyna, and Rick Rude that needled Bret Hart on the way out of the promotion and then the rest of the roster once he was gone.[1] Michaels was the group's whole reason for existing. When he lost the WWF Championship to Steve Austin at WrestleMania XIV on March 29, 1998 in Boston and left to have back surgery, DX had no obvious center anymore, and Triple H, its longest-tenured member after Michaels, stepped into the leadership by default rather than through any on-screen coronation.[1][2]

The Nation of Domination changed hands the very next night. Faarooq had led the group since its Survivor Series 1996 debut, built around Nation of Islam and Black Panther-inspired imagery and a real dose of pro-Black heel heat.[3] On the March 30, 1998 Raw, The Rock took the group away from him, and the Nation quietly dropped "of Domination" from its name as it shifted from militant posturing toward the faster, funnier tone Rock's promos brought with him.[3]

Both factions, in other words, got new leaders in the space of about eighteen hours, and neither leader had fully arrived yet. Triple H was still working out from under a real backstage penalty, having been the one member of the 1996 Madison Square Garden "Curtain Call" incident the company could actually afford to punish, since Kevin Nash and Scott Hall were leaving for WCW and Michaels was WWF Champion; the fallout had cost him the 1996 King of the Ring and kept him off four straight pay-per-views.[4][5] The Rock, not yet two years removed from a rejected babyface debut and still growing into the cocky heel persona that had rescued his career, was still building the character that would carry him past everyone in the group he now led.[3] Putting the two of them, and their factions, in front of each other all summer was as much an audition for both men as it was a program.

Build-up

The early running was lopsided. DX spent the spring destroying opponents like Cactus Jack and Terry Funk and running comedy vignettes threatening to invade WCW's Monday Nitro, once driving a tank as far as the arena gates before security turned them away, all of it built to get a heel stable over as the show's most entertaining act rather than its most hated one.[1] Owen Hart, feuding with Triple H as a lone babyface that spring, challenged him for the European Championship at Unforgiven: In Your House on April 26, 1998 in Greensboro under a stipulation meant to keep Chyna out of it, locked in a cage lowered from the ceiling. She got out anyway, and Road Dogg and X-Pac helped from ringside, letting Triple H retain.[17] Owen turned heel the next night by attacking his own tag partner Ken Shamrock, joining the Nation alongside Faarooq's holdovers Mark Henry, D'Lo Brown, and Kama Mustafa.[1] At Over the Edge on May 31, Triple H and the New Age Outlaws lost a six-man elimination match to Owen, Kama Mustafa, and D'Lo Brown when Owen pinned Triple H with his own finisher, the Pedigree.[1]

King of the Ring on June 28, 1998 gave the rivalry its first real one-on-one measuring stick. Triple H beat X-Pac in the quarterfinals, then lost to The Rock in the semifinals; Rock went on to lose the tournament final to Ken Shamrock by ankle lock submission, with D'Lo Brown having helped him past Dan Severn earlier in the bracket by attacking Severn behind the referee's back.[6] It put Rock a round further than Triple H in the one tournament both factions cared about, a small but real edge heading into the summer.

What followed on July 6 became the single most discussed moment of the feud for reasons that have nothing to do with wrestling quality. DX aired a parody of the Nation on that night's Raw from State College, Pennsylvania: Triple H played The Rock, Road Dogg played D'Lo Brown, Billy Gunn played The Godfather, X-Pac played Mark Henry, and Jason Sensation played Owen Hart, several of them in blackface.[7][8] The segment has since been pulled from WWE's own streaming archive.[9]

Three weeks later, on July 26 in Fresno, Triple H and The Rock wrestled for the Intercontinental Championship in a two-out-of-three-falls match with both factions working the outside. Henry, The Godfather, and D'Lo Brown helped Rock win the first fall with a Rock Bottom; Chyna evened it in the second with a chair-assisted DDT that let Triple H get the pin.[10] Triple H hit the Pedigree to apparently win the third fall and the title outright, only for the time limit to expire before the referee's hand hit the mat a third time, and Rock retained on a technicality that satisfied nobody watching.[10]

The stables settled it the hard way three weeks after that. On the August 17 Raw, DX and the Nation fought a no-disqualification street fight with whatever weapons either side could find, chairs, cookie sheets, garbage cans, and ladders among them, while Jeff Jarrett and Southern Justice ran in separately to attack and shave X-Pac's head.[11] The match ended with no winner when the Nation, having isolated and beaten Triple H down with a ladder, simply chose to walk to the back instead of covering him.[11] The image of Triple H buried under that ladder was the direct setup for the stipulation two weeks later.

The Matches

SummerSlam ran on August 30, 1998 at Madison Square Garden, 21,588 fans in the building for a ladder match between Triple H, with Chyna at ringside, and The Rock, with Mark Henry at his.[12] Dave Meltzer rated it 4.25 stars, a rare number for either man that early in his career.[13]

Triple H was working the match on a bad knee, and Rock spent most of the twenty-six minutes going after it, dropping the ladder onto it, trapping it inside the rungs, and smashing it further with a chair.[18] Triple H sold the leg all the way through rather than working around it, an unusual amount of restraint for a match with this much else going on, and it gave the finish real stakes once he was climbing on it.[18] Along the way, Rock busted himself open when Triple H drove a second ladder, brought in by Mark Henry, into his face with a dropkick, and later hit a scoop slam onto a laid-out ladder followed by a People's Elbow.[18]

The finish came with both men climbing opposite sides of the same ladder, trading punches at the top. Chyna climbed up from below and hit Rock with a low blow, buying Triple H the moment he needed to shove past him and pull the belt down, winning the Intercontinental Championship at 26:01.[18] It was the signature match of the entire rivalry, the one still cited whenever people talk about either man's breakout year.

Aftermath

The win didn't come free. Triple H had gone into SummerSlam already carrying a bad knee, and it kept bothering him into the fall even as he stayed in the ring.[1][18] Rock, for his part, barely stayed a full-time Nation member much longer.

The group he'd taken from Faarooq came apart fast. In September, Owen Hart's storyline exit came through a piledriver gone wrong on Dan Severn, deliberately echoing the real neck injury Owen had caused Steve Austin at SummerSlam the year before; Severn was fine, but the guilt written into the angle pushed Owen out of the Nation and eventually back into his old Blue Blazer gimmick.[14] The Godfather left the group in October, and D'Lo Brown and Mark Henry drifted on for a while afterward as an unnamed tag team before quietly stopping being a team at all by the end of the year.[3]

Rock, freed of the group, spent a few weeks that fall as a fan favorite, the newly christened "People's Champion" chasing the WWF title as a face for the first time in his career, before turning heel again at Survivor Series in November to join Vince and Shane McMahon's Corporation.[15] A planned Mark Henry romantic storyline with Chyna, meant to keep using her while Triple H nursed his knee, dragged on for months into 1999 and never became the angle Vince Russo had scripted for it.[1] DX itself kept going with Triple H at the front of it, but its war with the Nation, the thing that had defined its whole summer, ended the moment the ladder match did.

Behind the Scenes

The parody segment is the part of this feud people still argue about, and the account of it that has aged the way it has comes from D'Lo Brown himself. Looking back on it in 2022, Brown said the joke never needed the blackface to land: "If there was never any blackface, you would have never known the difference and it would have been just as entertaining."[9] He said no one raised an objection at the time, framing it as a product of the era rather than a decision anyone thought twice about: "In 1997-98 eyes, it was a way of getting these two factions to war," he said, adding that pitching the same segment "three years later" would have been rejected outright.[9] He still landed on regret. "In retrospect, we could have done that segment without the blackface and I wish we hadn't," he said.[9] WWE has since pulled the segment from its own streaming archive rather than let it stand alongside the rest of the era's footage.[9]

Triple H's side of the story runs through a different piece of real WWF history. Two years earlier, he had been the only participant in the May 1996 "Curtain Call," the on-camera embrace between Michaels, Triple H, Kevin Nash, and Scott Hall at Madison Square Garden that broke kayfabe on Hall and Nash's last night before leaving for WCW, that the company could actually discipline. Nash and Hall were gone regardless, and Michaels held the WWF Championship, so Triple H alone lost his planned 1996 King of the Ring win and was left off WWF's next four pay-per-views as punishment.[4][5] Winning the Intercontinental Championship in that same building, Madison Square Garden, two years later, in a match built to make him a headliner, read to a lot of observers as the promotion finishing the sentence it had started with the Curtain Call.[4]

None of that backstage history made Rock and Triple H's on-screen chemistry any less genuine. Both men were still climbing in the summer of 1998, feeling out how much the crowd would give them, and the string of matches, the King of the Ring loss, the Fully Loaded draw, the street fight, the ladder match, functioned as a real audition for both of them at once rather than a settled program with a predetermined winner.[12][13] The Nation's dissolution that fall wasn't scripted as a single dramatic implosion; it happened piecemeal, Owen's exit through the Severn angle, then Godfather leaving, then Henry and Brown simply drifting out of a tag team nobody had bothered to name, which is closer to how real stables actually come apart than how television usually shows it.[3][14]

Legacy

The ladder match is the piece of this rivalry that lasted. Dave Meltzer's 4.25-star rating made it one of the highest-rated matches either man had wrestled to that point in his career, and it's still the answer whenever the conversation turns to underrated SummerSlam matches or to the moment either Rock or Triple H first looked like a future top guy rather than a promising midcarder.[13]

The Nation itself became a launching pad rather than a lasting act. The Rock left it behind entirely within a few months, cycling through a face turn and then a heel turn into the Corporation on his way to becoming the WWF's biggest star of the next several years.[15] Triple H used the Intercontinental win as the first rung of a climb that ended in multiple world championships over the following decade, eventually becoming the on-screen and then real-life leader of the promotion itself.[1][2]

The parody segment sits apart from the rest of the feud's legacy. It doesn't appear in WWE's own streaming library, and the participants who still discuss it, D'Lo Brown chief among them, do so with the specific hedge that it would never be produced today and that its humor never actually depended on the racial caricature at its center.[9] The rest of the feud, the two number-one-contender losses, the Fully Loaded technicality, the street fight, and the ladder match, is remembered as one of the era's clearest examples of a midcard rivalry building two future main-eventers in real time.

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. "The DX vs Nation of Domination Storyline, Explained" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wrestling/the-dx-vs-the-nation-storyline-explained/
2. WrestleMania XIV — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_XIV
3. Nation of Domination — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Domination
4. "The Curtain Call Incident: How Breaking Kayfabe Hurt Triple H's WWE Career" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/curtain-call-breaking-kayfabe-hurt-triple-h-wwe-career/
5. "Was Triple H actually punished after the Curtain Call?" — Voices of Wrestling. https://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2015/09/01/was-triple-h-actually-punished-after-the-curtain-call/
6. King of the Ring (1998) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Ring_(1998)
7. "WWF Raw is War" July 6, 1998 results (DX parody segment, venue and cast) — WrestleCrap. https://www.wrestlecrap.com/art-is-war/wwf-raw-267/
8. "DX Parodies The Nation of Domination (WWF, 7-6-1998)" — Tape Machines Are Rolling. https://tapemachinesarerolling.wordpress.com/2018/05/27/dx-parodies-the-nation-of-domination-wwf-7-6-1998/
9. "D'Lo Brown Says DX Parody Of Nation Would Have Been Just As Entertaining Without Blackface" — Fightful. https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/d-lo-brown-says-dx-parody-nation-would-have-been-just-entertaining-without-blackface/
10. Fully Loaded (1998) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Loaded_(1998)
11. "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/
12. SummerSlam (1998) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SummerSlam_(1998)
13. "SummerSlam: The 10 Highest Rated Matches Ever (According To Dave Meltzer)" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wrestling/summerslam-best-matches-dave-meltzer/
14. "How WWE Tried (& Failed) To Repeat Stone Cold's Neck Injury As A Storyline" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wwe-stone-cold-neck-injury-storyline-repeat-owen-hart-dan-severn/
15. Survivor Series (1998) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Series_(1998)
16. "FULL MATCH: The Rock vs. Triple H | Intercontinental Title Ladder Match: SummerSlam 1998" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfrA4AhravI
17. Unforgiven: In Your House — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unforgiven:_In_Your_House
18. "(Almost) 5-Star Match Reviews: The Rock vs. Triple H - WWF SummerSlam 1998" — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2024/07/31/match-review-the-rock-triple-h-wwf-1998/

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