Last week, I revisited one of the more unforgettable debuts in WWF history, that of Goldust at In Your House 4 in October 1995. This week, we’re looking at another memorable debut, although the circumstances surrounding this one were very different. With Goldust, we’d spent weeks watching vignettes introducing the bizarre character, and we knew exactly when he was coming. His debut was an actual wrestling match against Marty Jannetty, which is generally what you’d expect when a new wrestler arrives in the company. That’s not always how things work in professional wrestling, of course, and as we’ll see this week, sometimes the most memorable debuts don’t involve a match at all.
On October 5, 1997, at the Kiel Center in St. Louis, Missouri, the World Wrestling Federation presented its first ever Badd Blood pay-per-view, an event headlined by Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker inside a brand new creation known as Hell in a Cell. The match itself would become one of the greatest encounters in WWF history, but as memorable as the action inside that enormous steel structure was, it would ultimately be what happened during the closing minutes that people would still be talking about nearly three decades later.
Because on that night, after months of warnings from Paul Bearer, The Undertaker finally came face to face with his younger brother, and business was about to pick up.
To fully appreciate Kane’s arrival, you have to go back several months to when Paul Bearer, the longtime manager and confidant of The Undertaker, began revealing some rather disturbing details about the Deadman’s childhood. Bearer had turned against The Undertaker in 1996, aligning himself with Mankind, and by the summer of 1997 he had begun threatening to reveal a terrible secret from The Undertaker’s past unless the Deadman returned to his side.
According to Bearer, The Undertaker had been responsible for a fire at his family’s funeral home when he was a child, a fire that supposedly killed his parents and younger brother, Kane. The Undertaker denied deliberately starting the fire, and as the story unfolded, Bearer eventually revealed that Kane had actually survived, although he had been horribly scarred by the flames and had spent much of his life hidden away from the world.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that professional wrestling has never been particularly concerned with maintaining a believable family history, and the idea that Paul Bearer had secretly been keeping The Undertaker’s supposedly dead brother hidden away for years certainly required a healthy suspension of disbelief. Then again, we were talking about a seven-foot mortician who could summon lightning, sit up after taking a beating, and occasionally rise from the dead, so I suppose a long-lost brother wasn’t exactly the most ridiculous thing the WWF had ever asked us to believe.
What made the storyline work, however, was that the WWF didn’t immediately introduce Kane and throw him into a match. Instead, Bearer spent months talking about him, threatening The Undertaker with his arrival, and slowly building the idea that there was someone out there who could not only match the Deadman physically, but who had spent his entire life blaming him for the destruction of their family.
The Undertaker, for his part, repeatedly insisted that he would never fight his own brother, a declaration that would become rather important once Kane finally arrived and began making his life a living hell.
By the time October rolled around, the audience knew Kane was coming. What they didn’t know was exactly when he would appear, what he would look like, or just how much trouble he was going to cause when he finally showed up.
While the Kane storyline had been simmering in the background, The Undertaker had another problem to deal with in the form of Shawn Michaels, who had cost him the WWF Championship at SummerSlam when he accidentally struck the Deadman with a steel chair intended for Bret Hart.
That incident led to a heated rivalry between the two, including a chaotic encounter at Ground Zero in September that ended without a winner, and with neither man able to settle their differences through conventional means, WWF officials decided to introduce a new match designed to keep the participants inside and everyone else outside.
Hell in a Cell.
In October 1997, this was something completely new, and the sight of that enormous steel structure surrounding the ring was genuinely intimidating. It was certainly a far cry from the big, chunky blue bar cage that we’d grown accustomed to seeing in the WWF over the years. On a side note, I absolutely loved that old blue cage, and to this day I wish the WWF had kept it around for traditional steel cage matches instead of replacing it with the chain-link version. But that’s probably a discussion worth saving for another Federation Friday.
There was no monthly gimmick pay-per-view to promote, no expectation that somebody had to fall off the roof, and no need to fill a card with multiple Cell matches simply because the event happened to be named after the structure. This was supposed to be the ultimate solution to a personal rivalry that had gotten completely out of control, and the WWF treated it accordingly.
The match itself was great, with Michaels spending much of the early going attempting to escape The Undertaker before eventually finding himself trapped inside the Cell with a man who wanted to tear him apart. Shawn bumped around like a madman, The Undertaker delivered one of the most vicious performances of his career, and the action eventually spilled outside the structure after a cameraman became involved in the proceedings.
Of course, that led to Michaels climbing onto the roof of the Cell, where The Undertaker followed him and proceeded to beat the hell out of him before Shawn eventually fell from the side of the structure and crashed through an announce table below.
It was brutal, violent, and unlike anything the WWF had presented before, and considering how much blood Michaels lost during the encounter, it’s a wonder he was still able to stand by the time the match approached its conclusion.
The Undertaker eventually dragged Michaels back into the ring, and with Shawn thoroughly beaten, the Deadman appeared ready to finish things off with a Tombstone Piledriver.
Then the lights went out.
The arena filled with the sound of ominous organ music, and before we even got our first glimpse of Kane, Jim Ross reacted to the strange sound with a wonderfully appropriate question: “What the hell is that?”
Moments later, a towering figure dressed in red and black stepped through the curtain alongside Paul Bearer, and Kane had officially arrived. What an entrance it was, too, because standing nearly seven feet tall, wearing a red and black bodysuit, a mask covering his face, and long black hair hanging down around his shoulders, Kane looked like something that had crawled straight out of The Undertaker’s nightmares. He wasn’t simply another big man in wrestling gear, and he certainly didn’t look like somebody who had shown up to introduce himself and shake hands.
Vince McMahon, who was handling commentary alongside Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler, delivered what would become one of the most famous calls in WWF history as he realized who was standing alongside Paul Bearer: “That’s gotta be Kane! That’s gotta be Kane!”
Kane marched toward the ring with Paul Bearer following behind him, climbed onto the apron, and proceeded to rip the locked Cell door right off its hinges. It was a tremendous visual, particularly after the WWF had spent the entire evening emphasizing that the structure was designed to keep everyone outside and prevent interference.
Apparently nobody had considered the possibility of The Undertaker’s psychotic younger brother showing up and tearing the damn door off.
Once inside, Kane stepped over the top rope and stood face to face with The Undertaker, who looked completely stunned by what he was seeing. For months, Bearer had threatened that Kane was alive and coming for revenge, and now the Deadman was standing across from a masked giant who looked every bit as imposing as he did.
Then Kane raised his arms and brought them down, sending fire exploding from the ring posts, just as it had so many times during The Undertaker’s entrances, only now the familiar display of supernatural power belonged to somebody else.
That was a brilliant touch, because in a matter of seconds the WWF had established that Kane wasn’t simply another giant coming after The Undertaker. He was a twisted reflection of the Deadman himself, a creature with similar powers, similar mannerisms, and apparently enough strength to do whatever the hell he wanted.
The Undertaker remained frozen, unwilling to fight his brother, and Kane took advantage by delivering a devastating Tombstone Piledriver before leaving the ring with Paul Bearer.
Shawn Michaels, who had spent the better part of the match getting beaten within an inch of his life, somehow managed to crawl over and cover The Undertaker for the victory.
One, two, three.
Michaels had won the first Hell in a Cell match, but nobody was thinking about Shawn Michaels anymore.
Everybody was thinking about Kane.
One of the more interesting things about Kane’s arrival is that the man underneath the mask, Glenn Jacobs, had already been given a couple of opportunities in the WWF, although neither had exactly turned him into a household name.
Jacobs had previously appeared as Isaac Yankem, Jerry Lawler’s personal dentist, and later as the fake Diesel during the company’s ill-advised attempt to replace Kevin Nash and Scott Hall after their departures for WCW. Neither character had exactly set the wrestling world on fire, although I suppose it’s difficult to blame Jacobs for failing to become a superstar while portraying an evil dentist.
With Kane, however, he finally had something he could sink his teeth into, and no, that wasn’t supposed to be another dentist joke.
The mask concealed his identity, the costume gave him an instantly recognizable appearance, and the storyline with The Undertaker provided him with a purpose beyond simply being another large wrestler who enjoyed beating people up. More importantly, Kane wasn’t immediately thrown into a series of competitive matches where he struggled to defeat wrestlers half his size, something that wrestling companies have occasionally had a rather unfortunate habit of doing with their supposedly unstoppable monsters.
Instead, Kane spent the following months destroying opponents and repeatedly attempting to provoke The Undertaker into a confrontation, while the Deadman continued refusing to fight his own brother. That reluctance eventually came to an end, and the two finally met in a singles match at WrestleMania XIV in March 1998, where The Undertaker needed three Tombstone Piledrivers to put Kane away.
The Brothers of Destruction storyline would continue in one form or another for years, with the two occasionally joining forces, occasionally trying to destroy each other, and somehow managing to make their family problems more complicated every time they reunited.
There would be championship reigns, betrayals, unmaskings, ridiculous storylines, and enough family drama to keep a daytime soap opera running for twenty years. Some of it was tremendous, some of it was downright awful, and some of it probably sounded better during a creative meeting than it did once it reached television.
But through all of it, Kane remained one of the most recognizable characters in the company, and Glenn Jacobs turned what could have easily been another short-lived gimmick into a career that lasted more than two decades. Not bad for the guy who used to be a dentist.
I’ve always believed that presentation is one of the most important aspects of pro wrestling, because all the talent in the world doesn’t mean much if the audience has no reason to care. On paper, Kane sounded like another ridiculous gimmick, a supposedly dead brother who survived a funeral home fire and returned wearing a mask to seek revenge against The Undertaker. But the WWF was transitioning into the darker, more violent Attitude Era, and Glenn Jacobs was the right man to bring the character to life. Sometimes the difference between a ridiculous gimmick and a legendary character is simply finding the right person to portray it.
As for Badd Blood itself, Kane’s arrival shouldn’t overshadow what Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker accomplished inside Hell in a Cell, because they delivered one of the greatest matches of the era. In fact, I think the quality of that match made Kane’s appearance even more memorable, as he interrupted the action at the exact moment everyone expected The Undertaker to finally get his revenge.
Twenty-nine years later, that first Hell in a Cell remains one of my favorite matches from the period, and the image of Kane ripping the door off its hinges remains one of the defining moments of the Attitude Era. Glenn Jacobs had gone from an evil dentist to a fake Diesel, but on October 5, 1997, he finally found the character that would define his career.
