1999 Year in Review | Retro Restling Reviews

So much changed over the course of this year. It is insane to look at where the company was on January 1st and where it ended up on December 31st.

The changes on screen - midcarders becoming main eventers, high-up-the-card acts departing and arriving at a rapid pace, the behind the scenes upheavals. The Attitude era is very much divided up into phases and this is the year where the shift from Vince Russo’s brand of scandalous, shocking, car crash TV into a more familiar action-adventure type show happened. It was a change for the better but the era of wrestling I fell in love with? It ended in around June of 1999 where due to injuries and fatigue, Stone Cold Steve Austin stopped being the singular focus of the company.

1999 was the year of The Rock. Don’t get me wrong, Mick Foley had a great year and Triple H had the biggest shift of where he was to where he ended up but it was The Rock who’s popularity exploded. It was The Rock who joined Austin as a fellow household name. It was The Rock who was shifting merchandise and selling out arenas damn near single handedly.

1999 more so than 1998 or 2000 illustrates the beauty of this period in wrestling history - constant, seismic change. There was no time to get bored, or stagnate, or lose interest. The constant evolution and flux and change is a sight to behold and sometimes week by week!

The negatives first - the treatment of the women’s division continues to be problematic - more so in the first half of the year than the second because let’s be honest, Russo. Wrestlemania is supposed to be the peak of the wrestling year but Wrestlemania 15 was a bust by most people’s measure. Some of the biggest storyline moments of the year - specifically the Higher Power - fall apart when you apply even a little bit of logic to them. There was little in the way of truly great wrestling matches as the company continued (correctly in my opinion) to focus on story and character over in ring performances.

The positives however, far outweigh the negatives. The product was white hot and excited crowds packed the arena every week. The booking and writing of the shows may be questionable but the fact is that every episode of Raw (and later Smackdown) felt like “can’t miss TV” with PPV level developments and matches appearing every week. The main event became so much deeper with the evolution of Mankind, The Rock and later in the year, Triple H. The tag team division started to really catch fire as a crop of hungry, talented young men started putting in world class performances and fully changing the industry (no hyperbole) with a tag team ladder match at No Mercy. The tide shifted in the Monday Night War and by stealing away young talents like Paul Wight and Chris Jericho (and a bunch more to come in early 2000) from WCW, the company was energised and the confidence of management led to them taking bigger risks and really leaning into the formula that had brought them this far.

That formula? Big matches on TV every week, constant storyline developments holding nothing back for later, and the brand of sex, violence and scandal that had brought them to this point.

1998 was the year of Stone Cold Steve Austin but 1999 was the year of the WWF in general. They reached heights they’d never dreamed of and amazingly, 2000 was even better!

The best matches of 1999 (not an exhaustive list, just some of my favourites)