December 19, 1999 Wrestling Observer Newsletter: WWF Armageddon review, more

The one thing I can say for WWF Armageddon is, it was a weird show. When it was over, I couldn’t say that I liked or disliked it, and based on the response here, a lot of people has similar reactions.

Some of the undercard wrestling was decent. Nothing was particularly good. A few matches were pretty bad. But that’s to be expected both from the line-up, which didn’t promise on paper one good match, and from the WWF PPV undercards in general. If anything, the quality of the undercard looked to be lacking because its best undercard workers were all wasted in a Battle Royal setting.

The show was built around one match. As a “wrestling” match, it was terrible. Vince McMahon is not a wrestler. He put on a very good performance for a 54-year-old men (or 53, whatever) but it was way too long. For a match with that kind of build-up, it didn’t have much heat and reports we heard from those there live is that fans live hated the match, but with so much of the match outside the arena setting, it would be hard for the crowd to get into it. Hunter Hearst Helmsley hyperextended his knee during the practice session they went through earlier in the day, so one has to give him credit for basically carrying a non-worker for 30 minutes on a bad knee and making it at least watchable. This also explains why Raw was booked the next night to where Helmsley was put in a match that he actually never tagged into. At press time we never got a final word on Helmsley’s MRI which was done on 12/14 before the Raw show, but they were hopeful the injury wasn’t serious and that he’d be back able to actually wrestle a match by the time they go back on the road on 12/26. After the session, Helmsley spent hours icing and getting electrical stimulation on the knee, then wrapped it up and did the match.

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