On May 19, 1996, professional wrestlers Scott Hall and Kevin Nash competed in the final matches of their contracts with the then-World Wrestling Federation at Madison Square Garden. The main event was a steel cage match between Nash and Shawn Michaels, the reigning WWF champion.
At the end, Hall entered the ring and embraced Michaels. Triple H followed him in, embracing Hall and then Nash. All four of them engaged in a group hug, then turned towards the crowd, their arms held aloft.
Western Sydney’s Brandon Borello clashes with Sydney FC veteran Alex Wilkinson at a derby last year.Credit: Getty
The card wasn’t televised, but a couple of fans snuck in a camcorder, and the vision they captured would send shockwaves through the industry.
Hall and Michaels were ‘babyfaces’, or the good guys, according to WWF’s storylines. Nash and Triple H were ‘heels’, or bad guys. They were all close friends outside the ring and were emotional because Hall and Nash were about to leave for World Championship Wrestling, a rival promotion. But by breaking character, this moment (later dubbed the ‘Curtain Call’) changed the course of professional wrestling forever.
The sight of supposedly feuding wrestlers mixing like that shattered the illusion of ‘kayfabe’, the unwritten rule that wrestlers maintain their in-ring personas in public, and blurred the lines between performance and reality. Fans already knew what they were seeing was scripted, but the mask had slipped, and the narrative structure upon which the WWF had been built on was broken.
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