During its late 1990s surge in popularity, the World Wrestling Federation, as it was then known, got to experience forays into pop culture not previously seen since the 1980s boom, if ever before. In January 1999, that meant that the WWF (now WWE) had a prominent role on Super Bowl Sunday.
In fact, WWF had a prominent role in two aspects of Super Bowl Sunday. The first was a largely well received Super Bowl commercial, featuring most of the company’s top stars of the time. The second was with Halftime Heat, the WWF’s foray into counterprogramming the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
Halftime Heat was a match between The Rock and Mankind, the characters of Dwayne Johnson and Mick Foley. And this was no ordinary match. Not only would The Rock be defending his recently regained World Wrestling Federation Heavyweight Championship but he’d be doing so in an Empty arena match.
And 25 years after the fact, we look back at a defining moment in the history of the WWE and the Super Bowl halftime show.
WWE buildup
A pre-taped episode of Monday Night Raw aired on Jan. 4, 1999. In the main event of that show, Mankind, one of the characters brilliantly portrayed by Foley, won his first World Wrestling Federation Championship, defeating The Rock, a man on the road to absolute superstardom. It was a famous night in the history of both WWE and its now-defunct rival, WCW, which spoiled the championship win on its episode of Monday Nitro and instantly lost hundreds of thousands of viewers. Oops.
WCW’s blunder, as well as its own mistakes made on Jan. 4, were maybe the biggest shots against what was one year earlier the biggest wrestling promotion in the world. Just over two years later, WCW would go out of business.
The fallout of Foley’s title win was more immediate. Shortly after Mankind’s win, it was announced that he would defend his title in a rematch against The Rock at that year’s Royal Rumble event on Jan. 24 in an “I Quit” match.
What unfolded was one of the most notorious matches in the history of the business. Mankind took several chair shots to the head. And as Mankind was handcuffed, the shots were completely unprotected. Making matters worse, the Rock did not appear to be holding much, if anything, back. It was uncomfortable to watch then (Foley’s family walked out on it) and has only gotten worse as concussions have become a bigger concern.
In storyline purposes, it was also a controversial match. The Rock regained the title when a downed Mankind was heard screaming, “I quit.” Only, it was later revealed that what was heard was a recording from several days earlier. During the match itself, Mankind did not quit.
The controversial title change set up the need for a rematch. Fortunately for WWE, Super Bowl XXXIII would air one week after the Royal Rumble. And that opened the door for one heck of a counterprogramming option.
The Super Bowl Halftime Show
For the first quarter century of its existence, the Super Bowl halftime show was largely a bland event. It was more elaborate than what you’d see during a normal regular season NFL game, but it wasn’t a particularly big event. The feeling was that, much like regular games, viewers aren’t paying a lot of attention at halftime, so there was no real need to have the Halftime Show be a big performance.
But something else was common during the first quarter century of Super Bowls. The games were not that good. The 1980s were a real nadir. Between Super Bowls XV and XXIV (both games inclusive), the average margin of victory was more than 22 points. And while some games were close at halftime, that wasn’t a trend. The average halftime lead over those 10 Super Bowls was nearly 14 points.
Think about election nights. From a ratings perspective, do the networks want an election like 1984’s, when the only drama was whether Ronald Reagan would lose a single state? Or do they want something like George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000, when the election went well into the night — and beyond? Sure, election night coverage is always going to bring in a good rating. But to hold that rating, the event has to have an element of drama to it.
Super Bowls are no different. The game being an annual blowout was not good news to the NFL, or any of its network partners. So, if the games weren’t going to be any good, something else had to hold the audience’s attention. It was around this time that halftime became more of a show.
At Super Bowl XXVI, held in January 1992, Halftime Show was Winter Magic.
The theme served a double purpose. This Super Bowl was held at Minnesota’s Metrodome, only the second time a Super Bowl was held in a cold weather city (the Pontiac Silverdome hosted Super Bowl XVI). It also became an opportunity to advertise the upcoming Winter Olympics in Albertville, set to begin less than two weeks later. CBS was broadcasting both the Super Bowl and the Olympics.
Winter Magic was a significantly bigger show than what took place during halftime of most of the first 25 Super Bowls. Still, it wasn’t exactly a pop culture extravaganza. No network would ever run a big show directly against the Super Bowl. But against Winter Magic? There was an opportunity to gain viewers. With the score 17-0, Winter Magic’s ability to hold the audience was already going to be put the test. But now it had to compete with another popular show on another network.
Fox tried its hand at Super Bowl programming with a show that would skew to a younger demographic. While Winter Magic was airing on CBS, a live episode of In Living Color was running on Fox.
It got the NFL’s attention. One year later, the NFL had Michael Jackson and later, pop stars would soon become the norm. But Fox showed other networks that even if the Super Bowl will dominate most of the broadcast window, there is a portion of it that’s more up for grabs.
Seven years later, Fox, now one of the NFL’s broadcast partners, was broadcasting Super Bowl XXXIII between the Denver Broncos and Atlanta Falcons, found itself on the other end of counterprogramming. That was Halftime Heat, airing on the USA Network.
The Match
If you’re not familiar with the concept, an Empty arena match is a match held in an arena with no fans. There were commentators ringside and other workers in the backstage areas of the Tucson Convention Center, but the rest of the arena was empty. And the fight was not limited to the ring. Pinfalls would count ringside, in the locker room area, the kitchen, catering, the building offices and as we’d soon find out, the loading dock.
Now that we know why there was a need for a match, why halftime of the Super Bowl was chosen as its air date and what the match stipulations were, a final question lingers. How did the match go?
Reading those stipulations, that might sound like an intense, high-risk match. And to a degree, that happened. Both men took bumps that certainly looked painful.
But the match was not purely brutal like the Royal Rumble match had been. It was a mix of Attitude Era intensity and Attitude Era silliness.
The Rock threw Mankind into a cotton candy stand. Moments later, Mankind struck back, hitting The Rock with a bag of popcorn. After leaving the kitchen, the two went into the catering area and had what amounted to a food fight. Mankind got sauce in his eye, prompting The Rock to pull some with his finger, taste it and taunt his opponent by saying, “it’s mild.”
After continuing the brawl through the building’s offices, The Rock and Mankind found themselves on the loading dock. Mankind eventually locked his finishing move, The Mandible Claw, on The Rock, leaving the champion not only incapacitated, but with his shoulders on the ground.
As luck would have it (for Mankind, anyway), The Rock was also directly underneath a forklift, which was carrying a pallet with several kegs on it. While Mankind had won countless matches with The Mandible Claw, he didn’t want to take any chances.
Mankind took control of the forklift, politely asking the operator to get out. He then slowly dropped the pallet onto The Rock. And while the champion was now revived after The Mandible Claw, he was stuck under the pallet. Mankind got out of the forklift and covered The Rock. The referee administered the three count and once again, Mankind was the World Wrestling Federation Champion.
Did it work?
Take any two wrestlers from any era and put them in their primes. It’s nearly impossible to imagine any pair pulling the match off this well. You need the right blend of intensity and comedy, which The Rock and Mankind had, especially with each other. In fact, unless Stone Cold Steve Austin was going against one of these two, it’s inconceivable that any other match would be close to this one. Even The Rock and Mankind had moments that made it hard to suspend our disbelief.
Mankind, who less than a week earlier had endured several chair shots to the head, was now incapacitated after being thrown into Cotton Candy? The Rock, who himself endured plenty of pain in the I Quit match, was downed by popcorn? Mankind’s bare hands were rubbed against a hot stove. But moments later, his hands weren’t hurting at all? And as silly as the forklift finish was on its own, it was made sillier by a camera on the pallet, which captured The Rock’s face as it was being lowered.
There are moments when professional wrestling looks a little too fake. This match featured several. Yet, because of the brilliance of the two competitors, it worked. From a commercial perspective, it was a home run.
RD Reynolds of WrestleCrap skewered the match. But in doing so, he had to point out where it was an obvious success.
“There are a ton of folks who thought this match was something great, the very antithesis of WrestleCrap,” Reynolds wrote. “And to be fair, it may be the highest rated segment of anything we’ve ever inducted, garnering a whopping 6.6 rating. A 6.6 rating – not just on a Sunday night, but on a freakin’ SUPERBOWL Sunday night.”
Aftermath
Mankind and The Rock fought again for the title at the promotion’s next pay-per-view, February’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Mankind retained in that match, as he and The Rock fought to a draw in a Last Man Standing match. The Rock regained the title one day later, though, defeating Mankind in a Ladder match. He would hold the belt until WrestleMania on March 28, when he lost it to Austin.
Mankind’s two title wins served multiple purposes. One, they gave Foley, who had wrestled in promotions around the world and was one of the most respected wrestlers in the business, a chance to be on top. While he didn’t have the megastar appeal of The Rock or Austin (and really, who did?), pretty much every objective metric showed that the fans responded well to Foley’s brief time as champion.
But it also helped keep The Rock and Austin apart from each other. They certainly had involvement in each other’s feuds at the time, but neither was the other’s primary combatant. There was really no doubt that the WrestleMania main event would put those two against each other. Foley being thrown into the mix for a while was perfect. The Rock and Austin could build their rivalry but the match itself and the direct build to it was kept relatively fresh.
Despite the successful rating, WWE never really tried Halftime Heat again, at least not to the same degree. Halftime Heat did run the following year, but it just highlighted parts of that year’s Royal Rumble. It also included an interview with Jim Ross and Austin, who had been sidelined in November with a neck injury and was still months away from returning. No new matches took place.
Since then, Halftime Heat has only been revived once. A six-man tag match pitting Aleister Black, Ricochet and Velveteen Dream against Adam Cole, Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa aired on Feb. 3, 2019 on the WWE network during halftime of Super Bowl LIII between the Los Angeles Rams and New England Patriots.
But in general, counterprogramming is not what it was in the 1990s. There are some efforts, of course, but nothing to the degree that we saw then. This is partially because the Super Bowl Halftime Show is much more of an event now. Eventually, the NFL started bringing in top tier acts annually. These performers were at least once mega-popular acts, even if they weren’t at the time of their halftime shows.
It’s also worth noting that the game itself has been been more reliably good every year. The Broncos led the Falcons 17-6 at halftime of Super Bowl XXXIII. Since then, the average halftime lead has been eight points.
Also, the NFL is dominated by offenses far more than it was 25 years ago. Because of that, a big halftime lead doesn’t mean the game will be a blowout. The Baltimore Ravens led the San Francisco 49ers 24-6 at halftime of Super Bowl XLVII and barely hung on to a 34-31 win. Four years later, the Falcons led the New England Patriots 21-3 at halftime and lost the game.
At the time of the original Halftime Heat, mention of the Super Bowl was often followed with, “that’s always a blowout.” It’s simply not the case anymore. And while all counterprogramming is done by the time the second half kicks off, fans are going to be less likely to flip the channel away from a close game.
That’s not to say that we’ll never see another Halftime Heat. But it’s hard to imagine another event being quite like this one.
[Photo Credit: WWE/Peacock]
