Triple H and The Rock’s rivalry was one of the foundations of the Attitude Era throughout the late 90s and early 2000s. From their Ladder Match over the Intercontinental Championship at SummerSlam 1998 to their numerous pay-per-view main events over the WWE Championship, the two were firmly established as the bitterest of rivals onscreen. But behind the scenes, the pair wanted their feud to eventually culminate in a match at WrestleMania, only for the rug to get pulled out from under them twice.
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The first was at WrestleMania 2000 with Hunter as the WWF Champion and The Rock as that year’s Royal Rumble winner. But with Steve Austin and Undertaker both off the card, the company opted to create a four-way main event between those two, The Big Show and a recently-retired Mick Foley. The match also got the four key members of the McMahon Family involved, which is why the show is known for “the match with a McMahon in every corner.
“My only regret with the whole thing with The Rock is, in 2000 we were poised to have a match at WrestleMania one-on-one. And I think that would have been an epic thing for both of us in that moment, the timing of Taker’s return and Austin’s return. And Austin wasn’t quite ready yet. So they pushed the WrestleMania match and that year we did this Fatal 4-way with Mick Foley, who I had just retired, coming back like a month later… and Big Show. And a couple of months later we would have the one-on-one Iron Man Match (at Judgement Day in 2000) that we wanted to have at WrestleMania,” Triple H explained on the Impaulsive Podcast this week.
“Unfortunately I always feel it’s the one thing… like we got to this unbelievably heated long-term rivalry and then never got to pay it off at the biggest platform possible. And I think Rock feels that way too,” he added.
He then confirmed that the backstage encounter the two had on Raw in October 2014 was supposed to set the stage for a match at following year at WrestleMania 31. He then explained it couldn’t happen because of Rock’s filming schedule, but the two still managed to share the ring at the event for a segment that also involved Stephanie and Ronda Rousey (years before she would actually debut with the company).
