It was 1997, and DeGeneration-X was riding roughshod all over World Wrestling Entertainment.
They had exiled longtime fan favorite Bret “The Hitman” Hart over to WCW, along with his real-life brothers-in-law, “The British Bulldog” Davey Boy Smith, and Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart.
They formally ushered in the legendary “Attitude” era that transformed the Monday Night Wars.
They brought edginess, danger, and ultimately a touch of mainstream acceptability to professional wrestling, which to that point had always been seen as a realm for kid fantasy, what with all the over-the-top cartoonish characters that had grown to populate the industry at the time – a wrestling garbageman, a man who claimed to hail from the future and had a jetpack to prove it, Doink the Clown, and a slow-witted Ugandan savage who needed the audience to “coach” him to roll his opponent onto his back before pinning him.
It had been that kind of world.
“The Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels & the newly renamed “Triple H” Hunter Hearst Helmsley, together with their muscular female valet Chyna, turned everyone on their ears with their degenerate ways and crotch-chopping antics. They were assholes to the highest degree, less socially-acceptable than a jelly-covered grandma, and lived to torment authority to its absolute limit. They introduced “Suck It!” into the popular lexicon of 12-year olds, and made dry-humping, thong underwear, and gay jokes part of wrestling legend.
They were irreverent, insufferably too-cool-for-school, and knew they were just That Damn Good. Nobody could do a thing to stop them.
Shawn Michaels had even posed for Playgirl Magazine, with nothing but a WWE Championship Belt to cover up his Little Showstopper.
Enter Sergeant Slaughter, an All-American Hero who stood for justice, discipline, and integrity. He even had a GI Joe action figure of his own to back up how upstanding and righteous and all-around awesome he was.
His plan? Fracture DeGeneration-X from within, by forcing Shawn Michaels to lay his coveted European Championship on the line against his own stablemate and real-life best-friend Triple H in the main event of Monday Night Raw.
Their match, as it turned out, was nothing less than epic…
