"Incoming" by Seth Mates
(any mentions of Shane in the article are in bold)
It has been a part of every World Wrestling Federation pay-per-view since the dawn of "Attitude". It has taken on superstars such as Stone Cold Steve Austin, Vince McMahon, Triple H and Undertaker, and never emerges unscathed. It single-handedly took out Kurt Angle at Summerslam 2000. At every pay-per-view, it starts out strong, but winds up destroyed - yet it's back at every show, just waiting to be part of the action. It's "la mesa de los anunciadores latinos" - better known as the Spanish announcers' table.
"Sometimes I feel like coming to work with a helmet," laughs Carlos Cabrera, one half of the Federation's Spanish announce team, along with Hugo Savinovich. "It's become out identity. You could compare it to the gold medals around Kurt Angle's neck. It's something that always goes with us, wherever we go - a part of the job. You have to stay alert all the time."
Every since the first Spanish announcers' table bump - at the 1995 Survivor Series, when Diesel threw Bret Hart into the table - the bumps have become a World Wrestling Federation pay-per-view tradition. With each show, the bumps become more elaborate and graniose. And when two superstars get near the table, fans begin to buzz, realising that something memorable and breathtaking is about to happen.
Perhaps the most infamous Spanish announcers' table bump came at the 1998 King of the Ring, when Mick Foley met Undertaker in a Hell in the Cell match. The Superstars began the bout by duking it out on top of the cge. Moments later, 'Taker grabbed Mick and tossed him off the 15-foot cell, right through the Spanish announcers' table.
"There are certain nights when the fans and the Superstars become one. That night, you could feel something special in the air," says Hugo. "You can never known how fast he was coming down unless you were there at that table. And the noise his body made - as good as Mick is, that was not a normal bump to take."
Carlos and Hugo had little time to react when Mick was thrown off the cage. In fact, Mick's boot hit Carlo's left hand on the way down, severely breaking his left ring finger. "I was just saying to myself, 'I hope he makes it,' because there's not too much you can do once you're in the air," Hugo says. "I had come to the decision that if I saw he wasn't going to fall on the table, I was at least going to try to protect his neck, because you can't control your body when you're thrown from that height. If he had fallen neck first, he could have been badly hurt. So I was very concerned. Even with all the precautions, it was still a mess after that."
Mick Foley - a man who has been in barbed-wire death matches, explosion matches and thumbtack matches - talked about the Hell in a Cell carnage in his book, Have A Nice Day! "It was the scariest moment of my life, but almost a relief when I landed on the announcers' table and felt it crumple beneath my weight. I felt suprisingly alright as I lay there among the wreckage. My shoulder was hurting, as it had become dislocated from the fall, and I felt a dull pain in my kidney area."
Mick writes that the most amazing thing to him was the crowd reaction. "I never have experienced or seen a reaction like it before, and I doubt I will again. For several days after the fact, I could watch the video, and I never ceased to be amazed by the reaction. It was like a chain reaction as every single person in the place stood up, even though there was nothing left to see but a prone human body lying underneath what used to be a table."
Undertaker - who watched from above as Mick too the painful dive onto the hard table below - says that Mick's bump was a true milestone in Federation history. "I don't think anybody will ever be thrown from that height onto a table again," he says. "But who knows? These guys are pushing the envelope every week now, but I think that'll always be instilled in people's memories as one of the most vicious bumps of all time."
In 1998, the Spanish announcers' table wasn't the tradition it is now, but that didn't stop Undertaker from revisiting Carlos and Hugo at that year's Summerslam, when he took on Stone Cold Steve Austin. With the Rattlesnake laying on the table, Undertaker got in the ring and jumped over the top rope, delivering a legdrop onto the table.
"What was I thinking?" laughs 'Taker. "I felt like I needed a high-impact move, I had thought about doing it before, and here we were at Summerslam battling for the title, and I said to myself 'This is not the time to hold anything back.' So I put him down, climbed up to the top and went for it. I cracked a bone in my ass; I paid for it as much as he did."
One man who observed 'Taker's legdrop with baited breath was Shane McMahon. Watching the American Bad Ass fly though the air, onto Austin and the table, Shane says he was inspired - so inspired that he paid homage to the Undertaker one year later, at Summerslam 1999. About 20 minutes into his Love Her or Leave Her Greenwich Street Fight against Test, Shane had the Mean Street Posse set Test up on the table, as he climbed to the top rope.
"I looked down at Test, my heart was in my throat, my blood was pumping, I heard the people and said 'Let's do this,'" Shane says. "I jumped, and everything went quiet for a second. I counted, 'One-Mississippi,' and then, 'BOOM!"
"I remember Shane going to the top, and knowing his crazy ass, I knew he was going to jump as high as he could," says Test. "When he got up there, the fans came alive. When he landed, I just remember the 'Holy s***!' chants that started. At the time, it was one of the biggest bumps that had ever been taken. It was a big part of our match, which is one of the best matches I've ever had. And it hurt like hell!"
Shane's Spanish announcers' table experience ended relatively well, but his father, Vince McMahon, wasn't as lucky. At the St. Valentine's Day Massacre pay-per-view in February 1999, Vince battled Austin in a steel-cage match. The two competitors were soon slugging it out on the side of the cage, and after one especially brutal shot by Austin, McMahon flew off the cage and onto the table below!
Unfortunately, McMahon fell in an odd position, and the table didn't immediately give way. As a result, his head, neck and back took the brunt of the assault, as he actually bounced up off the table before collapsing through it.
"The impact made one of those strange noises that make you go 'Uh-oh,'" Hugo says. "Being so close to the table, I can tell you that the impact we heard was mostly from his neck. I don't think he was fully prepared to go through what he went through. Sometimes the table has a mind of it's own."
A year and a half after Vince's unfortunate meeting with the table, Kurt Angle also learned the hard way that the Spanish announcers' table has a mind of its own. Angle's experience is such that he refers to the incident as "Something I'll never forget, even though I don't remember it."
At Summerslam 2000, Angle fought Triple H and The Rock in a Triple Threat Match. At the time, the main storyline was that Kurt was trying to steal Stephanie away from "The Game." Heading into the match, Triple H and Angle knew they had quite a story to tell in their bout - and they decided to use the Spanish announcers' table to help them. When the match began and the two ascended the table, however, the unexpected happened.
"As I went for the Pedigree, the table just broke out from under us," Triple H says. "Kurt took a Pedigree, but the table broke a bit faster than we envisioned, and I wasn't able to protect him properly. So we came crashing down. Kurt would have been okay, except his head crashed into a metal control box. The impact knocked him out. When I turned him over - this sounds funny - he was actually snoring. He was unconscious and snoring on the ground."
Kurt suffered a concussion, and as he was being taken backstage for medical assistance, it was unkown whether he would be able to return for the finish of the match. "As I was going backstage, I couldn't remember anything," Angle says. "I asked what happened, and Vince said, 'You feel through the table and hit your head on the floor. You've suffered a concussion.' I said 'Okay'. Then, 30 seconds later, I asked him again. I probably asked about 10 or 20 more times before I went back out there."
Even though he couldn't remember anything - and didn't even know where he was at times - Angle said he wanted to continue the match. Fortunately, everything went smoothly from then on, and he finished the match, even though he was already suffering from post-concussion syndrome - a condition which would affect him for six weeks following Summerslam. "We still had 25 minutes left when I went out there, and I couldn't remember anything that I was supposed to do. I was terrified," Angle says. "When I watch the video now, I laugh so hard, because I am so out of it. Vince has more respect for me now because of that match - he thinks I'm a hero. When you don't know what you did and you're considering a hero, you feel kind of guilty about it. To me, the real heroes were Triple H and The Rock, who held that match together and made it a success."
Two months after his concussion, Kurt was given the opportunity to confront any fear he might have had following his last table experience, and he seized it. On the October 30 episode of Raw is War, Triple H demolished the American hero, culminating in another Pedigree through the table. The time, the result was much smoother, as the reinforced table broke just when it was supposed to.
"We went up, and it worked perfectly," Angle says. "It was good to be able to do it again, and now I'm not so scared of it. It was just a freak thing. The experiences I've had with tables are no doubt scary."
Concussions. Splinters. Neck injuries. What does it feel like to go through the table? Let Shane put it in perspective. "You know how much it hurts when you do a belly-flop off a diving board into a pool?" he asks. "Imagine doing that from higher up, and instead of landing in water, you're coming down onto a hard wooden table. It hurts like hell."
Says Triple H, "People think the tables are made of some special material so they break easier, but they're not. It's just a table, but it's designed so that instead of breaking into stabbing pieces that could stab into you, the pieces are stronger than the connections. If something breaks, it's the connections. But it's still a very hard table."
As much as it hurts to go through a table, Triple H says it can be much more devastating when the table doesn't break. "When Mick and I were working around the time of the street fight and the Hell in a Cell match last year, there were a bunch of matches were Mick tried to piledrive me through the Spanish announcers' table, and it just wouldn't break," Triple H says.
"There was actually one show in particular - I want to say Mick gave me four of give piledrivers on that table, directly one after the other. I think we did it four or five times trying to break the table. And by the fourth or fifth one I was like, 'All right already! It's not gonna break - so before I lose consciousness, we better leave it at that.'"
Whether it breaks or not, the aura of the Spanish announcers' table cannot be denied. What's the draw? Why do Superstars target that particular piece of furniture? Many Superstars have theories. "You know why they always hit the Spanish table? Because no one can do the commentary on our match if we destroy the English one," jokes Big Show. "You wipe that out, and Jim Ross can't get us over. Me, I'm equal opportunity; I'll use both tables, I don't discriminate." "I think it's a tradition now," says Undertaker. "The fans know when we get close to it, there's a possibility that somebody's going to get slammed or thrown on it, or something's gonna happen to it." Bubba Ray Dudley - who is certainly no stranger to tables - chimed in with his expert opinion. "It's fun putting people through tables. People love it. It's a big payoff. You get to see people crash and burn. And the Spanish announcers' table is the biggest crash and burn of them all." Chris Jericho jokes that the shoody table-making in Spain is the culprit. "I think table-making techniques in Spain are not as highly developed as they are in this country. Once again, America's ingenuity and manufacturing prevails over Spain's; our table-making is much stronger. I think it has something to do with the reinforcing, the shelf brackets, or the lug nuts. You hit it, it explodes; and you're left with carnage."
Whatever the reason, the Spanish announcers' table will no doubt be part of the magic of the World Wrestling Federation for years to come.
"There was a point where I think we were using it a little too much, and we've held back on it for very important matches and very important moments. You can't utilize it every night or for every match, because it will become too routine," says Angle. "We've kept the Spanish announcers' table exclusive to special matches. When the fans see that coming, they say 'Okay, this is our treat'. And we've made it look so lethal, that the fans see a big red light flash that says 'Danger.' I think that's why fans respond to it so much - because they know something great is going to happen."
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RAW Magazine asked some Federation Superstars what was their favorite Spanish announcers' table bump of all time?
BIG SHOW: My favorite of all time had to be when Shane McMahon jumped off the top rope.
BUBBA RAY DUDLEY: Shane's also done some cool stuff putting people through it.
D-VON DUDLEY: My second favorite would have to be the Shane elbow.
BULL BUCHANAN: Of course, there's Mick's, and Vince and Shane.
JERRY LYNN: I would definately have to go with one of Shane's bumps. He gets some big air, and he's not afraid of anything."
HARDCORE HOLLY: Shane. It takes some balls to do it the way he did.
KEVIN KELLY: Of course, Shane McMahon with the elbow on Test was another great one.
HOWARD FINKEL: Shane's bump at Summerslam '99 blew me out of the water. Shane risks life and limb every time he does something. It's just unbelievable and outrageous, to be honest. Shane is the type of guy who's gonna do what it takes. I've never seen anything like it since.
TEDDY LONG: Shane's. The way he took that bump, the average man might not have survived it, or might have come out of it with an injury. But Shane's got a lot of heart - and a lot of guts. I admire the kid, and I thought the move was absolutely great.
Source: Raw Magazine, August 2001