The Rock vs. Triple H (Jul 1998 – Jun 2000)

Background

Dwayne Johnson debuted in 1996 as Rocky Maivia, a third-generation wrestler pushed as a clean-cut good guy the crowd never took to. When he came back from injury in August 1997, he turned heel by lashing out at the fans who had been booing him and joined Faarooq, D'Lo Brown, and Kama in the Nation of Domination. He later overthrew Faarooq as the group's leader, and his charisma and catchphrases made him a star in the role.[12] He had held the Intercontinental Championship since the December 8, 1997 Raw, when Steve Austin forfeited it to him.[11] In June 1998 he made the final of the King of the Ring tournament and lost it to Ken Shamrock, tapping to the ankle lock at 14:09.[1]

Paul Levesque had wrestled as the aristocratic Hunter Hearst Helmsley since 1995 before becoming Triple H in D-Generation X, the stable built around Shawn Michaels.[13] Triple H won the European Championship in December 1997 when Michaels lay down for him, lost it to Owen Hart, and won it back on the March 16, 1998 Raw.[13] After WrestleMania XIV, a 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."[13] When Michaels turned up as a guest commentator on the July 13 Raw, it was his first appearance in four months.[13][1]

The Nation and DX were already at war before the two leaders' fight turned personal. On the June 1 Raw in Chicago, Rock, Owen Hart, and D'Lo Brown beat Triple H and the New Age Outlaws in an elimination match. Triple H pinned Rock, then was disqualified when Ken Shamrock interfered.[1]

Both men were young and moving up the card at the same time. Triple H has said the two "weren't always on good terms" and were "very competitive."[4]

Build-up

The feud's opening shot was a comedy segment. On the July 6, 1998 Raw, DX came out dressed as the Nation, with Triple H as "The Crock," and performed it in blackface.[5] Jason Sensation played Owen Hart, and a week later Owen came out and attacked him, which led to a match that night in which X-Pac pinned Rock.[1] The same show announced a title-for-title match for Fully Loaded: Rock's Intercontinental Championship against Triple H's European title, two out of three falls.[1]

Triple H lost his half before he got there. On the July 20 Raw, taped in Binghamton, D'Lo Brown pinned him for the European title at 6:05 after Mark Henry drew away the referee and Chyna, and Rock slid in with a Rock Bottom.[1]

Fully Loaded was on July 26 at the Selland Arena in Fresno. Before the bell, Sgt. Slaughter sent everyone back except Chyna.[1] Rock took the first fall at 20:17 with a Rock Bottom after Triple H knocked an interfering D'Lo off the apron with the European belt. Triple H evened it at 26:29 after Chyna hit Rock with a DDT onto a steel chair. The 30-minute limit ran out with Triple H covering Rock after a Pedigree, and the Nation jumped him afterward.[1]

The rematch at SummerSlam on August 30 at Madison Square Garden was a ladder match. Late in it, Mark Henry threw powder into Triple H's face and blinded him. As Rock climbed, Chyna hit him with a low blow, and Triple H went up and took the belt at 26:03.[1] The rest of DX came out to celebrate and helped him to the back.[1]

By January 1999, Rock was WWF Champion, having won his first title at the 1998 Survivor Series, and Triple H got his shot on the January 25 Raw in Phoenix, in an I Quit match.[2] As Triple H set Rock up for a Pedigree through the announce table, Big Bossman, Kane, Ken Shamrock, and Test came out and grabbed Chyna, and Bossman threatened to have Kane chokeslam her unless Triple H quit. He quit at 9:12. When he went to check on her, Chyna hit him with a low blow, and Vince and Shane McMahon came out and hugged her.[2][6]

Through 1999 the two men crossed paths more than they feuded. At Fully Loaded on July 25 in Buffalo, they met in a no-DQ, falls-count-anywhere strap match to decide the number-one contender for SummerSlam. Billy Gunn and Chyna, now back on Triple H's side, both interfered, and after Rock hit a Rock Bottom on Gunn, Triple H pinned him with a Pedigree at 19:21.[2][14]

Triple H won his first WWF Championship from Mankind on the Raw after SummerSlam.[13] On the November 29 Raw in Los Angeles he broke up Stephanie McMahon's wedding to Test by showing footage of himself marrying her, unconscious, in Las Vegas.[2] By WrestleMania 2000 on April 2 at the Arrowhead Pond, he was champion and Vince McMahon's son-in-law in storyline, and a McMahon stood in every corner of the four-way main event: Stephanie with Triple H, Vince with Rock, Shane with Big Show, and Linda with Mick Foley.[3]

Rock pinned Big Show at 4:50, and Triple H pinned Foley at 19:40 with a Pedigree onto a chair.[3] With Rock and Triple H left, Shane bloodied Vince, and Vince came back, low-blowed Shane, and looked ready to hit Triple H with a chair. He hit Rock with it instead, twice, and Triple H pinned him at 36:24. Vince and Stephanie embraced afterward.[3]

Backlash on April 30 at the MCI Center in Washington was the singles match. Shane was the referee, and Vince, Shane, Gerald Brisco, and Pat Patterson all got involved until Steve Austin, off TV since he was run down by a car in a storyline at the previous November's Survivor Series, came out and fought them off.[3][2] Rock hit the spinebuster and People's Elbow and won the title at 19:22, with Earl Hebner making the count.[3]

The Matches

The rematch at Judgment Day on May 21, 2000, at Freedom Hall in Louisville was the match Triple H has said was first meant for WrestleMania: a 60-minute Iron Man match, with the man who scored the most falls taking the title and Shawn Michaels as special referee.[3][10][20] Rock hit the Rock Bottom at 10:44 for the first fall.[3][10]

Triple H then took over. He blocked Rock's figure-four into a Pedigree at 25:30, rolled Rock up in an inside cradle a minute later, and pinned him with a piledriver at 32:27 to lead 3-1.[3] Rock came back with a jumping DDT at 40:38. At 43:43, Triple H was disqualified for a chair shot, which tied it at 3-3, and then pinned the dazed Rock 27 seconds later to go back ahead.[3] He added a fifth fall with a sleeper at 47:29.[3]

Rock needed two falls in 13 minutes. He got the first at 56:09 by count-out, after putting Triple H through the commentary table with his own Pedigree.[3] Then, fighting off Vince and Shane McMahon, he hit the spinebuster and People's Elbow at 58:04 to tie the match at 5-5.[3]

The last seconds belonged to someone else. With Michaels down, the rest of DX ran in to help Triple H, and The Undertaker, gone for eight months, came back and chokeslammed all of them, Triple H included.[10][3] Michaels got up in time to see it and disqualified Rock. That was the sixth fall, the clock ran out, and Triple H won his fourth WWF Championship, 6-5, three weeks after losing it to Rock at Backlash.[10][3] The deciding fall came by disqualification, not a pin or a submission.[3] The Pro Wrestling Torch named it the Match of the Year.[3]

The Louisville crowd stayed with it for the full hour. One later review described fans who were "nuts for most of the match" and exploded "during the final five minutes."[16] Dave Meltzer gave it four stars in the Wrestling Observer, the same rating he gave that night's Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho submission match.[16][17]

Aftermath

Rock got the title back a month later. At King of the Ring on June 25 at the FleetCenter in Boston, he teamed with Kane and The Undertaker against Triple H, Vince, and Shane, under a stipulation that anyone who pinned a member of Triple H's team would become champion.[3] Late in the match, Kane chokeslammed Rock but also Tombstoned Triple H, and Undertaker chokeslammed Shane off the top rope through the announce table. Rock pinned Vince with the Rock Bottom at 17:55 as Vince ran the ropes looking for a People's Elbow of his own.[3]

Triple H's relationship with Chyna, the swing vote in the SummerSlam and I Quit finishes, had been going on off camera since soon after she arrived in the WWF in 1997.[7] It ended in 2001, when she learned he was involved with Stephanie McMahon. By one account, she took it to Vince McMahon and soon after got a fax saying her contract would not be renewed.[7] Another account says she turned down a new contract because it didn't pay her at the level of Steve Austin or The Undertaker.[15] Either way, she left the WWF in 2001.[8][15] Triple H went on to marry Stephanie McMahon for real.[7]

They met once more with the title on the line that summer. At SummerSlam on August 27 in Raleigh, in front of 18,128, Rock defended against Triple H and Kurt Angle, who was feuding with Triple H over Stephanie. Early on, Triple H put Angle through a table and gave him a legitimate concussion. Rock won at 20:12, pinning Triple H with the People's Elbow after Triple H collided with Stephanie on the apron and got hit with a sledgehammer. Angle carried Stephanie to the back afterward.[3] Rock's reign ended at No Mercy on October 22, when Angle pinned him in a no-DQ match.[3]

Both men kept headlining for years. Rock's schedule wound down as his film career grew.[12] Triple H kept wrestling into the 2010s and in September 2022 became WWE's Chief Content Officer, in charge of creative writing, talent relations, live events, and talent development.[13][9]

Behind the Scenes

The friction had roots in the Johnson family. Rocky Johnson said in 2017 that when his son was a teenager, Shawn Michaels visited and landed a stiff kick on him, then told him, "If you can't take it, you shouldn't be in the business." Johnson described what followed as his son nearly killing Michaels.[4] Michaels has downplayed it, saying he got along fine with Rock and doubting the problems were as bad as reported.[4]

Bruce Prichard's explanation, on Something to Wrestle, was "simple jealousy." In his telling, Triple H resented how naturally Rock was rising, and would go off script in their shared promos to take shots at him, while Rock stayed on script. Prichard said he told Rock to start firing back, and the insults Rock improvised became part of his character.[4] Triple H, for his part, has said only that they "weren't always on good terms" and were "very competitive."[4]

He has also said he wishes WrestleMania 2000 had been one on one. A singles match between them there, he said, "would've been special."[4] In a 2022 interview he explained why it wasn't. The four-way with "a McMahon in each corner" was "originally supposed to be Rock and I in the Ironman match," he said, but it was pushed back "because Austin wasn't ready to return yet," a delay the two of them "fought hard against." The company's answer, as he recalled it, was "this is better for business." He called the Iron Man match "the culmination of my rivalry with him, and him with me."[20]

In the same interview he described how the two careers had tracked each other from the start: "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." With Austin out, he said, "it becomes The Rock and I," and "I fought the Rock more than any body, maybe with the exception of Austin." His picture of the era: "You've got Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, I was Darth Vader and had that opposition against both of those guys."[20]

Michaels had his own answer to the Rocky Johnson story: he got along fine with Rock, he said, and doubted there was as much bad blood as people claimed.[4]

The Crock segment has not aged well. D'Lo Brown, a Nation member at the time, said in 2022, "In retrospect, we could've done that segment without the blackface, and, you know, I wish we would have," adding that it "would've been just as entertaining." He said nobody could have pitched the idea even a few years later: "You'd get laughed out of a building if you pitched that idea three years later."[5]

The Chyna storyline ran on top of a real relationship the whole way. The two had kept it quiet, and she told interviewer Vince Russo years later, "I was so proud of him," and said she had "dreamed about marrying him and moving into a big house together."[7] Her mother said of the breakup and her exit from the WWF, "She never did get over that."[7]

Legacy

The Judgment Day Iron Man match was the Pro Wrestling Torch's Match of the Year for 2000, and it gave Triple H his fourth WWF Championship.[3][10] Triple H has said the feud was missing one thing. "Our careers sort of, in a way, marry each other and are intertwined with each other along the way," he said in 2022, "and we never sort of had that defining WrestleMania moment."[20] The SummerSlam 1998 ladder match rated even higher with Dave Meltzer, who gave it four and a quarter stars, more than that night's Steve Austin and Undertaker main event got.[19] SummerSlam 1998 drew 19,066 to Madison Square Garden, with another 2,522 watching in the theater next door.[1]

The big shows of the feud's last stretch drew. WrestleMania 2000 had 18,034 in the building, announced as 19,776. Backlash sold out the MCI Center with 19,101, and King of the Ring sold out the FleetCenter with 17,651.[3]

Reviews of the Judgment Day match have been kinder than the finish. One 2024 retrospective called it "one of the best ironman matches you'll ever see" and "a defining match of the Attitude Era," while finding the ending "rushed and muddy" with "too much too soon."[16]

By 2014 the two had reconciled enough to share a backstage segment, and they appeared together again at WrestleMania 31 in 2015.[4] When A&E's WWE Rivals devoted an episode to the feud in February 2024, Triple H wrote that they were "destined to do this forever," and Rock called him "my brother": "Boundless respect to my brother @TripleH. Blood, sweat and 'thanks for the house'."[18]

The lives around the feud went different ways. Chyna, the woman at the center of its two biggest finishes, died on April 21, 2016, in her apartment in Redondo Beach, California, at 46; officials initially reported it as a possible overdose.[8] Triple H, the man she had wanted to marry, became WWE's Chief Content Officer in 2022.[9]

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. WWF 1999 results — The History of WWE. http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/99.htm
3. WWF 2000 results — The History of WWE. http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/00.htm
4. "Why Triple H And The Rock Had A Feud That Extended Beyond The Ring" — Wrestling Inc. (Rocky Johnson interview; 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/
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. "FULL MATCH: The Rock vs. Triple H | WWE Title 'I Quit' Match: Raw, Jan. 25, 1999" — WWE Vault (WWE's official YouTube channel). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHh_GEVGAFo
7. Mitchell Sunderland, "Wrestling with Demons: The Story of Chyna's Final Days" — Vice, February 2, 2017. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wrestling-with-demons-the-story-of-chynas-final-days/
8. "1990s WWE star Chyna dies at 46 in California" — ESPN, April 21, 2016. https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/15285463/1990s-wwe-wrestling-star-chyna-dies-age-46-california
9. "WWE Elevates Paul 'Triple H' Levesque to Chief Content Officer" — WWE Corporate, September 6, 2022. https://corporate.wwe.com/about/news/2022/09-06-2022
10. "The Rock vs. Triple H: Iron Man Match" (Judgment Day 2000 main event) — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/shows/judgmentday/2000/mainevent
11. WWF 1997 results — The History of WWE. http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/97.htm
12. Dwayne Johnson — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayne_Johnson
13. Triple H — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_H
14. Fully Loaded (1999) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Loaded_(1999)
15. Dave Hillhouse, "A&E Biography: WWE Legends: Chyna" review — Slam! Wrestling, March 6, 2023. https://slamwrestling.net/reviews/wwe-aes-biography-takes-its-turn-telling-chynas-tragic-tale/
16. Alex Podgorski, "(Almost) 5-Star Match Reviews: The Rock vs. Triple H – WWF Judgment Day 2000" — Scott's Blog of Doom, May 15, 2024 (cites the Wrestling Observer rating). https://www.blogofdoom.com/2024/05/15/match-review-the-rock-triple-h-wwf/
17. "Dave Meltzer Star Ratings – WWE Judgement Day 2000" — IWNerd (Wrestling Observer Newsletter ratings). https://www.iwnerd.com/dave-meltzer-star-ratings-wwe-judgement-day-2000/
18. "The Rock & Triple H Hype Their WWE Rivals Episode On A&E" — Wrestling Inc., February 2024. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1526979/rock-triple-h-hype-wwe-rivals-episode-a-e/
19. "Dave Meltzer Star Ratings – WWE SummerSlam 1998" — IWNerd (Wrestling Observer Newsletter ratings). https://www.iwnerd.com/dave-meltzer-star-ratings-wwe-summerslam-1998/
20. 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

Further Listening

• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — episodes on the Nation vs. DX feud and the Rock/Triple H dynamic backstage
• The Rock's own retrospectives on his early singles rivalries as he transitioned from the Nation of Domination to the top of the card
• Triple H's Undisputed Era-adjacent interviews reflecting on WrestleMania 2000 and the Iron Man match with the benefit of hindsight
• Chyna's own accounts of the SummerSlam '98 and I Quit match angles and how they tracked her real relationship with Triple H