#3 The King of the Ring 1998
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If the feud with Kane helped us to better understand The Undertaker as a human being, it was his feud with Mankind a year later that re-established some of the fear we might have had for him as kids back in the early 90s.
1998 is now seen as the official start of the Attitude Era, where the WWF fans became particularly demanding of a certain type of superstar. Fans no longer wanted to ‘say our prayers and take our vitamins’, we wanted to watch badass rebels stick two fingers up to authority and men who didn’t care about anything other than beating up opponents and winning championships. It didn’t matter whether a wrestler was a heel or a face, we just wanted to think they were cool.
This perfectly suited the mood of the country at the time, which had a subverted approach to popular culture with shows like South Park and Jerry Springer being all the rage. The Undertaker might have been humanised by his storyline with Kane, but to really be able to hang with the likes of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock, we needed to see a more ruthless side to him.
When you want to show how much of a badass you are, the opponent you most want to face is Mick Foley. Foley is effectively a stunt man that found his way into the wrestling business. He could withstand an immense amount of pain and punishment, all while making the giver of said pain and punishment look like the ultimate sadistic monster. Nowhere was this more apparent, at least in WWF terms, than in his match with the Deadman at King of the Ring he8 inside of Hell in a Cell.
Taker and Shawn had set a very high bar in the first HIAC match a year earlier, so these two knew they’d have to put on something very special. The match pretty much started with Undertaker mercilessly throwing Mankind off the top of the cell into the Spanish announce table. It wasn’t just the fall and the impact that made this scene so iconic, it was the cool and calculated fashion in which Taker let his opponent drop.
It was the facial expressions on Taker afterwards that let the audience know he didn’t give a damn about whether Foley was permanently injured or even still breathing. From that moment on, people knew this was a man not to be messed with, and someone that could legitimately take on the likes of Stone Cold, matching him in terms of his love for violence and breaking all the rules imaginable.
