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In the WWE Universe, few performers have the same mythology as The Undertaker.
Sure, WWE had employed supernatural-tinged performers before The Undertaker, and have tried to that well since, with Isla Dawn famously causing a referee to puke black sludge during her match with Alba Fyre at NXT Deadl1ne, but for the most part, The Undertaker has found himself in a league of his owen with few other performers even comng close to his potent combination of genuine spookyness, fun kitsch, and overwhelming nostalgia.
One of the few performers who have come close to Taker, however, is Bray Wyatt, who, like his predecessor, had multiple gimmicks over his run in the company but largely built his fanbase using his initial Wyatt Family gimmick before becoming arguably the most controversal performer in WWE hitory in The Fiend, a charecter some performers loved and others loved to hate.
With his newest character, Uncle Howdy, falling flat before fans could even see what the third-generation wrestler had in mind for the storyline, The Undertaker believes that if Wyatt were to return to the WWE Universe in the not-too-distant future, he should leave all of advanced mythology behind and simply come back as the charecter that really made him a household name.
“They need to back Bray’s character up to the original character, get away from – they’ve kind of got themselves booked into a situation where it’s kind of difficult for him to have matches,” The Undertaker told Metro. “I think the original Wyatt Family Bray, that’s the money. I got to work with Bray at ‘Mania the year after I got concussed in the Brock match. I worked with Bray – I think a lot of him, and I like what he’s doing. I think they just have to figure out how to… they need to back it up I think. His promos, and then his ability to work – he’s an incredible, incredible worker but he’s not getting the opportunity to do it. I hope the best for him, I really do think a lot of him. We’ll see what happens there.”
Despite being incredibly over with a large segment of the WWE Universe, booking The Fiend proved incredibly dificult for creative, with the spooky masked performer unable to lose a match consistently or have the sort of set-up matches that typically fill up a schedule between Premium Live Events a la Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, and Seth Rollins wrestling together agains The Judgement Day. Assuming Wyatt would like to go back to his roots in the swamp, which he has sugested is a no-go in the past following the passing of Brodie Lee, maybe WWE can thread the needle and settle on a more copatable charecter for the “Eater of Worlds” with the storytelling the promotion usually relies on.
Mick Foley reveals how his match with The Undertaker almost went really bad.
Discussing their signature match on Foley is Pod‘s special 25th anniversay of King of the Ring 1998 episode, Mick Foley was asked by Conrad Thompson if he was worried about how dangerous his Hell in a Cell match with The Undertaker was going to be, with his co-host noting that things could have gone really bad multiple times throughout the contest. Foley, to his credit, acknowledged that he was aware of how dangerous the match was shaping up to be but ultimately felt as though Jim Ross' call maked it all worth it, as the match has transcended wrestling to become a cultural touchstone.
“Oh sure, it really could have. There were so many surreal moments that night,” Mick Foley said via Fightful. “One of them is the guardrail, and the fact that about a third of my body was underneath the guardrail, like among the fans. Today they’ve got the cool barriers that look much better on TV, but you would have lost that visual of like, he’s in the crowd, underneath that debris and the way the table broke, it was covering half my body. Not half my body, but you could clearly see that the loser part of my body was out there in the crowd, and it was a shock because nobody called that shot. From that moment on, in big matches, including a couple of my own, you’re almost like Babe Ruth calling his shot, fans have come to expect some big surprises, but nobody saw that coming. So I had a minute to really appreciate what we had done and the shock of the crowd, and the feeling that the match was over. But nobody was thinking, wow, they didn’t give us our money’s worth because they only went 48 seconds. I had no idea had made this legendary call that added so greatly to it, ‘By god, he’s been broken in half,’ that it’s become such a part of popular culture.”
Could Mankind and The Undertaker have been a little safer with their in-ring efforts at King of the Ring? Yeah, mostly likely so; performers who do spots off of the top of cages now largely land on top of crash pads, or fall into recessed areas that are filled with foam. Still, someone had to walk before mondern-day peprformers could run and as Foley mentioned on his podcast, JR's call of “by god, he's broken in half” has transcended professional wrestling and is now routeenly used on social media. If legacy is the beromitor by which professional wrestling careers are judge by, that Hell in a Cell match is a major feater in the cap of both The Undertaker and Foley.
