Get your popcorn ready.
Business will be picking up on Monday Night Raw tonight, when the Undertaker will confront both WWE owner Vince McMahon and Shane McMahon, his opponent for the highly-anticipated Hell in a Cell match at WrestleMania 32 in Arlington, Texas on April 3.
Since returning to WWE for the first time in six years late last month and learning that the Phenom would be his WrestleMania 32 opponent, Shane-O-Mac has yet to come face-to-face with the Dead Man. Instead, he was hit with the Undertaker’s death bell entrance theme on Raw last week, only for Vince to emerge, providing for quite the interesting give-and-take between the distant father and son.
Part of that opening segment had Vince even showing his son a framed portrait of the two of them, only to stomp on it, shattering the frame into pieces. Shane would more than extract revenge, though, as he successfully fought off the handful of security guards that his father ordered into the ring to remove him from the arena.
That opening segment expressed so much tension between Vince and Shane that even those close to them wondered if there’s genuine heat between the father and son.
“Maybe it’s storyline, maybe it’s not,” WWE Hall of Famer Bret “the Hitman” Hart said on his debut episode of WrestleZone Radio’s The Sharpshooter Show. “I know there’s a lot of tension between Stephanie and Shane. It’s my understanding, unless I’m wrong, that there was a lot of tension there for quite a long time — which is why Shane left. They kind of passed him over and gave everything to Stephanie to run. There’s a lot of question marks about the legitimacy or the reality of what’s going on. For me, as WrestleMania gets closer, the wrestling fan in me is kind of excited about seeing where it goes.”
So are we, especially when the Undertaker injects himself into the mix tonight. How will he respond to Vince after already choking him with a cold warning a couple of weeks back? How will he respond to Shane for the first time since the match was set in stone?
We’ll find out tonight.