5 Greatest WWE Feuds Of The 90s (1)

1. Steve Austin vs. Vince McMahon

Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment was desperately in need of a spark in 1997. The company was on the receiving end of a thorough ass kicking by Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling and in danger of being put out of business. The New World Order was incredibly hot and fuelling that company’s success. The realism of their product completely exposed the cartoon-like atmosphere of McMahon’s wrestling company and proved that booking style to have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Determined not to fail, McMahon met with his talent and asked that they put more of themselves into the characters. More importantly, he announced that the company would be headed in a new, edgier direction going forward.
To fans that had been watching in the weeks that immediately followed that announcement, it was no surprise. Steve Austin, the hottest star in all of wrestling, had been flipping middle fingers and cursing like a sailor for months and had been garnering tremendous reactions from the fans. He was anti-authority, a renegade and a rebel who was prone to doing what he wanted, not what he was ordered to by some suit located on the fourth floor of Titan Towers. He was a beer-drinking everyman and the crowd, which was very blue collar at the time, ate it up. As great as Austin was, he was missing that one villain that could be his opposite, the villain that could spark a rivalry that would carry the company out of the doldrums and back into the spotlight. A program with Bret Hart did a great deal to launch him but now he needed someone so unlikable that fans would tune in to see him get his comeuppance on a weekly basis. Enter Mr. McMahon.
The Montreal Screwjob in November 1997 had unexpectedly created a character so detestable that fans relished the opportunity to boo him. He was WWE chairman Vince McMahon. An evil boss willing to stick it to any employee that does not subscribe to his way of doing business, he rubbed the hard-working men and women that filled arenas across the country the wrong way. He was an elitist, the type of boss every fan hated. In him, Austin finally had that figure that he could strike out at, a machine he could rage against.
After capturing the WWE Championship at WrestleMania XIV, Austin was confronted by a Mr. McMahon eager for the Texas Rattlesnake to change his ways. He wanted the cursing eliminated from his vernacular. He wanted the middle fingers to cease and he wanted Austin to appear presentable, wearing suits and sporting a smile. He wanted Austin to be a corporate champion that he and those in power could be proud of. Austin balked at the idea and spent weeks outsmarting the boss. When they finally met for what was to be the first match of McMahon’s career, the ratings indicated that the company had something special on its hands. For the first time in 83 weeks, the advertised Austin-McMahon match helped Raw to a win over WCW Nitro.

From there, the story took off. McMahon would regularly recruit Superstars to defeat Austin for the title. Sometimes they would succeed, more times they would not. It was the boss’ determination to have a champion he could be proud to call the face of his company and Austin’s own willingness to humiliate said boss that fueled the story and guided WWE to a level of success it could only have dreamed of. Wrestling became accepted in the mainstream media and Austin 3:16 t-shirts flooded malls across the country. The Attitude Era was created out of the conflict, which would continue well into the next Millennium.