[2000-05-21-WWF-Judgment Day] HHH vs The Rock (Iron Man)

[Superstar Sleeze]

WWF World Heavyweight Champion The Rock vs Triple H - WWF Judgment Day 2000 Iron Man Match

 

I have never seen this before. From what I understand this always had a rep of being better than you would think it would be on paper. The Rock vs Triple H going 60 minutes is a hard sell for me, but they pulled it off. Surprisingly to me, they pulled it off with minimal Attitude Era hijinx. Instead, they built a match on solid fundamentals with strong peaks and valleys and let Rock's popularity carry the crowd heat rather than rely on highspots and gimmicks. Now, I never thought the match reached classic status, but they held my attention throughout the match even if I did not think there was a great hook or anything that special other than them going 60 minutes. It was just solid, meat and potatoes wrestling.

 

I usually will defend Shawn Michaels' attire, but he looked downright stupid with his too long ref tank top covering his short shorts. Was there a plan to bring him back two years early? But he was still fucked up on drugs and shit to function?

 

Loved the early tests of strength. They get over the intensity of the match and serve as mini-battles for The Rock to win. I thought the transitions throughout the match were lazy for the most part. A lot of random exploding out of the corner. It is fine once or twice for a babyface, but HHH does it first here. I think my biggest problem with this match was any two people could have had this match. They one used any unique attributes to get this match over. Rock's inherent popularity withstanding. This was not and going 60 minutes long could not be a popcorn, happy, fun, entertaining Rock match. They laid the match out well, but they needed to put their own spin on it. HHH goes to work on the arm and does a decent job. Rock Bottom out of nowhere takes the first fall. Great use of a finish early. They popped the crowd big. It was a nice high spot. Liked it a lot. I thought Lawler was badass on commentary putting over strategy and now that a draw goes to The Rock, HHH needs to score two falls. The Rock 1-0.

 

Probably the most solid work comes in the next twenty minutes where The Rock goes to town on HHH's leg and Trips sells pretty damn well. Triple H was a really good seller in 2000 and we have seen that again in his comeback with Daniel Bryan and beatdown by Roman, but something happened in 2002-2008, where he just sucked for the most part at selling (there are exceptions). The Rock using the knee to cutoff Triple H was really good and some of the best work in the match. Loved the whip into the steps. One spot I never seen before, but looked awesome was Rocky putting HHH's knes on middle rope and hitting a kneedrop on it. HHH kicks off on the second figure-4 attempt and nails a Pedigree to take the second fall. I really like their use of flash finishers as highspots around really solid wrestling. Tied 1-1.

 

Another thing I thought both did well was sell fatigue, which started here. Both men kinda out of it, but HHH has the presence of mind to roll Rock into a small package to go up 2-1.

 

Here comes some arena brawling as Rock tries to create some distance between him and Triple H knowing he can't lose a fall out there. However, he was not able to mount a comeback either even as he tried with suplexes. HHH hits a sweet piledriver and takes a commanding 3-1 lead.

 

Rocky's adrenaline rushes were electrifying and his punches as JR mentioned were his best weapon. HHH's high knee remains my favorite move of his because it is just a definitive cutoff. You always feel the air totally let out of a building when he cuts off a red hot babyface with that high knee. Belly to belly and Rock's DDT gain a fall back for the Rock. The match is entertaining, but it is not really telling a great story either. HHH 3-2.

 

I thought the spot of the match was the steel chair shot by HHH. Tied 3-3

 

Jerry Lawler goes ballistics on commentary about how stupid that was until HHH rolls Rock up for three and then praises him as the smartest man in the Game. HHH 4-3

 

The reason I liked it so much was that it was a great transitions and I thought finally there was some drama. The first thirty minutes was surprisingly solid wrestling with lots of effort. It was not inspired, but it was strong. The next 15 minutes were the weakest and just kinda there, but that chair shot was an awesome transition and now there is a lot of drama heading down the stretch. HHH works the sleeper big time in this match and if there was ever a match to use the sleeper it is an iron man match. After three tries, he finally gains a fall through it. Really nice strategy. HHH 5-3 with twelve minutes left. Rock just needs two falls to force a tie.

 

The spots that irked me the most in this match was HHH going up to the top rope not once by twice. This is the exact opposite of the sleeper. It is high risk and not something he normally does. Very stupid. Superplex is a badass spot and got a big pop, but they needed to set it up better. They have worked the outside well, but with ten minutes left it was time to kick into overdrive and completely agree now was the time to do the announce table spot. Rocky hitting a pretty nasty Pedigree on HHH to gain the countout decision. HHH 5-4.

 

Here come the McMahons. Nice to know in 2016 they are still being pushed and nothing has changed. Rock decks them all. SPINBUSTER! You know what's next. If smell what the Rock is cookin...Peoples Elbow! It is all knotted up and two minutes left.

 

Here comes Road Dogg & X-Pac, but now here is Undertaker returning as BikerTaker. The crowd loses their fucking shit for all this. Undertaker destroys everything that moves. X-PAC GOES ALL THE WAY UP! Taker chokeslams and Tombstones HHH in front of HBK, who calls for the DQ and HHH wins the match 6-5 and the WWF World Heavyweight Championship.

 

The match did pacing really well. I thought they took their time and really milked every moment. That's been a problem since the Attitude Era and they didn't fall into that trap. They laid match out well and I thought the first thirty minutes was solid wrestling. They were missing interesting transitions and character work. That extra oomph that really sinks my teeth into a match. After the chair shot, the drama kicked in and they were able to have a really fun Attitude Era brawl. Clocking in at 60 minutes, I will probably never watch this again, but it is a great match and a feather in both men's cap. ****

[soup23]

Important note to start out with HHH saying he wants to do this alone. The crowd is electric as they square off and the beginning is textbook heavyweight action. The tests of strengths were engaging and everything had a sense of table setting without it being a chore to watch. The flash Rock Bottom for the first pinfall was clever and gave Rock an early advantage. Fall two starts with HHH showing more desperation but he knees the guard rail. Rock has really strong focus on the leg and even busts out a figure four which is milked as a possible fall. The first twenty minutes go by really fast here IMO even though they didn’t use that many bells and whistles. We do have some crowd brawling and other segments that are set up to fill the time but they are limited. HHH is still trying to work out his leg and getting progressively flustered that he can’t gain a pinfall. Rock going back to knee to temporaily fend off the HHH attack shows he is a smarter worker than sometimes he gets credit for. Back outside we go and HHH’s knee goes straight into the steps. It really feels like the Rock has the match in control and is dictating the pace. HHH needs a desperate move and he gets that with the Pedigree to even things up 1-1. To build off the psychology, Rock is still groggy and allows himself to be rolled up and now all of a sudden HHH is in the lead. That gets a hearty Rocky chant fired up from the count. JR has a good call that if this was boxing, the referee might stop the match. JR and King overall have been pretty fantastic in their call here and are really keen on the micro and macro strategy of a match like this. The next segment of brawling on the stage set made sense as Rock was trying to gain some distance by retreating a bit. HHH catches up to him and they brawl around the set here. Rock hits a suplex on the floor as we are at the halfway point of the match. Rock also hits a sloppy back suplex on the ramp. The execution certainly isn’t flawless but with the talk of fatigue, it does make sense that not everything will be completely crisp. Rock is gaining his mojo back and back body drops HHH on the concrete. Back inside the ring, Rock keeps going back to the leg that he worked on beforehand. HHH again shows how resourceful he is by seeing the tiniest bit of opening by hitting his knee and a piledriver to have a commanding lead of 3-1.

 

These flash finishes have been really spaced out and delivered well. Now, the strategy shifts with HHH being able to play defense in the second half of the match with a commanding lead. HHH gets greedy and goes up to the top. That costs him with an arm drag from the top. Rock has maybe his strongest sequence of the match with some good looking punches and a la magistral cradle which flat out shocked me with how good it looked. HHH is once again able to stunt the momentum of Rock with a knee and now he goes to the wear down strategy utilizing a sleeper. The sleeper isn’t applied as snug as Benoit earlier but it is fine and does play off the HBK and HHH dynamic with HHH using the ropes for leverage. Rock now is able to hit a flash move with a belly to belly suplex. Rock is able to string together another flurry and hit a DDT for pin and we are at 3-2 with around 19 minutes left. Outside we go again with more brawling and HHH goes for a chairshot but the chair is grabbed by HBK. Back inside, HHH grabs the chair again and pastes Rock with it for the DQ. Lawler talks about how stupid that was until he immediately pins Rock to go back up one. The crowd appreciates the efforts as they realize how smart that was. Rock is busted open pretty good now and we have 15 minutes to go. In a sweet callback spot, HHH goes for the sleeper again and really drains the energy out of Rock to gain the submission at 12 minutes remaining. HHH is up 2 falls and now is shoving HBK which isn’t a smart move which Lawler calls out. HHH takes the HBK and Harley Race bump out of the floor and takes out a camera man in a neat looking spot. The Rocky chants mount again. HHH going to top again was dumb and didn’t really fit the character or storyline of the match as Marty points out in his review above. I can understand once but this was too much even if it does set up the superplex. A really dramatic nearfall results off of the superplex. I think Rock may have bladed again as his blood flow has increased. Back inside we go once more and Rock gears up everything he has into sending HHH into the post. HHH is able to regain the momentum by sending Rock into the steps and with six minutes left, it feels like HHH is going to win now just running out the clock. For the third and most costly time, HHH’s pride gets the best of him as he prepares to send Rock through the announce table. HHH then gets pedigreed through the table and is busted open big time due to his greed. This gives Rock the countout victory but he is still 1 fall down. Here come the McMahons back down the ramp. HBk does the count again and HHH gets back in at 9 as the crowd gasps. Now we get The Rock doing the hulk up that he did at the end of Backlash and in the Raw matches we have seen of taking out the McMahon Helmsley regime and then delivering the People’s Elbow to tie things up at 58 minutes. Shane drags HBk out of the ring and HBK punches both Shane and Vince. Road Dogg and X-Pac come in the ring and Rock hits a Rock Bottom with HBk out of the way. Just then the video package starts up and we get Taker coming down the ring on his bike to a huge pop. HHH hits the pedigree on Rock in the ring. All of DX and the McMahons are taken out by Taker and Shane gets chokeslamed. Even Steph gets the chokehold on him but HHH saves her. Take hits the chokeslam right as the match ends and then a tombstone is hit giving the DQ to HHH allowing him to regain his title. That is a really well done finish that actually builds a lot of intrigue for the future. I had thought that Taker didn’t make it in time but he does hit the chokeslam on HHH before the bell with HBK looking at him from the apron so that is a conceivable out right there. This was paced tremendously well. These two guys are the biggest stars in the US with Austin on the shelf, but going out there and having a 60 minute iron man match is a big risk. This could have stunk up the joint as neither had went nearly this long before. Due to strategic planning of laying out the match and good enough execution with both men really having focal points throughout the match, they delivered a classic. ****1/2

[SAMS]

Shawn Michaels comes out to referee. His shorts are extremely distracting in the worst possible way. His hairline has already receded so much at this point that you could argue he’s already reached ‘Dad mode’, so why he/they thought this was a good idea is anybody’s guess. Triple H asks Vince, Shane and Steph to go to the back so he can destroy The Rock all by himself. This is already looking promising. Watching 70s All and New Japan I often wondered what it would look like if they did that style today. The opening 5 minutes of this match is exactly what it would look like. It’s almost absurd to see them doing wristlock exchanges and The Rock even bridges! Good stuff so far. The first 10 minutes moved at a very deliberate pace. Shawn calls for a break in the corner, Rock uses it to nail Triple H with a shot to the face then a Rock Bottom out of nowhere! First fall to The Rock at 49 minutes. Clearly they aren’t taking inspiration from Michaels and Hart’s WrestleMania XII version. Obligatory brawl through the crowd results in a fan taking a potshot at Triple H causing the crowd to be distracted, watching him being removed from the arena for the next 5-10 minutes. Once again, the pace is deliberate with mat work we’re really not used to seeing in Attitude Era WWF. The Rock is targeting Triple H’s leg, using a figure four earlier to good effect and once again going for it here, only to be kicked away then Triple H hits a Pedigree to even the score at 25 minutes. Both falls have been relatively surprising as neither were built up to in any tangible way. No break between falls here and Triple H rolls up Rock to sneak his way to a 2-1 advantage. Heavy booing from the crowd. They are finally back with us and paying attention to the action in the ring. As we reach the halfway point you can tell that fatigue is setting in. Rock goes for a back suplex in the aisle but he barely got Triple H a foot off the ground. Back in the ring Triple H hits a piledriver for yet another fall. This time going up 3-1 with 33 minutes gone. Rock takes a lot of flack for his weak offense, but in this match his punches have been great. He throws another one which just lays Triple H out. Rock goes for his patented DDT reversal but totally loses hold of Triple H. He recovers with a simple gut stomp and pulls it back to 3-2 with a regular DDT. Triple H tried to bring a chair into the mix earlier on only to have Shawn intervene. This time he he defends against some Rock offense with a firm shot to the head. He gets DQ’d to tie it up at 3 a piece only to capitalise on Rock’s discombobulation by pinning him with the aide of the ropes. Now The Rock’s busted open and visibly spent. Triple H locks in a sleeper and gets a pass out decision. Triple H is now up 5-3 with 12 minutes to go. They move to the outside and Triple H tries to put an exclamation point on proceedings by delivering the Rock Bottom on the announcer’s table only to succumb to the Pedigree instead. The table held strong which made it look twice as brutal as it should have. Shawn comes over and clearly is reminding both that they need to get into the finish as quickly as possible as time is running out. Rock manages to get back into the ring and Shawn counts Triple H out in double time. 5-4. The McMahon’s come down to ringside and as Triple H narrowly avoids a second countout they descend upon the ring. The Rock fights them off, hits a spinebuster and a People’s Elbow to tie it once again at 5-5. Shawn, after doing his own little bit to put down the McMahon’s gets bumped off the apron just as members of D-X enter the fray and we get a massive beatdown on The Rock. An ominous video appears on the titantron and The Undertaker appears! He cleans house, culminating with a Chokeslam on Triple H just as time expires which Shawn sees. After the dust has settled Finkel announces that due to Taker’s interference The Rock was DQ’d for the last fall thus making Triple H the winner and the new champion.

The ending was a bit of a mess. Ironically the timing was basically perfect with Undertaker delivering the Chokeslam on Triple H with 1-2 seconds to go and just as Shawn was climbing up on the apron however after the announcement of the result Lawler and JR were confused over whether the DQ was in fact for the Tombstone Piledriver that Taker hit afterwards. It didn’t help that Shawn also motioned for a DQ a second time after the latter as well as the buzzer for time expiry going off a good 10 seconds after the graphic had already told us the match was finished.

As for the match as a whole, I thought the deliberate style helped in the sense that I’m sure this was probably the first time either guy had realistically gone the full 60 minutes in a match (A point that they make ad nauseum about the Rock. His previous high had been around 30 in his and Triple H’s Ladder match in ‘98). Everything about what they did in the ring made perfect sense, and the gradual build of fatigue on both guys was the reason for most of the falls. In fact the narrative seemed to be that both guys were kind of out of their depth in this kind of match and basically whoever had the best endurance would survive to become the victor. Also, people often talk about the matches with Foley as being the star solidifying moment for Triple H, however for me when rewatching this stuff, it was him standing side by side in the ring with Michaels. With Austin gone, Undertaker gone, Bret gone, and Michaels gone, Triple H had mostly been feuding with the new guys on the block. Finally with him being in the ring with Shawn and looking the part, it hit home that he had finally arrived as a lock main eventer for me. At least in mid-2000.

I think the Iron Man match is the closest thing in wrestling we have to how football (soccer) works. There’s a time limit and you try and score as many times as possible. While there were may falls in this match, none seemed to go against the run of the match, or finish off an extended section of dominance by one of the two. Mostly - and especially the early ones - seemed entirely random. The sensibleness of the match worked to its favour in many ways as it came across as extremely competent, however it really lacked the drama to make it special (Undertaker’s return aside). When I think back on the best football matches I’ve seen you have goals on the break, teams conceding when they themselves look most likely to score or a flurry of chances until the dam finally breaks and the dominant team gets their just rewards. This match didn’t really have any of that and I think suffers for that reason. However I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the match as a whole far exceeded my expectations heading into it and was thoroughly entertaining. ****

[AstroBoy]

It was well laid-out. The story they told made sense. It was ambitious and timed to draw out the maximum impact from the falls and shifts in momentum. Triple H was really strong in this and Rock was solid. So in some respects it feels like it should have approached some kind of classic status but it just. . . didn't reach that for me. It was a good story told in the best way possible and not screwed up in any way. But it just didn't break past that barrier and I think that's why I'm having a hard time finding more to say about this match. How far does two guys doing the best they can in this type of situation go when it doesn't leave any kind of lasting impact? It's a feather in their caps for pulling off what they did but more in the way that I admire what they did. Not in a way that I just can't wait to go back and watch it again or think that it's something nobody else could have pulled off.

 

***3/4

[TravJ1979]

This was very good. Shawn Michaels looks absolutely ridiculous.

[ohtani's jacket]

If you ignore all the bullshit at the end, this was a tremendous main event match-up. The Rock and Triple H wrestling for an hour sounds like the most unappealing thing ever but they managed to defy all expectations and produce an engaging bout. There weren't a lot of holds used but the pacing was good and there were enough shifts in momentum to keep things interesting, As soon as Triple H went up big the drama kicked into high gear. Whoever laid this out had a real sense of the occasion and the final quarter was full of exciting moments. Even WWE tropes like the chair shot and going through the announcer's table came at just the right time. Everything was perfect up until the bullshit at the end. They couldn't really help themselves, I suppose. Ever Shawn was going to superkick Hunter and cost him the bout or there was going to be interference. It's the nature of the beast, especially if its the heel going over, but they'd done so well on their own you that the bookers could have spared us from the run-ins. In spite of the mess at the end, it was another great main event from 2000 and holds up to this very day.

[Robert S]

Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I remember the finish was blown timing-wise. I think the idea was for the Rock to have some seconds left to pin HHH after the tombstone to even the score. If that's true than the WWF had two accidental title changes due to clock-missmanagement in three PPV shows (the other one being Hardcore Holly pinning Crash Holly at Wrestlemania after what was supposed to be the end of the 15 minutes hardcore batle royal).

[Cornette's racket]

I'm doing my quarterly rewatch of this match and it still stands up to all these years later. I know the finish was a bit of a mess due to taker missing some cue or something like that. I've read the other reviews and I don't see the praise of Jerry Lawler's call on commentary, where he stopped being the "puppies" colour guy and called it using his experience doing hour long matches. I've always liked this Lawler commentary on this match. 

[Makai Club #1]

I don't blame Taker for the finish, I blame Shawn Michaels for not DQ'ing Rock after Taker chokeslams HHH, waiting for the Tombstone. That judgement call messed up the finish. Shawn Michaels ruining matches as ref continues to be a trope for the ages. The match overall isn't hurt because it's still pretty incredible. It's suprbly paced, putting the vastly overrated Hart/Shawn Ironman match to shame. It's always exciting and engaging to sit through. The big struggle at the start looked great, something I always love in my matches but made perfect sense for this match both psychology wise and for pacing reasons. They esclate the match superbly well with a deliberate pace into hot and heavy brawlling with great selling, great face and heel work and an extremly hot crowd. Every fall except the first one, because when does a normal main event end in 10 minutes, was great and felt earned. HHH was great in these. It's hard to wrestle a strategic match to the point but he does it so well with his offence, mannarisms and desperation. The commentary was on-point as well. Excellent match, the 60 minutes was practically a breeze  ****1/2