Mike Looks Back – The WWE European Title – Part Four: From Helsinki to Milan

Welcome once again to Mike Looks Back!

When we left things last week; Triple H was a two time European Champion and had been the first wrestler to defend the belt on a US broadcast pay per view event since August 1997. However, following his victory over Owen Hart at the Unforgiven In Your House event in April 1998, Triple H’s next defence didn’t come until the end of July 1998 on an episode of Raw. Triple H and his D-Generation X faction had begun a rivalry with The Rock and his Nation faction, with the plan being that Tri and Rocky would meet at the Fully Loaded In Your House event in a Two out of Three Falls match with both HHH’s European belt and Rock’s Intercontinental belt on the line. However, it was finally decided that just letting Chyna hang the belt over her shoulder whilst it was never defended was doing little for Triple H or the European Title, so the decision was made to take the belt off Triple H.

D’Lo Brown, a member of Rock’s Nation faction, was chosen as the one to dethrone HHH, and he did it on Raw with help from Rock in order to heat up the HHH Vs Rock issue. Brown had been part of the WWF roster since 1997 when he had appeared as an unnamed heavy for The Nation’s then leader Faarooq. It wasn’t the first time that Brown had been part of a militant African American group, as he’d previously been an associate of Da Gangsta’s when that group was part of Smoky Mountain Wrestling. Brown was heavyset and didn’t do a lot of wrestling for most of the first half of 1997, with him instead filling the role of “big dude who can take bumps for the stars” and doing a good job with it, including a memorable moment with Ahmed Johnson gave Brown a Pearl River Plunge on top of a car. However, as 1997 rolled on, Brown began to drop some weight and started wrestling in the ring more often, with him becoming a solid addition to the mid-card by the time 1998 began.

After being “injured” in a King of the Ring match with Dan Severn, Brown started wearing a chest protector and, in classic Pro Wrestling tradition, the storyline soon became that Brown didn’t actually need the protector any more but he was wearing it anyway as a way of getting an unfair advantage in his matches. Brown was a good choice to hold a tertiary belt like the European Title as he was a solid in-ring performer and he was also reasonably over for a mid-card act. Rather than being an overly big star who didn’t need the belt, or a lower level wrestler who wasn’t deserving of it, Brown was at just about the right level to be European Champion, as he was over enough that he could justify holding the belt and the belt itself would be capable of giving him a bit of a boost on top of that. What also helped was that Brown really leaned into being the Champion and made it his own.

Whereas Shawn Michaels and Triple H had treated the belt mostly with open contempt, Brown by comparison was clearly thrilled to be Champion and it actually helped make the European Title seem important and worth having that Brown was so happy to hold it. Brown added some flavour to his stint as Champion by demanding that he be announced from a different European city every time he defended the belt, with cities like Helsinki in Finland and Milan in Italy getting shout outs whilst he wrestled. It was an effective mid-card gimmick which, combined with the chest protector and Brown getting increasingly more comfortable in his own skin, helped Brown climb up the ranks to arguably become the second most over act in the entire Nation group at the time, which was impressive when you consider that Rock and Owen Hart were also part of the group.

Sadly for Brown the parade of terrible finishes in European Title matches plagued him the same way it had plagued previous champions Davey Boy Smith and Owen Hart, as almost every match Brown had for the belt either ended in a Count Out or DQ, with a victory over Val Venis on HeAT at the end of August being the sole occasion that Brown actually got to pin or submit an opponent in a Title Match. Despite this, Brown did still get to feature on the SummerSlam 1998 card, as he had an energetic opener with Val Venis that did a good job of showcasing two of the WWF’s younger up and coming stars, although the match in question was sadly marred by yet another DQ finish. Although the matches with Venis did somewhat represent a trend during Brown’s reign, as the majority of his Title defences were against younger workers who could generally “go” in the ring, with the most notable series of matches coming with X-Pac.

X-Pac had previously wrestled in the WWF as The 1-2-3 Kid but he’d left for WCW in 1996 in order to join real-life friends Scott Hall and Kevin Nash in their nWo faction. Wrestling as “Syxx”, the former Kid had done reasonably well in WCW, with him usually being the nWo member who was there to carry the workload in big matches, something he did a good job of. Sadly for Syxx, he ended up being the victim of wrestling politics, as WCW President Eric Bischoff seemingly decided to assert his authority and send a message to both Nash and Hall by firing their buddy when he was out with an injury. Bischoff did seem to relent somewhat, but by that point Syxx was so steamed that he decided to take up the WWF on a contract offer, with him appearing as the newest member of the D-Generation X faction following WrestleMania XIV and cutting a blistering shoot promo on Sleazy E that went some way to making DX just as edgy a group as the, now waning and overexposed, nWo stable. It took the newly renamed X-Pac a few months to get healthy enough to really start contributing inside the ring, with a match against Owen Hart at King of the Ring 1998 being his first pay per view in-ring jaunt since returning to the WWF.

Once X-Pac started finding his sea legs he showed that he was a pretty effective underdog babyface, especially when in there with bigger opponents who could bully him around. Brown met that criteria well, as he was somewhere between high-200’s and low-300’s weight wise at the time, so he could use his power and size to pummel poor X-Pac, whilst also using his speed, agility and explosiveness to keep up with the former Kid when the smaller of the two tried working at his trademark quicker clip. This meant that the matches between Brown and X-Pac for the European Title were often some of the better matches on the shows they took place on, and better yet, the two were actually allowed to do some proper finishes as well.

Brown and X-Pac traded the belt during the autumn months of 1998, with X-Pac defeating Brown for the belt, Brown regaining it, and then the two having a climactic bout at the Judgment Day 1998 pay per view event, where X-Pac defeated Brown in an enjoyable match to regain the belt and win the feud. After seeing so many of the first holders of the European Title either not being able to buy a pin-fall win or treating the belt itself as some kind of joke/inconvenience, Brown and X-Pac restored the belt to a level of credibility it arguably hadn’t seen before. Brown and X-Pac were both talented wrestlers who personified the WWF’s Attitude Era “youth movement”, and they were also over acts in the mid-card who both treated the belt like it was something worth having.

To get fans to care about a belt you first have to make it look like the wrestlers themselves actually care about it, and the Brown Vs X-Pac feud really helped create that feeling. Brown loved having the belt and acted like he was genuinely crestfallen when he didn’t have it any more, which was a world away from Shawn Michaels taking a dive to Triple H so that he didn’t have to be burdened by carrying the belt around any more. X-Pac’s performances in the feud with Brown showed that he was mostly over the ring rust he’d suffered from after first coming back from injury, and should have been a harbinger for a period of prestige for the belt, but things didn’t quite end up working out that way, which we’ll cover next week when Mike Looks Back.