At WrestleMania 14, Owen went up against the real HHH; Owen suffered a severe tear in his right ankle ligament in a match against Barry Windham a few weeks earlier. Owen wasn't fit for fight at WrestleMania, but still he gave as good as he could get in a really good match, but he wasn't able to get the win due to interference from Chyna, who dealt Owen a low blow, which gave Hunter the chance he was looking for to hook up the Pedigree for the win.
Obviously Owen and Hunter was far from finished with there feud with each other, at Raw is War, April 6th, Owen was on his way to win the Intercontinental Title from The Rock, when Chyna came down to the ring and whacked Owen with a baseball bat.
As DX became baby faces (Good guys) by mid-1998, Owen was left with no alternative but to return to the heel status that had served him his major career highlights. He "snapped" on a live edition of RAW, and joined the Nation (led by The Rock) after attacking “The Worlds most dangerous man” Ken Shamrock where he continued to insist, “Enough is enough and it’s time for a change." (Owen even had a cool T-Shirt with that on it I always wanted one but didn’t know where to get them) The Nation would feud with DX for the summer months, with Owen playing a significant part in storylines.
On the other hand, the Nation was on its last legs. As The Rock become more established, it became noticeable that he'd be spun off as a single-handed baby face. D-Lo Brown and Mark Henry remained as a tag team, but Owen was now a man without a country (on his own again). Though there was no official ceremony that marked the end of the Nation, Owen distanced himself from the group by moving onto feud with “The Worlds most dangerous man” Ken Shamrock and later Dan “The Beast” Severn.
The WWF ran a storyline in which Severn's neck was "broken" following an Owen Hart Piledriver like what happened to Austin at SummerSlam back in 1997. The worried Owen Hart then "retired" the following week on Raw saying that he never planned to hurt anybody, and couldn't live with himself if he crippled somebody yet again.