Turnbuckle BEATdown: Kane and The Legend of May 19th

John Cena’s retirement tour is sort of a reckoning for me and perhaps many others because Cena has been such a staple of WWE for over twenty years now. Cena’s reign as a figurehead of the company is uncontested by any of his forebears in Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin, and The Rock and to see him step away is a sobering testament to how time waits for no man. The Ruthless Aggression era that gave birth to Cena has now come around to be a relic of the past to be excavated and exhumed and examined in the way many wrestling fans before looked back on the 80s, 90s, and the Attitude Era.

But we’re not here to be sober and look back on things with a wistful or existential lens, no. I’m here to look back at some of the outright insanity that was the WWE from 2002 until roughly 2009, a generally agreed upon timeline of the Ruthless Aggression era (though it can be argued that it stretched as far as into mid-2011) and a period where it was, frankly, probably embarrassing to be a wrestling fan following the “peak” of coolness and cultural relevance. Today, we’ll look at one of the biggest sufferers of RA era debauchery: “The Big Red Machine” Kane and the spring 2006 storyline that revolved around a circle on the calendar: The May 19th saga.

Kane went into 2006 as one half of the World Tag Team Champions on RAW with frequent frenemy Big Show. Say what you will about the team, but they were one of the only tag teams in WWE at this point in time that were any kind of interesting. Over on Smackdown, the WWE Tag Team Champions at one point were Renee Dupree and Kenzo Suzuki. Who? Exactly.

Anyway, Big Show and Kane successfully defended the World Tag Team Championships in the opening match of Wrestlemania 22 against Carlito and Chris Masters in a snapshot of just how nothing the division (and the booking, even for young stars) was at the time. The next night on RAW, however, they lost to the male cheerleader team the Spirit Squad when Kane got distracted by voices in his head and their rematch a week later was thrown out for the same reason.

These voices would keep haunting Kane for weeks. In classic campy wrestling fashion, we could also hear the voices sometimes and other times Kane would narrate them for us. The voices and Kane himself tormented Kane of the ominous date “May 19th”. The mystery would elevate for weeks and drive Kane to deeper and deeper insanity, leading to a one-on-one match between Big Show and Kane at Backlash 2006. The same show where Vince McMahon also fought the Judeo-Christian God.

The disturbances would continue and Kane would keep beating people up as a result. But why exactly was the date May 19th even significant? Well, we’d learn later on the RAW after May 19th that it was the day that Kane’s parents burned to death in kayfabe. But in reality, it was a way to promote the slasher flick Kane was the star in, See No Evil. In the film, Kane played freakshow Jacob Goodnight who had a large hook on a rope. He would use this like a grappling hook to reel in and gut his victims while also keeping a collection of their eyes, hence the title.

What was kinda “meh” about the whole thing was that May 19th fell on a Friday and Kane was a member of the Monday Night RAW roster, so we wouldn’t even get a proper climax if it ever occurred.

Enter Rey Mysterio’s infamously terrible initial World Heavyweight Championship reign.

At that same Wrestlemania 22, Mysterio would become champion riding a wave of sympathy coming from the sudden death of friend Eddie Guerrero in November 2005. Unfortunately for Rey, the fact that he was a sympathy champion was quite evident in the way he was booked following his title win. 

His first real contender that would face him for his title was recent United States Champion John “Bradshaw” Layfield. As a part of JBL’s chickenshit bully persona, he would select opponents every week for Rey to face, and all of the opponents would be much larger than the cruiserweight champ. JBL teasing Rey in the weeks leading up to the Judgment Day PPV by calling him “my little machismo” is still somehow etched and echoing in my brain nearly 20 years later.

Anyway, JBL would choose opponents like Mark Henry and the recently debuted Great Khali. But we got a special treat on the May19th edition of Smackdown when JBL brought Kane over to face Mysterio in the main event. It should be noted that Mysterio would lose to his larger opponents cleanly in the weeks leading into this, but here, it would result in a no contest that Kane wound up overwhelmingly looking stronger in. He just beat the tar out of Mysterio for 6 minutes. 

According to Glen Jacobs himself, Vince McMahon wanted the May 19th angle to result in a Kane world title reign, to which Jacobs declined. Considering the WWE title was on John Cena in the midst of his Superman push, that means Vince floated the idea of dethroning World Heavyweight Champion Rey Mysterio and all that came with his recent push for the sake of promoting a D-List tier slasher flick.

And that, plus the blink-and-you-miss-it explanation from the following RAW, was all we got of the main crux of the May 19th story. But we’re not done with the fallout of it yet! That’s because Kane would still be haunted by voices throughout May and June, with the voices being revealed to be coming from an “Imposter Kane” who wore Kane’s old mask and gear. 

This whole program went over just as well as the Undertaker vs. Undertaker match about a decade prior, however real Kane lost to Imposter Kane at Vengeance 2006. Even so, Kane beat up Imposter Kane backstage, snatched off his mask, and threw him out of the arena to never be seen again. Well, not as “Kane” anyway. The wrestler playing the gimmick would later be known as Festus aka Luke Gallows aka Doc Gallows aka DOC aka one of the founding members of the Bullet Club. 

That would be the last we saw or heard of anything about the May 19th storyline proper, but the movie it promoted would inspire storylines and imagery an entire year later. 

At the Royal Rumble 2007, Kane and King Booker would eliminate one another from the titular match. At No Way Out 2007, they would face in a low fuel grudge match to basically give both guys something to do going into Wrestlemania. On the go-home episode of Smackdown for No Way Out ‘07, King Booker and Queen Sharmell would do a “review” of See No Evil, which had by that point gotten a home release on DVD. Booker criticized Kane for not being able to be terrifying, and then presented his own version of See No Evil if he were the killer.

The result was low-key memetic gold shitpost with Booker completely taking the piss out of the whole thing and being the biggest ham with an axe this side of Jack Nicholson. It’s also the reason I wanted to write this article as an examination into not just how silly the story was, but just how far along something so silly could affect a character in this period of wrestling when star power seemed to be at its nadir. We’re still not done with the final stretch of this story, though.

It would come to an end, mercifully, at Wrestlemania 23. Riding the wave of promotions for the DVD release of the film, Kane would start coming back out with Jacob Goodnight’s rope and hook to terrorize people. Unfortunately, he drew the ire of someone he couldn’t really terrorize in The Great Khali and became Khali’s first ever Wrestlemania victim.

The true cherry here is just how and why this match came to fruition to begin with. Because Wrestlemania 23 would be the 20th anniversary of Wrestlemania 3, where Hulk Hogan famously slammed Andre the Giant in front of a sold out stadium in Detroit, and WM 23 would also be in Detroit, Hogan was pitched to make an appearance on the show.

Hogan wouldn’t just appear, but have a match with a returning Big Show to try and re-create the magic moment of body slamming a bigger man (which would also be an inadvertent full circle nod to Big Show’s original origin story in WCW: that he was Andre’s son seeking revenge on Hogan). Big Show hadn’t been seen on-screen since December 2006’s disastrous December to Dismember PPV and wouldn’t be back for this Wrestlemania, but ironically would be for the next Wrestlemania. When plans with Big Show fell through, Khali was slotted in to replace him. Hogan was eventually dropped entirely from plans and would be replaced by Kane. The two would recreate the star-making slam with a bit less aplomb.

In conclusion, this was all just one giant musing about how a random go-nowhere storyline for Kane was so cartoonishly nonsensical that it led him to being a Hulk Hogan analogue and maybe the second biggest Wrestlemania match in his entire career and a dumb skit a year later that embedded itself in my memory somehow. And this probably isn’t even a unique thing about Kane’s career or the Ruthless Aggression era, but rather, in line with the rest of it.