The Undertaker vs. Mankind (Apr 1996 – Jun 1998)

Background

The Undertaker had been in the WWF since November 1990 and had spent most of that time as an unbeatable act with a manager who did the talking. Paul Bearer, real name William Moody, carried the urn and handled the promos; by 1996 Undertaker had worked his way to a 60-minute Iron Man match with Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania XII.[18][20]

Mick Foley arrived with a decade of scars and no obvious place in that company. He had debuted in 1986 as Cactus Jack after training with Dominic DeNucci, worked WCW from 1989, took a powerbomb onto exposed concrete from Vader in April 1993 that gave him a concussion and cost him feeling in his left foot, and lost part of his ear in a Munich ring in March 1994.[17]

Bruce Prichard, who was in the room for the WWF's evaluation of him, has said the appeal was straightforward: "What impressed me about Mick was his size and his ability to move for a big man. I liked the look, I liked the way that he worked. When I finally got to hear him cut promos, I liked those as well, because they were different."[19]

What they signed him as was not Cactus Jack. Mankind was built as "an eerie, masochistic, mentally deranged lunatic who was masked and spent his spare time dwelling in mechanical rooms," which is a description of a character and also, as it turned out, a description of where the feud would be fought.[17]

Foley's own life at that point was not the character's. He had met Colette Christie in July 1990 while handing out flyers for a wrestling show in Riverhead, New York, married her in April 1992, and had two children by the time Mankind debuted: Dewey, born February 20, 1992, and Noelle, born December 15, 1993.[17]

Build-up

Mankind debuted on the April 1, 1996 Raw at the Orange Pavilion in San Bernardino, the night after WrestleMania XII, beating Bob Holly with a hold nobody had seen before that left Holly frothing at the mouth.[9] Later that night, after The Undertaker beat Justin Bradshaw, Mankind came out and attacked him: into the barricade, into the ring steps, a flying elbow, and the mandible claw applied over and over until officials pulled him away.[9]

He kept going after him through the spring. On the May 13 Raw, Mankind jumped Undertaker during a confrontation with Goldust, shoved him into a casket and beat on the lid, which put the two heels loosely on the same side.[10] At In Your House 8 on May 28 in North Charleston, Goldust retained the Intercontinental Championship in a casket match at 12:36 because Mankind was hiding inside the casket; when Undertaker opened the lid after a Tombstone, Mankind was in there waiting with the claw, and pulled him in.[8]

Their first singles match came at King of the Ring on June 23 at the Wisconsin Center Arena in Milwaukee, in front of 8,762.[2] Paul Bearer swung the urn at Mankind and Mankind pulled Undertaker into it, then applied the mandible claw for a technical submission at 18:21.[2] The same night, on the same show, Steve Austin won the tournament and cut the Austin 3:16 promo.[2]

The Boiler Room Brawl at SummerSlam on August 18 at the Gund Arena in Cleveland was built for Mankind specifically. There was no referee and no pinfall: the two men started in the boiler room and the winner was whoever got out, reached the ring and took the urn from Paul Bearer, who waited in the ring holding it.[3][25] They fought for around half an hour through the boiler room, the arena corridors and the entrance ramp before Undertaker got there first.[3]

Bearer did not hand him the urn. He hit him with it, and gave it to Mankind.[3] Six years of the act ended in one swing. Bearer said afterward that the company wanted him turned heel to set up the Kane story that was still more than a year away.[20]

Bearer spent that autumn recruiting. He brought in The Executioner, and at In Your House 11 in Indianapolis on October 20 the promotion ran its first Buried Alive match, an actual grave dug at the entrance, no pinfalls, win by burying the other man.[4] Undertaker won it at 18:25, and then Crush, Bradshaw, Goldust, Hunter Hearst Helmsley and The Executioner came out and buried him instead.[4] Thunder cracked, the wrestlers ran, and Undertaker's hand came up out of the dirt to end the broadcast.[4]

He came back at Survivor Series on November 17 at Madison Square Garden in front of 18,647, out of the funeral coat and into a leather look, with Paul Bearer suspended above the ring in a shark cage so he could not interfere.[5] Undertaker pinned Mankind at 14:54.[5] The Executioner ran in afterward anyway and got Bearer out of the cage and out of the building.[1]

The rivalry went quiet through most of 1997 while Undertaker won the WWF Championship from Bret Hart at WrestleMania 13.[18] Bearer brought it back by blackmail, threatening on television to tell everyone about a fire at Undertaker's parents' funeral home, and on March 31, 1997 staged a reconciliation with Undertaker that turned out to be a setup with Mankind.[1][20]

That produced the title match at In Your House 14 on April 20 in Rochester. Undertaker retained at 17:26 with a Tombstone.[6] Then he cornered Paul Bearer and threw a fireball into his face, and Bearer's storyline burns became the reason he dropped the ghost-white makeup and, that October, produced Kane.[6][20]

By June 1998 Foley was working as Mankind again and running with Kane, and on the June 15 Raw is War the two of them fought Undertaker and Steve Austin in a Hell in a Cell tag match that ended in a no contest.[1] That set the singles rematch for King of the Ring thirteen days later.[1]

The Matches

Foley and Terry Funk had sat in Stamford watching a tape of the previous year's Undertaker and Shawn Michaels Hell in a Cell, trying to work out how to follow it. Funk's suggestion, made half as a joke, was "maybe you should let him throw you off the top of the cage," and Foley answered that he could then climb back up for another one.[1][11]

When Foley took it to Mark Calaway, the answer was a question: "Mick, do you want to die?"[1][11] Calaway agreed after Foley argued they had to start hot for the match to be remembered.[11] Foley also told Vince McMahon he had climbed the cell earlier that day and felt fine on it. He had not been up there at all, and later said that if he had, the height would have talked him out of the whole idea.[12][13]

The match ran at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh on June 28, 1998, eighth on the card in front of 17,087, with a 385,000 buyrate.[7] Calaway went into it with a fractured ankle. "It was such a important time in the business," he said later, "you knew you had to do it, so you just grit your teeth and go in there and do what you do."[15]

It started with both men already on the roof. About two minutes in, Undertaker threw Mankind off the side of the sixteen-foot cage and roughly twenty-two feet through the air into the Spanish announce table on the concrete.[1] Jim Ross called it live: "Good God almighty! Good God almighty! They've killed him!" and then "As God as my witness, he is broken in half!"[1] Officials and medical staff put Foley on a stretcher.[13]

He got off the stretcher, dislocated shoulder and all, and climbed the cage again.[13] The next spot was supposed to be a chokeslam onto a roof panel that would sag toward the ring, leaving Foley hanging in a widening gap for Undertaker to kick through.[12] The panel was held together with plastic tie wraps, and it gave way completely. Foley dropped about thirteen feet to the canvas, and the steel chair that had been sitting on the roof came through the hole after him and hit him in the face.[12][13]

Ross, on air: "Will somebody stop the damn match? Enough's enough!" Jerry Lawler beside him: "That's it. He's dead."[1] Foley has said he lost roughly thirty to forty seconds and woke up confused, with Terry Funk's shoes next to his head.[12] Funk had come out to check on him and buy him time; Undertaker chokeslammed Funk hard enough to knock his shoes off.[14]

Calaway, looking down through the hole, later said in The Last Ride that he assumed Foley was dead and stood there waiting for someone to signal him.[13] When he got down to the ring, he was distracted by something in Foley's face: "I remember talking to him, trying to talk some sense into him, but also being distracted by this huge... what I thought was a booger in his nose. Come to find out that it was one of his incisors that went through his lip and ended up through his nose."[16]

The match kept going. Foley emptied a bag of thumbtacks onto the mat and went for the mandible claw; Undertaker reversed it, dropped him onto the tacks, then hit a chokeslam and a Tombstone piledriver for the pin at 17:38.[7] Foley was concussed enough afterward to ask Undertaker whether he had used the thumbtacks at all. The answer was "Look at your arm, Mick!"[12]

Aftermath

Foley walked backstage under his own power and was treated for a concussion, a dislocated jaw, a dislocated shoulder, a bruised kidney and puncture wounds, on top of the teeth.[13] The locker room gave him a standing ovation.[1] Vince McMahon came to find him in the medical area: "You have no idea how much I appreciate what you have just done for this company, but I never want to see anything like that again."[12][13]

Then he called home. Colette cried on the phone, and Foley has said that conversation was the closest he came to retiring on the spot.[12] He kept wrestling, but the character changed. The Mankind who came out of Pittsburgh was gentler and funnier, ended up in the Rock 'n' Sock Connection with The Rock, and did most of his best-known work after that with a sock puppet.[1]

The main-event door opened anyway. Foley beat The Rock for the WWF Championship on the January 4, 1999 Raw with Steve Austin's help.[17][24] Raw was taped that week and Nitro was live, and WCW commentator Tony Schiavone gave the result away on air; roughly 600,000 viewers changed the channel to watch it happen.[24] Foley's own view of the booking was not the company's: "I saw me as champion as a mistake. I didn't think it was a good idea," he said years later. "I always thought the challenger should be chasing the champion, and The Rock was a great champion."[24]

Undertaker went from here into the Ministry of Darkness and another decade and a half of main events, retiring after 30 years with the company on November 22, 2020 and going into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2022.[18] Paul Bearer's storyline burns from the fireball became the on-screen reason for Kane, who debuted at Badd Blood in October 1997 as Bearer's son by Undertaker's mother.[20] Moody died on March 5, 2013 at 58, of a heart attack.[20]

Foley's last full-time match was another Hell in a Cell, against Triple H at No Way Out in February 2000, where he took the fall off the roof again with proper safety work under it.[1] Terry Funk inducted him into the WWE Hall of Fame at Madison Square Garden on April 6, 2013.[23]

Behind the Scenes

The plan for the second fall is the part everyone involved has been consistent about, and it is the part that went wrong. Foley, Calaway and Bruce Prichard have all described the same intended spot: repeated chokeslams sagging the roof panel until it billowed toward the ring, leaving Foley dangling for a controlled drop.[1] The panel was tied together with plastic zip ties that were never going to hold a man of Foley's size hitting it at speed.[14]

Jim Cornette's assessment, given for the Dark Side of the Ring episode on the match, is about as blunt as anyone has been: "If I've ever seen a match that should have been stopped, that was probably the one... but you just didn't do it back then."[14]

Calaway has said since that his own reading of it changed while he was standing on the roof looking down. He described the first throw as an out-of-body thing, watching Foley fall and feeling like it took forever for him to hit the table, and he has said the margin was measured in inches: "We're talking a matter of a couple of inches even the way he landed. I mean, that could have been catastrophic."[15][16]

There is a smaller, stranger detail from the same night that Calaway has also told. Once he was up on the cell he had no way to talk to anybody: "You know I'm kinda up there without any kind of communication with anything or anybody. I'm just like, 'Well I guess I'm not going anywhere until they bring me down'."[15]

The most reproduced still image from the match, Foley grinning against the turnbuckle with the tooth showing, was not a pose. He was running his tongue around a hole near his lip trying to work out how bad the damage was.[12]

The cost did not stay in 1998. Foley has talked about ongoing memory loss, limited mobility and multiple surgeries in the decades since, and his daughter Noelle has said she has no memories of watching her father wrestle because of what those matches were like to sit through.[14] Calaway, by the account of that same documentary, was the one who eventually helped Foley make peace with being remembered for it, on the grounds that the work would outlast both of them.[14]

Foley's relationship with the match took twenty years to settle. He did not watch it all the way through until 2018, on a live tour built around its anniversary, and found it hit harder complete than in clips.[22] He has also been direct about what it would look like now: "under today's protocols in wrestling, that type of match wouldn't continue."[22] He says he would not change the match itself, though he might have cut some of the extreme spots he was doing in smaller buildings.[22]

Prichard, on the wider question of Foley's standing in the company, has said McMahon needed convincing before Foley was made world champion, which is a useful marker of where the two men's judgment sat relative to each other in this stretch.[19]

Legacy

The business had moved a long way in the two years the feud ran. King of the Ring drew a 158,000 buyrate in 1996 and In Your House 11 drew 110,000 that October; King of the Ring 1998 did 385,000 with 17,087 in the Civic Arena.[2][4][7] Kevin Sullivan, then booking WCW, has said the match was the point at which he could see which company was going to win the ratings war.[11]

The match won Pro Wrestling Illustrated's Match of the Year for 1998.[1] Dave Meltzer rated it 4.5 stars in the Wrestling Observer and wrote that he would "never forget the performance of Foley," who had made himself an "all-time legend."[1] Wade Keller, writing in the Pro Wrestling Torch at the time, called the two falls the most incredible bumps in wrestling and predicted the match would work as both an inspiration and a warning about the precedent it set.[1]

Keller's second prediction is the one that aged into consensus, including with Meltzer, who wrote in 2019 that "with 20 years of perspective" the match had been "a terrible thing because of all the stunt bumps it encouraged" and had pushed wrestlers toward dangerous spots over wrestling.[1]

Jim Ross's two calls, "Good God almighty! They've killed him!" and "As God as my witness, he is broken in half!", became the lines he is best known for and travelled well outside wrestling.[1] The footage of the first fall is among the most replayed clips the company owns, and in 2023 a FOX Sports writer marking the 25th anniversary described it as the match he shows people who do not watch wrestling.[21]

Foley spent years uncomfortable with being remembered mainly for it, and by 2018 had stopped fighting that.[1] His own summary in 2025 was that it changed the shape of his career: "It really put an exclamation point on my career," he said, adding that without it he doubts he would have won the WWF Championship or become a headline act, having been "a hardworking journeyman" until that night.[22] It is also, he pointed out, "the only match that fans celebrate the anniversary of."[22]

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Mankind vs. The Undertaker — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind_vs._The_Undertaker
2. King of the Ring (1996) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Ring_(1996)
3. SummerSlam (1996) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SummerSlam_(1996)
4. In Your House 11: Buried Alive — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Your_House_11:_Buried_Alive
5. Survivor Series (1996) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Series_(1996)
6. In Your House 14: Revenge of the 'Taker — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Your_House_14:_Revenge_of_the_%27Taker
7. King of the Ring (1998) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Ring_(1998)
8. In Your House 8: Beware of Dog — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Your_House_8:_Beware_of_Dog
9. "WWF Raw Results — 4/1/96 (Mankind debuts)" — Wrestleview. https://www.wrestleview.com/retro/379410-wwf-raw-results-april-1-1996-san-bernardino/
10. "Reliving A Feud #2: The Undertaker vs. Mankind, 1996–1998" — Place to Be Nation. https://placetobenation.com/reliving-a-feud-2-the-undertaker-vs-mankind-1996-1998/
11. "Undertaker and Mick Foley Hell in a Cell Match: The Untold Story" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/undertaker-mick-foley-hell-in-a-cell/
12. "10 Things You Might Not Know About The Undertaker & Mankind's WWE Hell In A Cell Match" — Cultaholic. https://cultaholic.com/posts/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-the-undertaker-mankinds-wwe-hell-in-a-cell-match
13. "Inside The Chaos Of Undertaker Vs. Mankind Hell In A Cell Match" — Wrestling News. https://www.wrestlingnews.co/stories/inside-chaos-undertaker-mankind-hell-cell-match/
14. "Dark Side Of The Ring: What We Learned From 'Mick Foley: Hell In A Cell'" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/dark-side-of-the-ring-takeaways-mick-foley-hell-in-a-cell-wwe-undertaker-terry-funk/
15. "The Undertaker Reflects On Working The 1998 Hell In A Cell Match With A Fractured Ankle" (Sep 15, 2018) — Fightful. https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/undertaker-reflects-working-1998-hell-cell-match-fractured-ankle/
16. "The Undertaker Thought That Mick Foley's Tooth Was A Booger During Their Hell In A Cell Match" (Sep 17, 2018) — Fightful. https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/undertaker-thought-mick-foley-s-tooth-was-booger-during-their-hell-cell-match/
17. Mick Foley — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Foley
18. The Undertaker — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undertaker
19. "Bruce Prichard Says It Was 'Love At First Sight' With This WWE Hall Of Famer" (Jun 22, 2024) — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1606535/bruce-prichard-says-love-first-sight-wwe-hall-famer/
20. Paul Bearer — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bearer
21. "25 Years Later: Remembering Mankind vs. Undertaker's Hell in a Cell match" (Jun 28, 2023) — FOX Sports. https://www.foxsports.com/stories/wwe/25-years-later-remembering-mankind-vs-undertaker-hell-in-a-cell-match
22. "WWE Great Mick Foley Talks 1998 Hell In A Cell Match And How It Put An 'Exclamation Point' On His Wrestling Career" (Mar 24, 2025) — Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/djsiddiqi/2025/03/24/wwe-great-mick-foley-talks-1998-hell-in-a-cell-match-and-how-it-put-an-exclamation-point-on-his-wrestling-career/
23. "Terry Funk to induct Mick Foley into the WWE Hall of Fame" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/wwe-hall-of-fame/who-will-induct-mick-foley
24. "Mick Foley says 1999 WWF title win on Raw was a 'mistake' by company" (Jan 7, 2019) — Sky Sports. https://www.skysports.com/more-sports/wwe/news/14203/11195947/mick-foley-says-1999-wwf-title-win-on-raw-was-a-mistake-by-company
25. "WWE Classic of the Week: Undertaker vs. Mankind from SummerSlam 1996" — Bleacher Report. https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2545068-wwe-classic-of-the-week-the-undertaker-vs-mankind-from-summerslam-1996
26. "FULL MATCH: Undertaker vs. Mankind | Boiler Room Brawl: SummerSlam 1996" — YouTube (WWE Vault). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjfVeV5tPB4
27. "FULL MATCH - The Undertaker vs. Mankind – Buried Alive Match: WWE In Your House: Buried Alive" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT7eElns0c8
28. "FULL MATCH: The Undertaker vs. Mankind | Hell in a Cell Match: King of the Ring 1998" — YouTube (WWE Vault). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89BPNcsL7QI

Further Listening

• Have a Nice Day! A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks (Mick Foley's autobiography) — Foley's own chapter on planning and surviving the Cell match
• Dark Side of the Ring: 'Mick Foley: Hell in a Cell' — Foley, Terry Funk, Jim Cornette and the Foley family on the match and its cost
• Undertaker: The Last Ride (WWE Network documentary) — Mark Calaway on looking through the hole in the roof
• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — episodes on Mankind's creation, the Paul Bearer turn and the 1996 In Your House run
• The Steve Austin Show / Broken Skull Sessions with The Undertaker — Calaway's later retellings of the King of the Ring match