The Rock vs. Mankind (Nov 1998 – Feb 1999)

Background

The Rock had spent 1997 being told to go away. Debuting as Rocky Maivia in November 1996 and pushed hard as the WWF's first third-generation wrestler, he was met with "Die, Rocky, die" and "Rocky sucks" chants inside a few months.[6] He turned on the crowd in August 1997, joined the Nation of Domination, stopped answering to Rocky Maivia and started referring to himself in the third person.[6]

By late 1998 the crowd had come round to him anyway. He feuded with his own Nation stablemates Mark Henry and D'Lo Brown, the group broke up after Henry beat him at Judgment Day in October, and he went into the winter as a babyface.[6]

Mick Foley had come into the WWF in 1996 as Mankind, a masked, self-harming character who slept in arena boiler rooms to get into it.[5] By the summer of 1998 he had run through Dude Love and a Cactus Jack return, been fired on screen by Vince McMahon, and taken the two falls that defined him: off the top of the Hell in a Cell through the Spanish announce table on June 28, 1998, and then through the roof of the cage onto the mat.[5]

Foley's response was to make Mankind funny. He dropped the tortured-soul material and played a broken-down, agreeable oaf instead.[5] On the October 5, 1998 Raw he turned up at the hospital where Vince McMahon was recovering, with balloons, chocolate and a clown named Yurple, and when none of it worked he pulled the sock off his own foot and made it talk.[5][9]

Mr. Socko was meant to be one joke, suggested by Al Snow.[5] It became a finisher.

McMahon leaned into the bit and started treating Mankind as a kind of adopted son, giving him a corporate makeover and inventing the WWF Hardcore Championship to hand him.[5] With the WWF Championship vacant, it was filled with a fourteen-man single-elimination tournament at Survivor Series called the Deadly Game, and McMahon spent it visibly steering the brackets so that Mankind would win it.[1][5]

Mankind beat Duane Gill in 30 seconds, Al Snow in 3:55, and Austin in the semi-final with help from McMahon's people.[1] The Rock came through the other side.[1]

Build-up

Survivor Series ran on November 15, 1998 at the Kiel Center in St. Louis, in front of 19,322 with 17,966 paid.[9] The final went 17:15.[9] The Rock put Mankind in a Sharpshooter, and while Mankind was still in it and had not submitted, Vince McMahon ordered the bell rung and the title awarded.[1][9]

It was one year and one day after the Montreal Screwjob, in the same hold, at the same annual event.[1] The McMahons presented The Rock with the belt and all three hugged in the ring. McMahon took the microphone and said "the people screwed the people."[9]

That was the double turn. Mankind became a babyface, The Rock became the corporate champion and the centerpiece of McMahon's new group.[5][6]

The next month was spent finding new ways to not give Mankind the belt. On the December 1 Raw in New Haven, Mankind beat The Rock in 13:33 with the Mandible Claw, piledriving the referee at one point to stop McMahon having the match called off and attacking the timekeeper so the bell could not be rung.[9] McMahon announced afterward that Mankind had won the match but that since Rock was neither pinned nor submitted, the title had not changed.[9]

At Rock Bottom: In Your House on December 13 in Vancouver, announced at 20,042 with 17,677 actually in the building, Mankind stuffed the sock down The Rock's throat until Rock passed out and referee Mike Chioda called for the bell at 13:35.[2][9] McMahon overturned it again. Mankind had promised to make Rock say he quit, and passing out is not quitting.[2]

The title finally changed on December 29 at the Worcester Centrum, in front of a 10,668 sellout, on a show that aired as Raw on January 4, 1999.[9] It was a No DQ match with the Corporation on one side of the ring and D-Generation X on the other. At 8:48 Steve Austin came in and cracked The Rock in the head with a chair, Mankind covered him, and DX hoisted him up on their shoulders.[9]

WCW knew it was coming, because Raw was taped and Nitro was live. Eric Bischoff had Tony Schiavone announce the result on air, and Schiavone added, "That's gonna put some butts in the seats."[5] Raw won the night anyway, against a Nitro main event of Hulk Hogan against Kevin Nash, and WCW never beat the WWF in the ratings again.[5] Foley's own reading of the Nielsen numbers was that large numbers of people had switched over to watch him win it.[5]

January was three weeks of The Rock ruining Mankind's title defenses. On the January 11 Raw in Houston, Kane beat Mankind by disqualification when Rock came in and hit both men with a chair, and Austin came out afterward and Stunned everybody.[10] The same pattern ran on the syndicated shows: Rock interfering, a chair, a Rock Bottom onto the chair.[10]

Mankind held Rock off for weeks and then named his terms. The Rumble match would be an I Quit match, which can only end when one man says the words into a microphone.[3]

That stipulation is what made the finish possible, and it is the part that had already been recorded. During the build, Mankind did an interview with Shane McMahon in which he shouted "I quit" three times.[3][5]

The Matches

The Royal Rumble ran on January 24, 1999 at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, a sellout at 14,816 with 13,597 paid, on a card that drew roughly 650,000 buys.[3][10]

Mankind started fast, clotheslining The Rock into a corner and hitting him with a microphone before taking him over the top with a Cactus clothesline.[3] Rock took over and put him through the Spanish announce table.[3]

From there it left the ring entirely. They fought into the technical area, where Rock hit a DDT on concrete.[3] Rock brought a ladder in and Mankind knocked him off it and dropped an elbow onto him.[3] They went into the crowd, Rock hit a low blow and threw Mankind onto an electrical hub, and the lights in the building briefly went out.[3]

Then Rock handcuffed Mankind's hands behind his back.[3] He ran his head into the turnbuckle, laid a chair across his face and dropped an elbow on it, and asked him if he quit. Mankind told him to go to hell.[3]

What followed was eleven chair shots to the head in about two and a half minutes, none of them blocked, because Mankind's hands were cuffed and there was nothing he could put in front of them.[5] Jerry Lawler, working as the heel announcer, called it as "Goodbye brain cells!"[13]

Mankind was bleeding by the third shot.[13] Foley has said the first one legitimately knocked him down, because he had misjudged how much the handcuffs would take away.[13] Rock chased him up the walkway hitting him until he stopped moving.[3]

With Mankind unconscious and physically unable to say anything, the recording of him shouting "I quit! I quit! I quit!" was played over the arena PA, and the referee awarded the match and the WWF Championship to The Rock at 21:47.[3][10]

Rock celebrated in the ring, walked down the aisle, stood over Mankind's body and held the belt up.[10] Mankind refused the stretcher and was helped to the back.[10]

Foley's wife Colette and their children Dewey and Noelle were in the front row. The WWF broadcast never mentioned them and never cut to them.[10] A film crew making a documentary did.

The two of them wrestled four more times over the next three weeks. On January 31 at the Tucson Convention Center, taped five days earlier and aired during the Super Bowl XXXIII halftime as Halftime Heat, they had the WWF's first empty arena match: 22,000 empty seats, twenty minutes of brawling through the stands, a kitchen, the catering area, an office and the corridors, and a finish where Mankind used a forklift to trap The Rock under a wooden pallet and pinned him at 17:19 to win the title back.[4][6][10] Mankind's head was heavily taped for it.[10]

At St. Valentine's Day Massacre on February 14 in Memphis, the Last Man Standing match ended in a draw at 21:54 when both men swung chairs into each other's heads at the same instant and neither answered the count.[10] Mankind kept the belt on the technicality and both men left in ambulances.[10]

McMahon booked a ladder match for the next night's Raw. Paul Wight, debuting, chokeslammed Mankind off the top of the ladder, and The Rock climbed up and took the title at 13:00.[6][10]

Aftermath

The Rock lost the belt to Steve Austin in the main event of WrestleMania XV on March 28, 1999, and lost the rematch to him at Backlash a month later.[6] The night after Backlash, Shane McMahon threw him out of the Corporation, which turned him babyface for good.[6]

Mankind beat Paul Wight at WrestleMania XV and again in a Boiler Room Brawl at Backlash, then joined a group of ex-Corporation castoffs called The Union before taking time off for knee surgery.[5]

The two of them came back together in August 1999 as a comedy tag team. The Rock 'n' Sock Connection beat The Undertaker and The Big Show for the WWF Tag Team Championship on the August 30 Raw and held the belts three separate times over the next two months.[6]

The best-remembered thing they did together came on September 27, 1999. In a segment called "This Is Your Life", Mankind brought a parade of fake people from The Rock's past into the ring, including a high school girlfriend and a football coach, purely so Rock could insult each of them in turn.[6] It drew an 8.4 Nielsen rating, one of the highest ever recorded for a Raw segment.[6]

Foley kept going longer than he had planned to. By late 1999 he was forgetting how to spell simple words and losing track of basic physical movements, and he had decided he would have to stop.[5] He intended to retire in November 1999, then stayed on because Austin was out with a broken neck and he did not want the company down two top acts at once.[5]

He went back to Cactus Jack for the end. Triple H beat him in a street fight at the 2000 Royal Rumble, and then again at No Way Out on February 27, 2000 in a Hell in a Cell with Foley's career on the line.[5] Cactus went through the roof of the cage and Triple H pinned him.[5]

Beyond the Mat opened in theaters on October 22, 1999, while the Rock 'n' Sock Connection was the most popular act on the show.[7] Vince McMahon watched it and pulled all WWF advertising for the film off his broadcasts.[7] Its director said McMahon told the wrestlers not to talk about it publicly, though Foley went on Larry King Live to promote it anyway.[7] The tagline became "The Movie Vince McMahon Didn't Want You to See."[7]

Behind the Scenes

The chair shots were not the plan, and the version of the plan Foley has told since is stranger than the one people assume.

"The original finish was going to be me looking out into the crowd seeing the concern and... fear in my children's eyes, then I was going to quit so they wouldn't have to suffer through any more of that," Foley said on his podcast in 2022.[15] By his account, he then told Vince Russo a story about being able to reopen an old wound, and that is what convinced the office to go with the harder ending instead.[15]

What got agreed was five chair shots, with the last one landing about two thirds of the way up the entrance ramp.[6] Five was already a lot; most Attitude Era matches with a chair had two or three, and those were usually blocked.[5]

After the fifth, Mankind was still at ringside rather than up the ramp where the finish was supposed to happen.[6] Accounts differ on what happened next. One version has Foley signalling to Rock to hit him in the back after the sixth, and Rock choosing to stay with the tone of the match because Foley had called for that kind of thing on the fly before.[5] Either way, Rock hit him another five times in the head on the way up the ramp, and the eleventh one knocked him out.[5][6]

Bruce Prichard's account is that this was discussed in advance and that nobody was freelancing out of malice. "They did discuss it ahead of time and did have an idea of how brutal it would be," he said on his podcast in 2020. "Sometimes it's just worse in real life, folks, and people get carried away trying to paint a picture."[11] On the Rock's intent, Prichard was blunt: "Rock couldn't convince me that he wanted to take his head off; I just couldn't believe it."[11] He also said watching it was hard at the time and not only in hindsight: "It was violent and brutal. Not just difficult to watch now, it was difficult to watch back then."[11]

Sean Waltman was backstage afterward. "I remember talking to The Rock and I remember him being really disturbed afterwards," he said in 2019. "He was not digging what just happened and not digging that he had just done that."[12] By Waltman's telling, Rock was regretful about how many times he had hit Foley in the head.[12]

Whether he said it to Foley, and when, is less settled. One retrospective account has Rock not apologising in the moment at all, leaving a rift that ran for months.[13] Another has the tension as mutual, with both men aware they had gotten carried away.[16] They agree on the part that matters: the two of them were cold with each other for a while before they became a comedy tag team.[13][16]

The part Foley has been consistently hardest on himself about is the front row. Colette, Dewey and Noelle were seated there at his invitation, and Noelle, who was five, believed her father was dying.[5] Barry Blaustein's cameras got all of it, and then Blaustein went to Foley's house and played it back to him.[7][13] Foley has said he felt guilty about what he had put his family through and did not want to do it again.[7]

His view of the match itself has settled into something fairly flat. "It was really going well and then that ending was just a little much," he said in 2025. "You'll never see a match like the one I had with The Rock with the 11 shots, that was definitely overkill."[14] He added: "I'm glad that chair shots to the head are gone."[14]

Legacy

The I Quit match was voted Match of the Year for 1999 by the readers of Pro Wrestling Illustrated.[10] It is also the single most cited exhibit in the argument about what the Attitude Era cost the people who worked it, largely because a documentary crew happened to be pointed at Foley's family while it happened.[7][13]

Beyond the Mat holds an 82 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for a Directors Guild award.[7] Its Foley section, and the Royal Rumble footage in particular, is what most people remember it for.[7]

Foley's autobiography Have a Nice Day! A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks came out on October 31, 1999, written on the road without a ghostwriter and in longhand, over 760 pages of it.[8] It entered the New York Times bestseller list at number three on November 7 and reached number one on December 5.[8] The story it ends on is winning the title from The Rock.[8]

The January 4 title change is the moment most often pointed to as the night the Monday Night War tipped. WCW gave the finish away to hold its audience, Raw won the night regardless, and Nitro never took another ratings win.[5]

The Rock went from corporate champion to the biggest draw in the company inside a year, and left wrestling for film in the early 2000s.[6] Foley wrestled his last full-time match in February 2000, went into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013, and has said publicly that he is glad head shots with chairs are no longer part of the job.[5][14]

Halftime Heat, the strangest match the two of them had, has aged into the fondest. A twenty-minute empty-arena brawl through a kitchen and a loading bay drew a 6.6 rating opposite the Super Bowl, a number the show it aired on would never come close to again.[17]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Survivor Series (1998) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Series_(1998)
2. Rock Bottom: In Your House — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Bottom:_In_Your_House
3. Royal Rumble (1999) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rumble_(1999)
4. Halftime Heat — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftime_Heat
5. Mick Foley — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Foley
6. Dwayne Johnson — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayne_Johnson
7. Beyond the Mat — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Mat
8. Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_a_Nice_Day:_A_Tale_of_Blood_and_Sweatsocks
9. 1998 WWF results (television, pay-per-view and house shows) — The History of WWE. https://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/98.htm
10. 1999 WWF results (television, pay-per-view and house shows) — The History of WWE. https://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/99.htm
11. "Bruce Prichard Recalls The Brutal Chair Shots The Rock Gave Mick Foley At WWE Royal Rumble 1999" by Marco Rovere (Sep 9, 2020, on Something to Wrestle With) — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2020/09/bruce-prichard-recalls-the-brutal-chair-shots-the-rock-gave-674579/
12. "Sean Waltman On The Rock's Demeanor Backstage After Brutal 1999 Royal Rumble Match With Mick Foley" by Ross Kelly (Jan 28, 2019, on WINCLY) — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2019/01/sean-waltman-on-the-rock-demeanor-backstage-after-brutal-650344/
13. "Twenty Years Ago, The Rock Beat Mick Foley About The Head..." by David Bixenspan (Jan 25, 2019) — Deadspin. https://deadspin.com/twenty-years-ago-the-rock-beat-mick-foley-about-the-he-1832057103/
14. "Mick Foley: Taking 11 Chair Shots To The Head From The Rock Was 'Definitely Overkill'" by Jayakrishna Dasappan (May 31, 2025, on No Contest Wrestling) — WrestleZone via Yahoo Sports. https://sports.yahoo.com/article/mick-foley-taking-11-chair-150000921.html
15. "Mick Foley Reveals Original Finish For Royal Rumble '99 Match With The Rock" (Oct 25, 2022, on Foley Is Pod) — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/mick-foley-original-finish-mankind-rock-royal-rumble-1999/
16. "Perkins' Blog: Etched in Stone - Remembering the 1999 WWE Royal Rumble 'I Quit' match between The Rock and Mick Foley" by Nick Perkins (Jan 27, 2019) — Pro Wrestling Dot Net. https://prowrestling.net/site/2019/01/27/perkins-blog-etched-in-stone-remembering-the-1999-wwe-royal-rumble-i-quit-match-between-the-rock-and-mick-foley/
17. "25 years ago, WWE gave us 'Halftime Heat' on Super Bowl Sunday" by Michael Dixon (Jan 31, 2024) — Awful Announcing. https://awfulannouncing.com/wwe/halftime-heat-super-bowl-counterprogramming.html
18. "FULL MATCH - The Rock vs. Mankind – WWE Championship Match: Raw, Jan. 4, 1999" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJjbnFZ6yA8
19. "FULL MATCH: The Rock vs. Mankind | WWE Title Match: Halftime Heat 1999" — YouTube (WWE Vault). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ5YoJYv4U0

Further Listening

• Beyond the Mat (1999, dir. Barry W. Blaustein) — the Foley section, including the Royal Rumble and the footage played back to him at home
• Have a Nice Day! A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks (Mick Foley) — written by hand in 1999 and ending on the title win over The Rock
• Foley Is Pod — Foley on the original planned finish for the I Quit match and how it got changed
• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — the Survivor Series 1998 screwjob, the Corporation, and the Rumble chair shots
• Mick Foley: Hard Knocks & Cheap Pops — WWE's own documentary on the Mankind years
• The Epic Journey of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson — WWE's retrospective on the corporate champion run