Cactus Jack / Dude Love / Mankind / Mick Foley vs. Triple H for the WWF Championship (Street Fight), from WWF Royal Rumble 2000 (revisited)

It’s hard to watch this and consider that a match like this could ever happen again. Matches filled with ultraviolence still happen, but not in the biggest wrestling federation on the planet and the stuff on the indies (mostly) lacks a narrative that makes sense of its carnage. One way to interpret this is as a negative, that never getting anything like this again is a bad thing, but I’m choosing to view this as a positive. If this style of wrestling peaked here, perhaps we’re better off engaging in different avenues of storytelling. Why bother trying to top perfection?

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