The Rock vs Hollywood Hulk Hogan is one of the most iconic matches, maybe THE most iconic match, in WWE history. Speaking on an AdFreeShows watchalong of the match, the man in the middle – Mike Chioda – opened up about how he “marked out” during the match, but so did another WWE legend backstage in Pat Patterson!
Pat Patterson, who tragically passed away at the beginning of the month, was hugely influential on The Rock, with The Great One paying an emotional tribute to Patterson recently. Mike Chioda revealed that the first-ever Intercontinental Champion had a heartwarming response when discussing the backstage reaction.
“Man, everybody’s clapping. Everybody – Vince, Pat Patterson, everyone. And God bless Pat. A good friend of mine for many years. He was a huge friend. And I remember him saying, ‘Oh, my God, when Hogan dropped the Leg Drop, the place went banana.’ And then the whole, you know, ‘this and that.’ I mean, Pat just… He marked out for the match. The whole place was… Everybody was clapping backstage and, you know, and they brought it to the table. There was so much so much expectation on this match. And they had to bring it. And they did. They executed this match perfectly.”
That “perfect execution” is even more impressive as Chioda revealed how much – or how little – preparation was done before the match.
“Hogan was just kind of like, ‘Brother, let’s just have fun out there. Let’s just do it.’ Rock was very more like, ‘Hey, ChiChi. I need you here. I need you there. I need you this spot, make sure you do this, make sure…’ Then the bump was the most important part. Then the grabbing the chair, making sure I grab the chair at the certain point in time, take away the chair. I had to milk the chair for a little bit, talk to Mark Eaton, the timekeeper out there, to kill some time until Rock hit the ropes. But that was the one spot we went over a couple of times and that was it. Just the timing of that bump. That was it. Everything else, they just talked about it in the back and outside the ring that day.
“It’s amazing how two old school talents could just talk like that, talk over for a little while. ‘All right. We’ll get back and we’ll talk about it again later.’ ‘Anything change? ‘No, maybe we should do this and do that,’ you know, and do this and a few other spots. But them two guys right there, icon and icon, they just had to talk about it a little bit. Like I said, we went over the spot with the bump twice maybe, that was it.”
Meanwhile, after the watch along, Inside The Ropes‘ Lead Writer Gary Cassidy got to ask Chioda all about the Montreal Screwjob.
You can watch back the Hulk Hogan vs The Rock WrestleMania X8 watch along with Mike Chioda via Patreon.com/AdFreeShows
Please H/T Inside The Ropes if you use any quotes from this article.