Welcome to part two of our five-part countdown ranking every WWE WrestleMania main event! We've moved up from the bottom of the barrel to the matches that weren't so good, but not terrible either. Let's look at numbers 40 through 31!
40. Sycho Sid vs. The Undertaker - WrestleMania 13
Another in a long line of underwhelming big man main events, Sid vs. Taker was put in the unenviable position of not only following the previous year's Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels epic, but being thoroughly upstaged by the Bret Hart-Steve Austin instant classic two bouts earlier. Undertaker did his best to lead the inept Sid through a good main event, but as Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart had each learned months earlier, there's only so much one can do with this guy between the ropes. The two behemoths slogged through the 21-minute contest, with the most memorable moments occurring only when an angry Bret Hart ran to the ring to protest his exclusion from the WWF Title match. Several minutes of boring offense and a Tombstone Piledriver later, and Undertaker had won his second WWF Championship, at least ending the night on a high note in front of an appreciative audience. But otherwise this match was pretty turd-like.
39. Randy Savage vs. Ted Dibiase - WrestleMania IV
The finals of the WrestleMania IV tournament to crown a new WWF Champion has to be high on the list of most disappointing matches ever. With two accomplished workers exploding with charisma like Randy Savage and Ted Dibiase, this should've been an 80s classic affair. Sadly the match took a wayback seat to the outside the ring shenanigans, starting with Andre the Giant and Virgil constantly interfering. Rather than the referee simply ejecting them from ringside, they had Elizabeth run to the back and get help in the form of Savage's "big brother" Hulk Hogan, who in the closing moments whacked Dibiase in the back with a chair just when Ted was about to win the title. Wow, what a great way for a new top babyface to become champion.... Instead of the Macho Man getting to fully enjoy his big moment after a blistering main event, he had to share the spotlight with the former champ after an overbooked nine-minute mess. The sight of Savage celebrating with Elizabeth and the WWF Title on his shoulder was a grand image to end WrestleMania IV on, but the match that led to it kinda sucked.
38. Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns - WrestleMania 38, Night 2
Some might think I'm being too hard on this match, but I don't think I am. Brock and Roman had met twice before on the Grandest Stage of Them All, their first bout scoring high with fans and critics alike, aided by the surprise Money in the Bank cash-in of Seth Rollins to create a highly memorable finale, and their second a very well-worked slugfest marred by fan hostility. The ingredients were all in place for this third 'Mania encounter to leave its two predecessors in the dust - a very over babyface Brock vs. a dominant monster heel Roman, a molten live crowd, a big fight feel - and yet the match underachieved to a shameful degree. What went wrong? Well for my money it was all about the lazy, unimaginative booking. Instead of having either guy do anything remotely unexpected or special, the company went ahead with the standard Goldberg match formula, both men playing the role of the one-dimensional, two-move clod. Big move, big move, big move, big move, finisher, finisher, finisher, finisher. Brock Lesnar is one of the most accomplished athletes we've ever seen in a wrestling ring, and yet his arsenal has been reduced to psychology-free signature moves, with no feeling-out process, no wear-down holds to build suspense, no storytelling whatsoever. Roman Reigns is fully capable of putting in a near-great in-ring performance, and yet in this match his offense consisted of the same two signature spots over and over. In twelve minutes the two of them performed a combined six wrestling moves - overhead suplex, German suplex, kimura, F5 for Brock, and Superman punch and spear for Roman. That's embarrassingly lazy booking. If there's no working up to a wrestler's big moves, there's no story - it's just finisher spamming. Absolutely disgraceful for two athletes of this caliber to turn in a two-star match on the biggest show of the year, particularly given its billing as The Biggest WrestleMania Main Event of All Time. Get fuckin' real.
37. Hulk Hogan vs. King Kong Bundy - WrestleMania 2
The first (and for 35 years only) steel cage match in WrestleMania history is one of those silly, cartoonish Hulk Hogan bouts that I shouldn't enjoy nearly as much as I do. It's a match you love as a kid because two larger-than-life titans are pummeling each other inside a rigid blue-barred steel box. It's simple and easily digestible, and the good vs. evil dynamic couldn't be clearer - superhero vs. monster. The match came about after Bundy squashed Hogan's ribs on a Saturday Night's Main Event, and Hogan sold the injury like crazy going into this (up until his dumbass Hulk-up near the end of course). There's almost no real wrestling going on in this match, but Hogan and Bundy embodied their characters so well the match became a bit star rating-proof (a phenomenon that would be magnified tenfold a year later). This ten-minute main event is big, dumb, and fun, like a 1950s B-movie. I can't rank it any higher than 32nd because it's actually pretty terrible, but I can't help but get a kick out of it.
36. The Undertaker vs. Roman Reigns - WrestleMania 33
WrestleMania 33 was one of those shows with about four potential main events, where I believe the company wasn't even sure until that weekend which bout would go on last. The Universal Title match pitted Brock Lesnar vs. Goldberg, but you can't end a WrestleMania with a five-minute match, right? Oh wait... The WWE Title match was a laughably terrible Randy Orton vs. Bray Wyatt outing (later outdone in its awfulness with a rematch four years later). The other marquee match that could've gone last was Triple H vs. Seth Rollins in a 25-minute mentor vs. student bout, which felt like a WrestleMania main event except that it took place three hours into a five-hour show. But the company opted to put The Undertaker's swan song last, an intended passing of the torch to the current generation of stars, in particular Roman Reigns (Yup, Vince was still trying to make fetch happen with babyface Reigns at this point). So the 52-year-old Undertaker, moving like a much older man, went out there and worked a 21-minute match with the spry, youthful Reigns, and more or less stunk up the joint, botching spots, hobbling around, and generally looking eons past his prime. Reigns won the match after numerous spears, and in the segment's most memorable moment Taker took off his hat, coat and gloves and left them in the ring, as if to close the door on his legendary career. The problem was, the match just wasn't very good, and Taker was so unhappy with his performance he unretired a year later, rendering the only truly effective part of the match meaningless. It also didn't help that Taker's historic WrestleMania streak had already been broken three years earlier and thus Roman's win over him here was far less significant. This is the kind of wastefulness that happens when you don't plan ahead and look at how a creative decision might affect the future.
35. Triple H vs. Roman Reigns - WrestleMania 32
Only slightly better than Reigns' third WrestleMania main event was his second, a dull, languid 27-minute outing against Triple H, who'd recently won a superfluous ninth WWE Championship at that year's Royal Rumble. I know Seth Rollins' late-2015 knee injury threw a wrench into the company's WrestleMania plans, but was there seriously no one else they could've pushed into a WWE Title feud with Reigns here? No? Let's just go with another semi-retired part-timer in a top slot then. Super. Reigns had started to gain a bit of crowd support during his feud with Sheamus a few months earlier, Superman Punching Vince and savagely beating the Celtic Warrior to regain the championship after Sheamus's Money in the Bank cash-in. But a month later at the Rumble the company booked him to look like an unlikable chump once more, as he voluntarily left the Rumble match to have a kayfabe injury tended to, only returning near the end. Way to make your top babyface look the opposite of gallant. Anyway, Hunter swooped in to win the belt, and the match was set for 'Mania, even though Dean Ambrose was WAY more over and in fact delivered a far superior match to this one only a few weeks earlier. It's never a good sign when the B PPV three weeks before WrestleMania features a main event that bitchslaps the 'Mania one. Maybe Ambrose should've gotten this spot instead, hmm? But no, Vince was going to have his guy in the main event, and not surprisingly Roman failed to get over in a basic, sluggish Triple H snorer. He'd drop the title to the returning Seth Rollins only a few months later, and then Dean Ambrose would immediately cash in Money in the Bank. So the belt ended up on Dean after all....
34. Bam Bam Bigelow vs. Lawrence Taylor - WrestleMania XI
WrestleMania XI was the second edition to bump the actual main event for a far inferior #2 match, just for the sake of attracting mainstream appeal. Instead of WWF Champion Diesel facing his former best friend Shawn Michaels in the final match of the night, the WWF put lifelong midcarder Bam Bam Bigelow against retired NY Giant Lawrence Taylor. Uhhh....ok. To be fair, Taylor did his homework in prepping for this match and turned in a more than fine performance, and Bam Bam led him through the match like a pro. But why precisely did this match need to be in the main event slot? Taylor was added to the show to grab widespread attention of course, but wouldn't the buyrate and news coverage be identical with this in the sixth slot as opposed to the seventh? Furthermore, isn't the point of celebrity guests to get casual fans to order the PPV and then get hooked on the actual wrestling stars? So why not present the lineup as "Okay you've seen your big NFL match, now we're gonna show you what we're really about. Take it away, HBK!" Or at the very least, why wouldn't you book Taylor against someone you intended to push hard coming out of this match? Bam Bam was, as I said, a lifelong midcard guy in the WWF, and based on the followup to this show, he was never in line for any serious elevation. In fact after turning babyface and sharing exactly one PPV main event with Diesel, Sid and Tatanka, he was gone from the company by the end of the year. So again I go back to, what was the point of all this? If Taylor's involvement wasn't to get mainstream fans interested in the WWF product by giving the rub to either the current main event guys or Taylor's WrestleMania opponent, why bother at all? Like I said, from a workrate perspective this match was fine, but it did nothing for the WWF's shrinking bottom line (the buyrate was significantly lower than WrestleMania X's) and thus it has to be considered a failure.
33. Hulk Hogan vs. The Ultimate Warrior - WrestleMania VI
Time for me to take some more abuse... I know Hogan vs. Warrior is one of the most beloved old-school matches of all time, but I think it's maybe the most overrated match ever. The spectacle was there, don't get me wrong. Two larger-than-life personalities, the babyface superhero champion vs. the babyface cosmic weirdo challenger, vying for the top spot in the company. This was the first major babyface vs. babyface match since Bruno Sammartino vs. Pedro Morales, and the intent was for Hogan to pass the torch to the Warrior heading into the 1990s. All the ingredients were there for this to be the biggest match in decades. And then the match happened, and it was, well, pretty goddamn boring. Yes, the Toronto crowd was red-hot, and yes, both men knew how to work them, but the pressure was on to make this match the most epic thing of all time, and so the company overindulged itself by booking this to go 22 minutes when neither guy was equipped to keep a match interesting for that long. Such is the drawback of primarily pushing wrestlers based on musculature and not athleticism. Hogan and Warrior bumbled awkwardly through basic offense, going for bearhugs and other rest holds only minutes into the bout. Things eventually picked up toward the end, when Hogan missed his legdrop (for the first time to my knowledge), and Warrior hit his rather feeble-looking splash for the historic title win. The crowd was super into this, and I get why it's remembered so fondly by my generation who grew up with it, but even as a 14-year-old I remember finding the match underwhelming and lethargic, a real chore to sit through. Cut seven or eight minutes out and you'd have a Hulk vs. Thor smashing bonanza, but the company's mistake was attempting to pass these guys off as actual wrestlers. Randy Savage could get a classic 20-minute match out of either guy, they could not get one out of each other. I'm sorry, I know you all loved this, but I can't give it a thumbs up.
32. Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant - WrestleMania III
This here might be the most star rating-proof main event in wrestling history. A horribly injured 500-pound man against a two-move musclehead. This match should be the worst thing ever. And yet the 12 minutes during which Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant feebly pretended to beat each other up is still a supreme guilty pleasure. You all know how this match came about; Andre was tired of being underappreciated and of Hogan getting all the attention, so he turned heel and aligned himself with Hogan's mortal enemy Bobby Heenan. Andre tore Hogan's shirt, his crucifix, the skin on his chest, and the hearts out of kids everywhere, challenging Hogan to a WWF Title match at the biggest show of the year. The company pretended they'd never wrestled each other before (even though they did numerous times in 1980), and that Andre had never been bodyslammed (he had been numerous times over the years, albeit at a substantially lighter weight). The hype worked in spades, as 80,000 WWF fans packed the Pontiac Silverdome, creating one of the grandest visuals in wrestling lore - a colossal stadium interior, bathed in daylight from the translucent roof above. The match was as basic as can be; Andre was in serious pain and could barely move, and Hogan simply worked around his limitations, bouncing off the ropes, selling punches and boots to the face as though they were sledgehammers, and finally after 12 minutes came the Bodyslam Heard 'Round the World. One legdrop later and Hogan had vanquished the unbeatable ogre, to the thunderous cheers of legions of fans. So why's the match only ranked 26th? Well from a mechanical standpoint it's pretty awful. Like, borderline incompetent. But damn, is it still a fun watch for my inner eleven-year-old.
31. Steve Austin vs. Kevin Owens - WrestleMania 38, Night 1
19 years after his untimely retirement at age 38, Stone Cold Steve Austin finally came home for one last hurrah, facing a man who idolized him growing up, Kevin Owens. While the company's build to this match was pretty wretched - Owens was left to hype the match all by himself a la Shawn Michaels vs. Hulk Hogan in 2005, and no official match was announced until WrestleMania itself, during a KO Show segment - the match made for a feelgood finale in front of a nuclear hometown crowd. At age 57, Austin was of course very limited in what he could do, but Owens worked hard to hide said limitations and the two brawled all around the stadium, up the ramp, down the ramp, and back into the ring, where they traded Stunners before Austin got the win. This was no in-ring classic by any means, but it was an enjoyable romp and allowed one of the industry's biggest stars to have one final moment in the spotlight.
No comments:
Post a Comment