This was a Hell in a Cell match with some stipulations that don’t matter much at all.
It’s a match about one spot, and fucking FINE, I’ll give it to you.
All things considered, it’s a pretty great spot.
Unfortunately, there is something like another twenty nine minutes outside of that spot (and a few moments in either direction, to be fair), and that is god damned obscene.
Supposedly, this was going to finally be the long awaited John Cena vs. Undertaker WrestleMania match, and it feels like they just never bothered adjusting the time to reflect that Undertaker’s opponent was now an equally old guy but also one who hadn’t wrestled in seven years, and not, you know, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time in Big Match John. There are a thousand other things they could have done with the time here. The midcard Brock Lesnar vs. Dean Ambrose match could have had another ten minutes and become a great match instead of a middling one. A shockingly decent Ryback vs. Kalisto pre-show match could have made it onto the main show. Shit, we could have done something even funnier and more absurd and made Triple H vs. Roman Reigns into a forty or forty five minute epic. Really, anything seems more interesting than these two having half an hour to play with, whether that means using the time productively or if it means wasting it in way funnier ways.
Immediately, it is apparent that neither Shane nor The Undertaker either cares about this being good or is capable of making it good.
Shane McMahon tries his all-time bad MMA guy routine, and The Undertaker beats his ass with all the fury and intensity of a man called into work on what he thought was going to be his day off. I may not have ever seen a more listless performance out of the Dead Man, as usually it’s just a lack of physical ability (2010s) or knowledge of how to be good (early 1990s) that gets in his way, moreso than effort. But here, he clearly and absolutely could not give less of a shit about any of this.
Taker and Shane not only waste all this time, but also waste in very dumb ways, doing like fucking finisher kickouts like it’s any other Taker Mania match. As if Shane McMahon was John Cena all along, except with allowances made for McMahon’s stuff. There’s a very odd sensation in these moments, like they didn’t bother changing the idea of the match from what Taker/Cena was supposed to be, but modified it for what Shane McMahon wanted and/or was capable of, instead of simply scrapping the larger idea outright. None of it makes a lick of sense, either in concept nor execution.
Even the big spot through the Cell wall, in which Taker tackles Shane to the outside to set up the big spot, is made less exciting on purpose by Shane beginning to trim the wall some with bolt cutters and telegraphing it. Even something that should provide an easy lizard brain ass thrill is not only rendered safer than ever, but telegraphed ahead of time, as if they wanted to remove any sort of joy from the thing.
It’s the sort of overblown and exhausting old man hardcore wrestling that makes one think back to the TNA Hardcore Justice 2010 match between Raven and Tommy Dreamer and think maybe you were too hard on the guys. God, at least they tried. At least there was a ghost of a great match somewhere there.
Not like this.
In the end, it’s a thirty minute match built around one recklessly wild spot, performed by two badly out of shape part time wrestlers who physically can’t do anything else but this. It’s exactly what your various independent deathmtch companies were criticized for in theory, but in execution, it’s truer here than it was in any of those cases people always loved to cite, but had never actually seen. It’s like a parody of something that never existed to begin with. Absolute dogshit and if you include the hype video, the entrances, and the post-match lingering, we spent almost fifty minutes on two shitty broken down old men play fighting and being publicly winded to get to one good ten second stretch.
Fifty minutes for ten good seconds.
In the immediate moments after this match, people who dared to voice the opinion that this absolutely fucking sucked were yelled at. Not just by people there inside Jerry World for the show itself, but like, people like me who were also just sitting on their couch or in the comfy chair in their shame cave/shame alcove by themselves watching the show on the TV. Told to enjoy things, to stop overthinking everything, called nerds for not just appreciating the one big spot. It was incredibly strange, and one of the weirder experiences I’ve had as a fan given how overwhelmingly and obviously terrible this match was, the sort of sentiment you usually only get from the most hopeless and pathetic sorts of WWE fans, but this time expressed by people whose opinions I would otherwise respect.
Thankfully, you have all finally stopped yelling at me for living in the truth, have gotten over whatever mass psychosis caused such poor behavior, and ideally, you have joined me in that freeing light.
A commission here from old friend and spiritual advisor Big E. Vil. You too can pay me to watch any wrestling match you’d like and write a few hundred words about it if you head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match and if you would be so kind, make sure I haven’t already written about it and, if you want to be very cool, include a link.
A famous piece of wrestling TV amongst a certain sect of us, the famous brief Bill Watts era of Raw.
Before discussing the match, there are two things before and around the match that strike my interest in particular.
The highlight of the entire segment and show might have came before the bell even rings, with this absurd video of Shawn Michaels talking to kids and then being interviewed about it. He’s a stammering wreck, constantly talking instead about how cool it is that kids think he’s important and how good it feels for him, just total maniac shit, unable to talk about anything but himself and doubly as inept at portraying himself as a good human being. Shawn obviously can talk, but he’s not a very good liar. There’s an old Patton Oswalt bit from the early 2000s that I’m sure is nowhere near as funny now as it was then about how George W. Bush was only a dummy when he had to talk about normal stuff, but could talk when he was talking about war and vengeance. That came to mind again watching this, this total dullard at a loss for words when asked to convey any sense of sympathy or humanity, revealing this dead eyed husk going through motions because he’s supposed to care about kids or something. Shawn isn’t exactly W, but they are both cokeheads from Texas who got positions far beyond their skills or talents based entirely on personal relationships, so one can’t help but see that also.
The other, of course, is how great Vince McMahon is on commentary.
You can say he’s bad. Talk about him enthusiastically shouting “KICK SOME BUTT” when Diesel comes out or the perverse groans of sexual elation that escape his lips when Shawn Michaels comes down the aisle, or when the big guys are fighting. None of this is incorrect, and it’s one of those situations in which I 100% see the other side and acknowledge it as equally correct. Much like with points of view on Davey Richards’ wrestling, I don’t think there’s a wrong opinion.
Is Vince bad on commentary? Yeah, maybe. He certainly undercuts his top acts by being so lame and over the top in his obvious cheering. At the same time, I love it. That’s not just because he’s one of the voices I grew up with as a result of constantly renting these tapes from video stores when I ran out of 1998/1999 WWF and WCW pay-per-views to rent, but I get a real thrill out of it years later too. Not only is he wildly entertaining and very funny on accident, but I always really like it when you get a booker or the head of the company behind the announce desk.
Not only is usually it a sign of a true control freak like a Vince McMahon or a Gabe Sapolsky (Ian Rotten may be the exception here, as always), which is always fun, but it’s a chance to get the true unfiltered vision of what something is supposed to be. As direct a presentation of someone’s ideas, in this medium, as there possibly can be.
Honestly, any booker who doesn’t also do commentary on their shows is kind of a coward.
Anyways, there’s also a match here, apparently?
The match itself isn’t some bell to bell marvel exactly, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. If I was reviewing 1995 as a whole, it’s the sort of a match I would put on a preliminary list, but not feel too shaken up about cutting if I wanted to hit a certain deadline or if I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s good and I like it a lot, but as a match itself, hey whatever.
Shawn and Owen work really well together for most of this. I like Shawn with all three of these guys, honestly, and Taker and Yokozuna is a great match up that emphasizes the best qualities of each man. There’s guys here that I think people might expect me to be mean towards and that I usually love to be mean towards, but this is not a match that inspires any sort of meanness. Shawn does nothing offensive, Kev and Taker are utilized in short bursts, and everyone on Camp Cornette is so much fun to watch. It’s pure formula, but one executed well. Offense that mostly looks good, big personalities, not a lot of waste. Certainly there are better versions of a WWF/WWE TV main event tag over the years (one of them being perhaps my single favorite match ever), but this is all fine enough.
The meat comes after the match, in a classic Wattsian finish and post-match.
Bulldog benefits from the Camp being a much more polished unit, hitting Diesel with his slam and getting the pin when Yokozuna follows it with one of those big boy 600 lb legdrops, getting a mostly clean win going into his title match on pay-per-view. It’s sort of wasted on a nothing challenge like Bulldog as nobody believe he would beat Diesel anyways, but it’s a nice sentiment with Diesel’s first loss in a real long time and it coming in a perfect sort of a way, clean but still just a little bit unfair.
After the match, both King Mabel and Dean Douglas come down and help the Camp beat up the good guys (certainly not Our Heroes, but the protagonists of the story all the same). Shawn gets the piss beaten out of him by Shane Douglas on the outside in perhaps the best non-Yokozuna bit of action in this entire thing, ending with a Gourdbuster on the steps. Mabel and Yokozuna gang up to hit like a thousand splashes and leg drops on the dead guy, eventually breaking his face.
A more prolonged, effective, and brutal beating than you usually get from the heels in the WWF, resulting in them (briefly) feeling like actual threats instead of just villain of the month tackle dummies as they so often did in the mid 1990s.
Less great as a match than I remembered, but a lovely angle and a wonderful chunk of pro wrestling television. A real classical sort of a thing, and different from so much WWF TV. First in having them still down in the ring after the break, giving you the feeling this is something a little more than a TV show about wrestling as something goes wrong like they do in real athletics. Couple it with a classic territory style promo at the end of the show, and it’s no surprise people have remembered it for all this time. Not a reinvention of the wheel, but a hell of a wheel on display all the same.
Something to be watched and studied, and something that still stands out over a quarter century later.
More of the Black Friday Sale commissions, again from Big E. Vil. You too have the ability to pay me to watch and then write about wrestling matches or other things, and you can head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon to do that. That’s $5 per match and if you want more than just that (or less? idk), hit the DMs and we can negotiate that too.
This was for The Undertaker’s WWE Undisputed Title.
I know that for a long time, this was my friend’s favorite match ever. Might be able to figure that one out based on the name. Before he sent the details of his commission and said it wasn’t his #1 favorite anymore, I still probably would have said it was if I had to. You know, gun to head, name the favorite pro wrestling match of a guy you’ve been internet friends with for thirteen years or whatever. That classic scenario.
My thoughts on the matter?
First of all, “Downfall” is a banger.
I’m fairly on the record about not loving the WWE triple threat format. It’s often overlong and filled with a lot of dead space. Either full of chunks where someone is down outside for way longer than ever feels appropriate or full of cutesy three way spots that make no sense, as they try to somehow make a WWE version of one of the early ROH three way matches. Then, you can get into all the other flaws of modern WWE, which always seem worse in matches like these. Stupid faces, drawing everything out for the sake of DRAMA, acting like the ordinary and routine is mindblowing, that sort of thing. While not an absolute dead end that results in no great matches ever, a whole lot of great wrestlers have gone into WWE three way matches and come up short. It’s a really really easy thing to get wrong.
This is a match that gets it totally right.
While this isn’t a match I think of quite as highly as my friend, it is something close to the ideal version of this thing.
While lacking the emotional throughline of something like the WrestleMania XX main event for example, it stands above so much of the pile as a WWE three way for avoiding so many of the negatives that can drag a three way down. Nobody ever just vanishes in this match for any longer than makes sense, there are very few three way spots if any, and there’s no real sense of waste to the thing. Above all, it always feels like the match is moving forward. From beginning to end, it’s wrestled at a fairly blistering pace and does so with very little repetition. You even get a little blood out of the thing and one beautifully gruesome unprotected chair shot to the face (it’s okay, it’s only to The Undertaker). It’s one of those special sorts of staggeringly confident matches, where every single aspect of it is so completely sure-footed, and the match goes on to prove that approach almost completely and totally correct, save one (1) finisher theft section that feels like an Attitude Era holdover prereq for a match like this.
A big part of this too is that there isn’t really a weak point.
The exchanges between Angle and Rock are especially great, perfect opponents getting to meet each other for the last time in a match like this. The match is significantly better when that’s the pairing in the ring, although as Undertaker is in the middle of his career year, he’s not the weak spot that a lot of people might thing. Not the hyperathletic maniac that the other two are, but a stellar bully heel still capable of delivering a sort of physical beating that provides a fun and easy contrast to the other two.
By the end, they’re able to do just about everything in the arsenals of all three without it ever feeling exhaustive or excessive beyond what the situation calls for. Angle’s plots and schemes fail, as his try and pinning Rock instead when he can’t beat Taker now that he sees him coming leads him right into the Rock Bottom. Taker just misses the save, and Rock wins the title to end a real barnburner.
Ideal WWE main event bullshit, the sort of thing that you can throw on every few years and just revel in. Mindless fun, but assembled with such a beautiful precision. Excess can be charming when done right. Just because something is big and dumb doesn’t have to mean it’s stupid either. As to wrestling matches as something like CON-AIR or GODZILLA: FINAL WARS or TOKYO DRIFT is to movies. Let it be what it is, abandon the pretense entirely, and something like this can still be so much fun.
I don’t love it like those movies exactly, or to the same level that my friend does, but this is an exceedingly fun piece of nonsense that holds up surprisingly well.
The worst thing I have to say about this — behind the undeniable and unavoidable reality that The Undertaker is shot and should not be wrestling — is that it’s only the second best Hell in a Cell match that these two have ever had. However, I’m of the opinion that their 2002 meeting is the best Hell in a Cell match ever, so that isn’t a major issue. “This isn’t the all-time best version of a thing” is no complaint at all, especially on the thirty second iteration of that thing.
By this point, especially in the earlier Cell match on this event, you can really feel that this is a match that’s happened thirty times or so. Once a special and novel thing, Hell in a Cell has largely become a gimmick that needs a match every year, or rather two or three of them. Since it became a yearly event in 2009, most of these matches have felt like normal matches shoved into the Cell, unfortunately reflecting the reality of the situation. With the majority of these matches, very little ever differentiates it from a No DQ match or a Street Fight or an Extreme Rules match, or any other phrase WWE uses to mean the same thing. That’s not to say they’ve all been bad, but they’ve all been very normal. What was once the most dangerous match in the company transformed into anything else, the sense of danger removed alongside the ability to bleed at will, although not because of that as many people have claimed. Spiritually bloodless, as much as it is literally bloodless.
Thankfully, this match is neither spiritually bloodless or literally bloodless.
It’s the EXACT match these two need to have at this point to have a great match, and this is a fucking great match.
The prop work of other HIAC matches is gone. It’s two men in a cage. A chair and part of the steel steps are used in sports, but it’s mainly a match that gets back to the simple brutality of what the match used to be. While not a dive off the top of the cell or a tackle through the wall, Brock Lesnar standing out of Hell’s Gate and pummeling the old man with bare fists feels as much at home in a match like this as any Foley stunt or bloodletting from the early 2000s, including their previous meeting.
Outside of the disappointment of a medic wiping off each man’s crimson mask at different points, there’s very little about this match that feels neutered, safe, or regular. Beyond the blood, they break another rule to great effect when Lesnar brains Taker with a chair instead of just hitting him across the back. The cell is used more than it has been in a while, they get hurled around with zero caution outside, and the gloves literally come off at a point. They also manage to innovate on top of getting all the basic elements correct, or at least innovating for WWE which means borrowing for the first time. Lesnar finds a hole in the mat late in the match and tears a chunk loose to reveal the wood boards. It’s a spot that’s been used more and more in recent years before this outside of the WWE, but it’s one time when the WWE system gets the most out of a big idea. The hole in the canvas coming on accident before being exploited feels better and realer and nastier than Bully Ray exposing the boards on purpose. It’s more dangerous this way, and if there’s one thing this match understands, it’s how to make this shit feel dangerous.
It’s hard to get past that The Undertaker is old as shit and isn’t going to win, but like everything else, they get it as right as possible. The desperation plays into it, as he gets a few real lucky breaks, from getting the Hell’s Gate out of nowhere, to kicking the steps in Brock’s face, to getting the first move onto the exposed board. He’s never able to win though, because he can’t anymore. He both got lucky at SummerSlam and stole the win after that, and he can’t run away from paying that back any longer. (Had this been The Undertaker’s final Hell in a Cell match, there would be something kind of beautiful about it. A match invented so that The Undertaker could get back at someone who stole from him at SummerSlam finally being used to prevent The Undertaker from getting away with the same thing.) Because as The Undertaker of all people ought to know, when you gamble with the Devil, the house always wins. Brock Lesnar shuts him down with the stiffest low blow I’ve ever seen, and the second most impactful one this side of Orton/Bryan, before an F5 now onto the exposed wood finally gets the job done.
There have been great matches inside Hell in a Cell ever since that decision to get away from how brutal these matches used to be. There will again be great Hell in a Cell matches after this. However, this is the only one for a while in either direction that feels like Hell in a Cell used to feel and looks like what Hell in a Cell is supposed to look like. The ultimate statement that this should be left to the professionals, or at least those with enough pull to get away with things like this. A violent spectacle that, in another rarity for the WWE, never has to lie about what it is or what you’re seeing. For once, one of these with the ability to speak for itself.
A remarkably cozy piece of violence, that ages better and better every time I see it.
After failing to retire when The Streak was broken in 2014 and coming back for an all time embarrassment against Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania, they may as well just go back to this.
It’s better than WrestleMania, for sure.
That is to say Undertaker isn’t immediately concussed, is in better shape, and the match isn’t about a slow deconstruction of this all-aura huckster.
Instead, Brock Lesnar puts him into a Brock Lesnar epic and it rocks. A hundred German Suplexes, gross grounded elbows and body shots in the corner, F5 through the table, a little accidental blood on Lesnar, the works. As far as routines go, there are few better. The Undertaker is neither the best nor worst guy to get plugged into this, and he can throw a decent punch and has a few real over pieces of offense, so it works. He genuinely seems to give a shit about having a good match and just barely capable of that for the first time since 2013, and one of the last times in his career. There’s a ceiling here, but it’s a fun little thing for most of the match.
It also gives us an all time moment as Lesnar does the sit up, only for Taker to do it back and begin laughing at him like a maniac.
It’s all great.
Unfortunately it is the WWE and that is almost always preceded by a “but”. This match is no different, as Undertaker is given three (3) F5 kickouts when one seems borderline unbelievable, and then there’s a real bad finish. The bell rings for some reason (which is never explained????) when Lesnar has the Kimura on with his shoulders down off of a one count by the ref. Lesnar thinks he’s won while Charles Robinson shouts that obviously this is not over and then Undertaker low blows Lesnar and chokes him out with Hell’s Gate to get his win back (albeit while Lesnar gives him the finger before passing out, because Lesnar is the coolest).
It’s all very dumb and makes no sense, and is a result that is even worse.
This is a finish I used to be very mad about, at least around the time it happened. It is very dumb and you don’t need to protect the fucking Undertaker in 2015. It’s Brock Lesnar’s first loss in two and a half years and it’s wasted, even with the shoddy finish. You don’t blow off this guy beating The Streak by then having him get choked out by The Undertaker a year and a half later. Of course, he then wins the rubber match and is still Brock Lesnar, so whatever. There are other Brock Lesnar booking calls later that are far more worthy of getting mad over.
It also doesn’t matter because Brock’s next loss after this would be in like thirty seconds to Goldberg, so it’s not as though anyone was going to be made to begin with.
It’s WWE and once again, it is entirely about the moments and what happens in the present alone. Brock Lesnar rules, Brock Lesnar matches rule, and even if The Undertaker is a fat old shit who can’t go at this point, sitting up and laughing was objectively one of the funnier things in recent WWE history, so I can’t say this match gave me nothing.
Without any momentum, buzz, or help from booking, Wyatt is revealed entirely as what he is, which is an above average wrestler who needs all of the things he was robbed of in the spring of 2014 and won’t ever get back again in the same way. The Undertaker is even worse, the worst wrestler on this show. Barely mobile, almost looking depressed to even be here. The ultimate sign of how important The Streak was is this match, in which without it, we also have to look at him entirely as he is, and it’s a pitiful sight. Outworked and then some by Bray Wyatt of all people.
It’s all best expressed here.
A spot laid out and sold on commentary as incredibly brutal, but both performed and filmed with a total lack of skill to the point that your eyes immediately tell you that this is total bullshit. And within moments, none of it matters whatsoever.
The Undertaker eventually wins with the second Tombstone, Bray Wyatt the latest rube to be taken in by the “but you get to kick out of ONE finisher!” appeasement strategy that only works on the true marks.
A bad match, but a perfect summary of the WWE at this point and into the next six years and beyond
A year ago, Bray Wyatt was white hot, but in classic WWE fashion, they ran a heel too long against Cena and he left the feud far far far worse off than he came in. He was put into middling feuds and had his cool stable destroyed. Then at some point in the fall, the brain trust decided to run this match and they then began destroying the momentum of babyfaces to try and suddenly heat Wyatt up for this feud It was too little and too late and more than a little too transparent to ever work. So instead, it just hurt everyone Bray beat because you can’t just cheat and get him back there in three months, and it’s not even FOR anything because he in turn just gets fed to The Undertaker without so much as even a special entrance, the sign of who actually matters in the company in a given moment.
This fat shitty old man who can’t move without looking like he’s dying all over again, who should have retired a year ago, he’s the one to ultimately benefit in the end, and even he doesn’t benefit after a performance that leaves everyone going “yeah, shouldn’t have come back” following the most perfect retirement scenario everyone could have ever written. With that erased, he’s now not only a fat old decrepit shit, but one who will spend the next half decade in search of a proper ending after passing up the one chance he had to get it a thousand percent right.
Everyone looks worse.
Nobody gains anything.
A wonderful story and a true summation of the post-canon phase of WWE booking.
Many people were very mad about this at the time. I recognize the silliness of making fun of anyone for caring about this after being very Mad Online after watching Triple H vs. Sting again, but ultimately, anyone with high hopes for this match probably deserved to be disappointed in the first place. We are not the same. You have bought magic beans at least twice in your life.
Real wheat from the chaff shit in terms of what you got angriest about on this show.
I said once that there were very few full shows that I would ever even consider writing about in full, and this is one of them. Possibly the one of them.
It isn’t that it’s such an overwhelmingly great show that I couldn’t not do it all at once. It’s moreso that the matches and narratives on this show all feel so connected to each other and to something bigger that it would feel incorrect on some level not to just write about the entire show. Especially if I was already going to write about most of it anyways, just split up into more traditional match reviews. It’s too good, too important, and too interesting of a show not to cover as one complete thing.
MATCH #0: THE USOS VS. THE REAL AMERICANS VS. RYBAXEL VS. LOS MATADORES
This was an elimination match for the Usos’ WWE Tag Team Titles.
It’s fine pre-show work! Most of the quality in this match comes from The Usos and Cesaro, if we’re being wholly honest, but that’s a great tag team and one of the best wrestlers in the world. The fourth most important person in this is El Torito, and he manages at least one spectacular dive here to almost steal the show in a pre-show match. Cesaro and Swagger run through the two jobber teams before getting to the match that should have simply been here all along, and it’s wonderful. Cesaro against The Usos is wonderful, and they’re a fun enough babyface team to get the most out of Jack Swagger for the limited amount of time that this match asks him to do much of anything. A miscommunication between Cesaro and Swagger gives the Usos the win.
Nothing blowaway here, but a brisk, easy, and fun match. Usually not the case with WrestleMania pre-show work, and it’s almost entirely due to a tag team that deserves more than the pre-show and a wrestler who will finally (briefly) get his due later on.
three boy
Following the match, tensions finally come to a head, and Cesaro does the thing people have been begging for en masse for the last month since his breakout February, and dissolves the team. Cesaro does so with a crowd pleasing many rotation Giant Swing, which is about all that Jack Swagger, this act, and this unbelievably wasteful team ever really deserved.
WWE WRESTLEMANIA XXX
APRIL 6TH, 2014
SUPERDOME
NEW ORLEANS, LOUSIANA
The show begins with one of the more fun pieces of WWE nostalgia bullshit ever. Usually, it’s the same three groups or same twenty people we always see, but with three of the WWE’s former Aces in the ring and three of the four or five top guys in company history, it’s just really cool. Also Hulk Hogan fucks up and says “Silverdome” instead of Superdome and that’s like a bit for a thousand years.
More than just being cool, it’s also done in a very cool way, as Stone Cold interrupts Hogan and clowns him, leading to a real fun little bit of tension and also Stone Cold getting a “WHAT” for simply listing the first ten WrestleManias off when describing Hogan’s run. The Rock then comes out to ease the tension, and all three do a spectacular job redirecting it to the current generation, likening Hogan to Cena and Austin to Daniel Bryan, before all three share some beers.
Genuinely cool!
The exact correct use of nostalgia.
Before the show actually starts, the best WWE hype video of the last decade airs –
DANIEL BRYAN VS. TRIPLE H
It’s the best build up and storyline in WWE history.
I am done coaching it in “perhaps” and “maybe” and even “of its time”. It’s better than Austin and McMahon in 1998-1999, and that’s not the fault of either Austin or McMahon. The fact that people had to force this and the rest of this show into being adds a sense of stakes and real struggle to it that Austin and McMahon simply can’t entirely match up with, because Austin was just so obviously the man. All of the little touches between SummerSlam and Elimination Chamber are basically perfect. The Shawn Michaels stuff, the title ceremony, the Wyatts/Bryan feud with the only reasoning being “the devil made me do it”, etc.
Once the match itself got made, just about every segment was a classic. If I was a maniac enough to rank the best segments of the year, I’m pretty sure all of them would come from this program. Hunter’s refusal was perfect, the veneer just barely still on. The invasion of the fans under an OCCUPY RAW banner to force the match, then following up with the fake police handcuffing beatdown, as seen in the video above. The comeback weeks later, Hunter’s shitheel video of all the other fan favorites he’s buried, even these promos on early WWE Network Raw post shows that were just pure shouting about the rights of workers against The Authority. It’s all perfect.
The presentation of this as well is stunning. Daniel Bryan makes a spirited but very normal entrance, eschewing any of the WrestleMania pomp and circumstance usually afforded to people as over as he is. In contrast, Triple H makes this all-time over the top entrance presented as like the version of himself he sees inside his own insane and diseased brain. This gold coated warrior god-king surrounded by his NXT golden girl valkyries. It’s truly truly deranged, and absolutely perfect.
The match itself is one of the best in WrestleMania and company history.
In this match, Daniel Bryan is nearly perfect.
The arm work isn’t entirely airtight, that’s really it. Otherwise, an incredible performance. The fire at the start, the wry sort of way he dominates Hunter initially, even something like changing up the knee off the apron into a tornado DDT off the apron. Read it as a bigger move for a bigger show, or changing up because Triple H is an obsessive tape watcher, it works just as well either way. Say the same for Bryan breaking out a repeated Tope Suicida spot for the first time in forever, so it feels like a huge deal. The selling itself is terrific. Only using the one arm, having problems with the Yes Lock and other holds, classic stuff. Beyond the mechanical, it’s an all time great WWE babyface performance. He’s sympathetic enough to work as a classical underdog babyface, but then fiery enough and whipping enough ass to work as a classical WWE top level babyface in the same match.
The best thing Bryan does here might not even be anything he overtly does from bell to bell. As you may have read on this blog, Bryan is the greatest wrestler of all time, and as much of that is about individual performance as it is about bringing the best out of other wrestlers. Sometimes it means him pushing someone to something or providing an example for someone like him. Other times, it’s a more nebulous thing, with the reputation that Daniel Bryan has forcing someone to bring their best to the table for fear of being to blame if a a match isn’t exceptional.
This match is the ultimate statement of that, because there has never ever been a better version of Triple H than the one we saw here, the King of Kings Road. He’s had matches as good as this, a few even better, but they’ve all had some shortcut attached to them, some gimmick to help him out. This is a boiler plate professional wrestling match, and he has never looked better in one or performed more intelligently in any single wrestling match.
Bryan comes in with his left arm and shoulder bandaged up from the months going into this of people targeting it, starting way back in December 2013. Bryan’s smart enough to keep Hunter away time and time again. There’s a great undercurrent to this that Hunter isn’t quite the technical wrestler he imagines himself to be, and it’s not until he can get into some Attitude Era bullshit with an announce table does his arm work actually pay any sort of dividend. That’s what works so well about this match for Hunter, is that Bryan seems to get the essence of the Triple H character its core and works to it. It’s not some genius god-king like Hunter thinks, but it’s this power wrestler who knows JUST enough to be dangerous and who has absolutely no moral limits. He can’t fight Bryan on the ground, not really and no matter how smart or well schooled he is, but when he can get a Divorce Court on the announce table, he can finally do something. Much like the rest of the feud, they’re also smart enough to weaponize Triple H’s past, as best expressed with his use of the repeated Crossface holds. It’s not a thing that can ever really be said, for totally fair and obvious reasons, but Triple H now using the Crossface is SUCH a god damned thing, and him doing it to Bryan is perfect. This symbol of another thing he snuffed out once upon a time, but also another example of Triple H not totally getting everything he’s doing. He’s smart enough to go to the hurt arm, he’s seen enough to know the right things to do, but he never totally gets how to make the most out of an arm based attack and has no real idea how to win with it.
Hunter goes back to his power game when it gets too hard, and it dooms him. Bryan’s tough enough to kick out of the Pedigree, but that’s all Hunter has. He gets mean and nasty, but at the other end of that is simply going for it again. Bryan escapes, outmaneuvers him, and wins clean as a fucking sheet off of the running knee.
A genuine epic level struggle, but one that manages that without going anywhere close to too far, and one that achieves that status while always being real and grounded. A masterpiece of a match that in retrospect, only Daniel Bryan could ever have gotten off of the ground, Not simply because he brought the best out of Triple H, but because only he could create a scenario wild enough for a match like this to happen, but also for a match like this to be able to be this restrained in the first place. The all time expression of the unstated and often unintentional politics of being the best wrestler of all time.
Bryan gets to the main event after all, and Triple H finally gets one of these “I did the right thing!” moments that he’s actually allowed to talk about, which you know he’s been mad about for the last seven years.
****
Following the match, Triple H and his wife attack Bryan’s arm with a chair, to try and put the main event participation of Our Hero in doubt, despite not being able to actually stop him themselves. The working class hero did the work and got there fairly, only to be kneecapped anyways yet again because The Game has been rigged from the start. So it goes.
THE SHIELD VS. KANE & THE NEW AGE OUTLAWS
It’s two minutes.
It’s two minutes and it’s PERFECT.
The Shield completely runs through three old hacks. It’s exciting and incredibly fun and wholly dominant. They get maybe a punch or two in, but thankfully, this match totally abandons the pretense. These guys are old, they can’t hang, and The Shield completely runs through them. Roman spears all three, Dean and Seth dive on them repeatedly, and the match ends with the first ever Double Triple Powerbomb. Or the Triple-Double. It’s a waste of The Shield, they could have done more on this show, but at the same time, it’s such a wonderful show of force.
At the end, JBL delivers one of his better serious calls ever with, “there goes the Attitude Era”.
It’s obviously bullshit seven years later, but in the moment, following all the fun and positive things that happened so far, it really did feel that way at the time.
THE ANDRE THE GIANT MEMORIAL BATTLE ROYAL
The best WWE battle royal in a long time, close to a decade. There were several surprisingly good ones in the mid 2000s, and they succeeded for the same reason that this did, and it’s the overwhelming pool of talent in the ring and some creative composition. The dead weight gets out of the ring fast and for the most part, it’s all fun and creative. You get down to the meat of the thing, and it’s all great wrestlers. The Big Show, Sheamus, Del Rio, Mysterio, Ziggler, Cesaro, Goldust, and the like. Cool eliminations, fast pace, really gets rid of every issue with boring and routine WWE battle royals.
Somehow Cesaro makes it to the end against obvious winner The Big Show.
Except that Cesaro just explodes on him? He hits a flurry of uppercuts on the big fella, AND THEN SLAMS HIM OVER THE TOP AND OUT HOLY SHIT WHAT?
It’s another seemingly impossible feat on this show. A battle royal win that genuinely feels like a huge deal and a starmaker. Beyond that, a battle royal with real substance and that’s full of cool stuff, instead of just being the means to an end. Easily the best of all of these Andre battle royals, as the only one they took entirely seriously, and the best WWE battle royal in close to a decade in either direction.
***
Between the big turn earlier in the show and a win as powerful and definitive at that, it seems almost impossible to deny Cesaro going forward.
Before the next contest, WWE manages to accidentally touch on something real in the media world at the time when it’s happening. Another total stunner, I know. Bray Wyatt comes out to his swamp voodoo song in New Orleans with a live performance from the band in these elaborate and creepy little costumes, at the exact time that the first season of True Detective (the good one) was a big and major deal with a real similar overall vibe. We’re in Carcosa now. It’s the peak of Bray Wyatt’s career, this incredibly cool entrance while the entire act still feels like a huge huge deal.
JOHN CENA VS. BRAY WYATT
I’m not going to waste whatever credibility I may or may not have selling you on the idea that this is great.
It isn’t.
What it is though is a whole lot of fun.
The story itself is quite silly. Bray wants Cena to kill him and reveal that he’s a monster as part of some plan to show the world that Cena can be mean and violent too and that their hero is no better than him. It’s especially weird because like…yeah, no shit? If you have a working memory, you remember all these big violent things Cena’s done to end feuds. The part of it that does work though is Bray trying to bait Cena into a disqualification so he has a huge WrestleMania win, but as always, the story told bell to bell is rarely the same as the one told on commentary when it comes to these WWE concept matches.
If you can get past that though, this is a lot of fun. It’s Cena against a Monster of the Week, but Bray’s physical and over enough for it to be a fun application of formula. Cena breaks out a lot of the bigger stuff for a WrestleMania match, even if he’s in the middle of the card for the first time in a while. Wyatt matches him with a few bigger moves and more spectacular moments than usual. It’d be ideal, if not for the end, when that bullshit comes back around. Bray gives Cena a chair for some reason, like he’s going to hit him with it, but without being nearly annoying or mean enough to warrant that. Cena hits the Family outside with it instead, and counters Sister Abby into the FU to win. I’m good with the bullshit on some Buy The Ticket shit, especially with a match this fun otherwise, but yeah, real weird and a depressing harbinger of what’s to come, both for the feud and for the entire Wyatt character, who will not be covered very often on this site from now on.
Pure WWE bullshit, but wrapped up in a surprisingly fun match bell to bell.
an extremely borderline three boy
THE UNDERTAKER VS. BROCK LESNAR
We’re not here to talk about the match. You know that.
This one’s all about the finish, and saying that, this is probably better than its reputation but also nowhere near good enough to eclipse the moment itself. The entire deal is about Undertaker being so assured in his victory after the last five years he’s survived, but no longer really doing anything to guarantee that. The entire match he feels half a speed off, and leans entirely on what worked on the past. He tries the Hell’s Gate from his back that’s won a few in the past, but it totally fails. He never makes a real honest comeback until the last few minutes, and when he needs to do more, all he can break out is fucking Old School or a Kimura. He wrestles like someone assured that something will eventually break in his favor, because for 21 shows and 24 years, it has.
Except it doesn’t.
Brock just never allows him that break, and on the third F5, it finally happens.
I’m not going to eulogize the fucking Streak like it’s a person or something real, but it is a major moment.
Around the time this happened, I read a wonderful and insane piece of fanwank, the sort of theory that redefines fanwank and sticks with you. It stated that Heyman saw Undertaker up close the previous year at Wrestlemania in the Taker/Punk match and saw what was there, that The Undertaker largely won because Punk hurt himself on the big table spot and barely defeated someone like two-thirds his size. Heyman also had a history of paying off The Shield to help his clients, and conveniently, they targeted The Undertaker and hurt him. Brock Lesnar’s next match is then against CM Punk, where he finds himself just about equal and more physically dominant, before nuking another big guy, The Big Show, earlier in 2014 in his next match. Brock fails to make any mistakes here, learning something from almost losing to Punk , and specifically, he fails to make the mistakes others have made against Undertaker in the last few years, despite Taker having been shot since the dive in 2009. It all feels like a plan finally coming to fruition.
Or it’s all bullshit that just happens to conveniently fit together. It’s sort of the beauty of fanwank. Do it with enough art and skill and hey, why not? It’s the WWE, you never expect anything out of them, but it makes sense, so…fuck it. Why not?
Really though, it’s one of the most significant things to happen in the WWE and pro wrestling all decade. A pro wrestling sort of 9/11 or JFK assassination, not in terms of actual importance (this is all nonsense fake fighting, none of it is actually important, we are all incredibly dumb for caring about it at all), but in the sense that most people I talk to seem to remember exact circumstances of their viewing experience or where they were or what they were doing when they found out. It’s not a unique thing, people tend to have those sorts of memories for the big things, but this is such a big thing that it seems almost a universal experience.
For me, I was in my sophomore year dorm room, leaning back in my shitty yet weirdly comfortable standard issue chair after digesting a Dominos pan pizza and bread bites, either drinking an Oberon or leftover Guinness from the holiday a few weeks prior. Headphones in to be nice to that fucking freak Kevin, the roommate who lived on Subway tuna melts and Pepsi Max, talking in a group chat. I was stunned. Genuinely stunned. It’s a result beyond even Oracle capabilities, I’m not sure that I closed my mouth for a whole minute. I’m not sure anyone in the chat wrote anything for a minute or two, which I’m not sure I’ve ever experiences in years of watching live pay per views in group chats.
I’ve never really experienced a feeling like it when watching wrestling otherwise, and the best thing I can say about it is that it’s the entire reason you manufacture streaks to begin with.
The only thing wrong here is that The Undertaker ever wrestled another match after this.
A stunning display of an entire company’s inability to look at a calendar.
THE VICKIE GUERRERO INVITATIONAL
I’ll give this as much respect as the company did. I think that’s fair. It wasn’t especially good, the only match on the show that’s obvious filler and that you could cut and lose absolutely nothing. That being said, after a thing like what came before it, you needed a little bit of a break. Feel sorry for all the women who got thrown to the wolves like this, but it was also easily the weakest match and weakest build on the entire show, so it’s not like it was the wrong choice of matches to sacrifice either.
RANDY ORTON VS. BATISTA VS. DANIEL BRYAN
This was for Orton’s WWE World Heavyweight Title.
Even if it’s not better than Bryan’s first match on the show, Hunter once again simply HAVING to outshine his proteges, it’s still a much better match than most people remember.
Obviously, this should have simply been Orton against Bryan. It’s been the central feud of the WWE over the last six plus months, really going back to their series in June and brief team against The Shield before that. It’s not the end of the world though. Batista is an addition that adds to the match in his own way, both as this obvious corporate avatar in contrast to Daniel Bryan, but also as the other representation of the last decade plus of WWE plans that Bryan’s upending.
The match itself is really great. A lot of complaints I’ve read and heard are about sections where Bryan is gone, like it’s WrestleMania XX or something and there’s a long stretch without him, but that genuinely is not the case here. The story is moreso that they try and do that, but never really can. It’s that all the bullshit in the world finally just can’t succeed anymore. The arm doesn’t stop him from getting there. The combined efforts of the two chosen ones aren’t enough, because he’s just better than them. Failing that, Triple H and Stephanie come to stop his win once, and they wave crooked referee Scott Armstrong back out after his absence for months after the plot in the fall of 2013. Bryan’s finally both done playing the game the right way, and also in a spot where he no longer has to, and kicks him in the head. A dive takes out The Authority, and when Hunter goes for his trusty sledgehammer, Bryan easily takes that and knocks him out with it too.
Subtlety may not or may not be for cowards, but there is a time and a place for it, and it sure isn’t now.
Big Dave and Randy manage their big spot to take Bryan out, but it simply doesn’t work. He refuses the stretcher and instead of some big sequence like I think people have turned it into in their heads, Randy simply brings him back into the ring. The big final ran is tremendous. Batista hits his marks as well as he ever had to. Randy’s tremendous. Bryan simply won’t ever go away. They tease a few different results as well as possible, making the most out of a real audience fear that they still won’t ACTUALLY do the right thing, before then actually delivering. Bryan wipes Big Dave out with the knee, and then goes into the Yes Lock. Good things can happen sometimes. Batista taps out, and it’s all finally over, and a year of faith is rewarded.
Daniel Bryan is the WWE World Heavyweight Champion.
It’s not the greatest match ever. It’s a WWE three way, and it has many of the problems of the WWE three way in terms of feeling somewhat aimless at times and three ways being less satisfying in major moments like this. However, they still packed so much into this in terms of the story elements, and with a performance as great and evocative as Bryan’s was, so much of those problems simply do not matter, outside of that I wish he simply just got Orton one on one at the end of all this. It’s a fortunate thing that this was a great match, another fortunate success for Daniel Bryan, but up to a certain point, this was entirely about the result and the match more than came through on that result.
***1/4
There are very few times in decades of watching wrestling that have felt as good as this.
Many are tainted, and the only one remotely on the same level is Money in the Bank 2011. It’s apples and oranges, to some extent. That was a short three week build, and this was something close to a year in the making. The qualities of the former allowed it to feel like a genuine revolution, a combination of a coup d’etat and a college football rivalry game. In contrast, this was the payoff to such a long and arduous struggle. They’re different situations and different feelings. The live element of MITB also can’t ever be separated. They also feel very connected in my head, one cannot exist without the other. Or rather, this cannot exist without that opening the door. All the same, this is the high point of that movement and feeling. It’s the high water mark of a wave of unrest that Punk began, and that Punk eventually sealed with his January 2014 walk out.
I reviewed this entire show at once not just because it’s such a well put together show, or because I like it so much, but because of what it felt like at the time and what it feels like now. It’s such a hopeful wrestling show, the likes of which you rarely get from the WWE, let alone from other pro wrestling. Virtually everything on this show is about the future, and closing the book on the past for good, save for Cena/Wyatt, which exists both as an outlier and as this reaffirmation of Cena as this new generation’s living legend. A new era’s been inching closer for a few years now, and this is the show where it feels like it’s finally upon us.
To put it in another way, if the WWE is a long running television show, this entire event feels like a series finale.
Perhaps not a willing one, but definitely a show with that sort of a tone to it. It’s not exactly “Made in America” or “Felina” or “Family Meeting” or the last episode of The Wire, or any of these finales that feel like they know they’re finales. But like a television show that knows it might be the end, and which seeks to wrap up every loose end just in case.
The Bryan thing obviously works to that.
When The Authority formed after SummerSlam, there was kind of a wink and nod way they did it where it felt like the WWE admitting they didn’t want smaller workhorse types to actually be on top, with the entire “B+” and “good little wrestler” lines echoing so much, and justifying a lot of past actions with guys like Punk, Bret, Benoit, Eddie, Jericho, etc. They weren’t just heels, they were this entire system that a lot of fans hated, put on screen, the implicit made explicit. It was made even more real when Punk had enough and quit, so Bryan wasn’t just fighting some good heels with an uncomfortable truth to them, but he was fighting the WWE. This entire thing that didn’t want people like him to succeed, and actively wanted them to either die, give up, or leave. He was fighting the idea of the WWE, the kind of place that’s always told people what they want instead of really listening and valued a certain body type and image in the face of everything else, and it put Bryan over the top as a People’s Champion. So when Bryan wins here, it genuinely feels like he’s broken that. Like WWE finally stopped fighting it and accepted that Daniel Bryan is their top babyface and this needs to ride out, like Bret Hart in the mid 90s. You knew he would never get the full promotional machine, but it seemed like this would at least play out until Reigns and Rollins and Ambrose and etc. were ready, and Bryan would be that guy, in the moment and euphoric feeling that came out of this show.
On top of that, Bryan did it by going through Evolution. Triple H has long been WWE’s most enduring schemer and this was the night that all his schemes over the last ten to fifteen years completely failed in front of the world. Triple H finally gave the kind of performance that seemed to match how he’d always seen himself in his own mind, and it absolutely did not matter. His hubris got the best of him and his world collapsed and his philosophy was defeated on the biggest possible stage. He couldn’t beat Bryan and his greatest creations failed to do the same, so he had nothing but the job title. Triple H’s days on camera being done seemed like they were coming to an end in a 100% believable way befitting of that character at the end of the show. He’s COO now because he married well and because he has the mind for it, but in a Vic Mackey-ish way, where it’s all he has left and he hates it. He’s been so exposed that that’s all there is, and it’s the exact ending he deserves, an embarrassing striver exposed and beaten in front of the world, and resigned to something he hates doing.
Beyond that, The Streak ended. WWE’s longest running story came to a close and got blown off, and The Undertaker finally got beaten. Based on everything else, he should be gone. Done and retired. The Attitude Era was seemingly laid to rest by the new hot group. Cesaro became a star in an amazing moment. John Cena is the outlier, but he works with a hot new heel, leaves him something, and establishes himself as the living legend to a new generation in the way The Undertaker was ten years earlier.
I’ve never seen a WWE show that wraps up this many loose ends.
So naturally, because they put on this “episode” – one of the most satisfying episodes in the entire genre’s history – the show is renewed. Like any good show, they allowed themselves stories to continue and expand on. The Shield are now firmly babyfaces, but now are bound to run afoul of top heels now, with all new match ups there. Bryan as champion and the top babyface in the company, obviously. Cesaro’s babyface turn. Bray’s continued rise as a top level heel, and Cena’s “THE FUTURE GOES THROUGH ME” speech from a month ago as this challenge to all the young guys in the company, many of whom still have yet to test that. And of course, that clear return match between our two top heroes, with a new God level monster Brock Lesnar waiting in the wings.
There’s all this stuff to continue on with in as satisfying a manner as the last twelve months have shown them capable of proceeding. Except, they didn’t. But we can get to that later, say after a certain event on a certain Raw after a certain early June pay-per-view where WWE intentionally ruins their hottest act at a time when with a certain injury to a certain top guy, and the way they’d ruined a certain battle royal winner seemingly 100% on purpose, they needed them the most.
On this night though, everything works and leaves me and you and all good wrestling fans unable to remove the smiles from our faces. The future, if it exists, is the brightest it’s looked after a WrestleMania in 16 years, if not ever.
The WWE has reached something like a peak again near the end and everything that could be blown off has been blown off. A rocky ride, but one hell of a final season.
It’s easily the biggest test for The Shield yet, and not just because it’s The Undertaker. They beat Kane and Bryan in their first match months earlier, but the element of surprise and the benefit of chaos is much farther removed now. Beyond that, it’s the tightest knit team against The Shield yet, both a team with no inner turmoil and one with two real strong bonds.
At the time, I loved this and I really have no idea why, years later.
It’s the first Shield match since the TLC match that’s let me down, and there’s no one thing to point out or blame. A lot goes wrong, but ultimately, it’s just not very good, save the brief time in the middle when the G.O.A.T. gets to work by himself, hoisting Rollins on his back like it’s 2008 again. It asks so much of Kane for some reason? He’s bad. There’s some Hell No stuff that doesn’t suck, but it also asks practically nothing of Kane, but this goes the opposite way. Obviously, the match suffers for it. Beyond just featuring a lot of two guys who can’t really go anymore instead of the greatest wrestler of all time, it was also the longest Shield match yet. They try and get Roman in there in control more, and he’s not very good yet. Not a lot of the explosivity, he doesn’t really even have the big uppercut to lean on yet. Rough stuff, one of his worst ever performances. Seth’s a fine pinball and Dean is always interesting to watch, but it just doesn’t really work out for them in a longer match. It’s a problem when a good chunk of that now asks a lot out of guys who aren’t quite ready for that burden, on top of asking it of guys who can no longer carry it.
After Taker and Kane clean up to middling results, Bryan gets to come back in because someone has to lose. He almost immediately misses the diving headbutt and Ambrose can cradle him for the win. Perhaps a weak link.
This one’s aged like milk, entirely because of some really weird compositional issues.
Before the match even begins, this match hits on some increasingly rare WrestleMania Magic by having two of the better WrestleMania entrances ever, captured in two of the better WWE shot photographs of the time.
For CM Punk, that means getting Living Colour to play “Cult of Personality” live, the rare live musical performance of a WWE entrance theme that doesn’t totally suck. Punk also gets the thing right that certain other people with this luxury never do, which is that he totally ignores the band instead of reveling in the idea that a band he likes is here and going up to them like some kind of a mark. For The Undertaker, it’s perhaps his most iconic non druid entrance with all the silhouette hands reaching up for him from some other realm. Some cool looking bullshit. Gets to the heart of both guys entirely. A wide eyed psycho who immediately feels cooler and realer than everyone else and then this old ghoul relying entirely on pomp and circumstance, gliding down entirely on the power of all these people he’s stolen the life force of.
As for the match, CM Punk never got the WrestleMania main event that he deserved this year (or the last, or the last, etc), but he can take some solace in this. It’s not only one of the two or three best Streak match of all time (Flair and Shawn I (maybe)), but the most impressive of them by a thousand miles, given both the difference in Undertaker’s physical condition from 2009 and 2010 to 2013 and ONCE AGAIN the total lack of shortcuts a major CM Punk match is allowed relative to other top guys in the same position. Triple H vs. The Undertaker was allowed every single shortcut under the sun, and all Punk gets is one announce table spot in a regular rules match.
And yet, it rules because CM Punk never needed any of that. Sometimes when I watch something like this or the Mark Henry matches from a year prior, I start thinking that part of CM Punk being so powered by spite is him seeming to love the challenge of figuring out how to do with as little as possible. Here, he has a decrepit old man with zero help from booking or anything like that. He’s there in the wilderness, and with his body so banged up that he’s about to try and take time off after this, he can’t really even put on the sort of lunatic bumping performance you might expect from a smaller heel against the elderly Dead Man.
Instead, it’s weirdly physical. Early on, Michael Cole hits that bullshit line about The Undertaker being the greatest striker in WWE history, and Punk spends the match pressuring him to live up to it for once. Taker has better looking and sounding punches than he’s had in a long time, but even then, Punk can’t help but embarrass him there through the diversity of his striking alone. Gross elbows, punches just as good as the old man’s, chops, boots, knees, all of it. High kicks aren’t great, but they’ve never been. It’s a perfect bully heel performance, made all that much more impressive by the obvious size and character difference.
This also stands out among all the later period Streak stuff because of the story. It’s not this workrate epic, even if CM Punk could do that. He’s getting the guy mad and taking advantage of sloppiness. Punk gets his ass kicked and eats shit a few times for his arrogance, but he’s always coming back through his own physicality or ingenuity. It’s classic heel and face work going into the match and a little on paper, but Punk’s really only a heel in that he’s being a shithead about it and in that he uses the stolen urn for a nearfall towards the end and that one of the many cut offs comes from a Heyman distraction. He finagles a Tombstone kickout somehow, and avoids returning the favor, instead utilizing the GTS to have Taker bounce off the ropes and into the lift for said Tombstone instead. It’s a surprisingly effective fighting spirit style spot, but because of how The Undertaker catches the knee on his chest instead of his face, it both excuses and justifies its existence while also inadvertantly protecting Punk’s finish all the more. The next time Punk tries it, it’s after using the urn and mocking Undertaker’s famous taunt, only to have it countered into a second Tombstone for the win. This story virtually never ends with the part timer looking this even with the current guy, so it’s hard not to pay attention and notice it when it happens.
It’s one more of these CM Punk performances that shows what a genius he really was, hanging there, picking spots, but beating Undertaker’s ass and surviving things mostly cleanly. He even gets the big spot of the match, with the famous elbow drop through the table. The announce table spot winds up helping him even more, because when the table doesn’t break, he cracks his hip and leg off the thing while landing his upper body on the old man. Punk spends the rest of the match with a limp and selling the injury, which winds up protecting him even more in its own way. With his Rock program done and having done the thing for Cena, it all comes off like a guy who realized what the ceiling for a heel in the WWE is who doesn’t have massive and unimpeachable political positioning, and is forcing himself to turn face again. It’s not just having this great match and great performance — complete with gigantic highspot elbow drop to the announce table — but it’s spending ninety nine percent of the match positioning himself as being as tough as the canon toughest guy in WWE history.
The most famous politicians in wrestling are remembered less because they’re actually great politicians and more because they’re obvious politicians. There is zero subtlety to Triple H vs. Booker T at WrestleMania XIX, or the things Hulk Hogan or Shawn Michaels got away with. Not an ounce of subtlety over Kevin Nash booking himself to end The Streak (the real one, Goldberg’s one, not this WrestleMania bullshit). The result is that so often, people fail to appreciate actual subtle political maneuvering. Triple H is the greatest politician in history not because of the 2002-2005 Reign of Terror, but because of something like the Political Hit, the 2004 Eddie Guerrero match, or the way he used Eugene to undercut Benoit in 2004. Just like inside the ring, it’s the subtle work that’s always impressed me so much more than the flashier work.
This is one of the great bell to bell political performances of all time. CM Punk never had the political muscle of any of those men, but what he had was raw intelligence like so few others have ever had, and it usually allowed him to get away with pretty much anything he wanted to do. Given the WWE being the WWE and the story going into this, I really doubt they planned this match out to turn CM Punk face again and to put him over to this extent. Everything they plan to do is so bright and loud and its specific intent is always shouted at you once a minute. None of the things Punk put out there and made so obvious through the match get that sort of treatment. Instead, it’s just one of the greatest of all time trusting that you can use your eyes and your brain to figure out what he’s trying to put into the world, and it works. Part of it is because so many people never wanted to boo him to begin with because nobody ever wants to boo someone as real as Punk when everything else is such bullshit, but it’s also real hard not to see some connection with a performance like this at the end of a near two year run like Punk’s had from the time he sat on a stage to the end of this match, the story Punk snuck in there, and his sudden shift back to the other locker room upon his return.
Ultimately, the match isn’t quite what I remembered, but still so much better than it had any real right to be and like the Jericho miracle the year before, it’s another Punk match that’s quietly much more brutal and physical than you might remember. Taker can’t have a great epic anymore, but he can have a really great fight, and that’s all that this wound up being. Taker’s largely useless at this point, but he does just enough to rise up to the moment, and to match yet another all-time great performance by CM Punk.
This was a Hell in a Cell match, laughably branded as “THE END OF AN ERA”.
Before we talk about how just flagrantly goddamned fraudulent this match is, I’d like to start with the positive. Dessert comes after dinner. Give me the damn veggies.
No one section of this is better than the first half of their match the year before. Thi sis probably not a better match. That was reckless in all of the best ways, before it become a slow, plodding, and masturbatory affair. That being said, I liked the broad strokes in this so so so so so much more than those of the previous match. Those broad strokes made this a more enjoyable watch on the whole for me if not quite a better match, just barely, as it all felt much truer to who these characters and wrestlers are.
Firstly, this is so much more true to Triple H. Last year, Triple H somehow beating The Undertaker to a pulp and rendering him near immobile was a reach, but him expressing such sorrow and angst over it felt incredibly fake in the worst way. As the years have passed, Triple H has largely forgotten what his character was at its best and why it worked so well for a time. It’s an interesting character to me, somehow. He’s a power wrestler who happens to know more wrestling history and be smarter than most other power wrestlers, but who lacked exceptional athleticism or in-ring skill. Against less skilled smaller wrestlers or dumber power wrestlers, he had a lot of success, however often struggling against best-in-the-world level technical wrestlers (Benoit, Bryan), next level smaller fliers (Jeff Hardy, Shawn (presentation wise)), super athletes (The Rock), and big men who saw him coming (Batista). To succeed in spite of these limitations, he had to be able to do vile and horrible things that other people wouldn’t. To suddenly care about The Undertaker’s well being goes against him entirely. If you say that it’s because he’s a babyface now, it reveals sort of why he should never be a babyface. He’s not a likable person, and this match does not ask that of him in the slightest.
He spends the match shoving Shawn around and trying to do the things that worked last year, getting Shawn’s help at a crucial moment only for them to fail, and then for the match to go another way and to end with him being destroyed and punished for thinking he’s tougher than he actually is. It doesn’t go far enough to vilify him but few matches will ever go far enough to vilify this piece of shit, so whatever. Take the wins where they exist. This match aims for something resembling a face/face legends match, but unlike the match the year before, it doesn’t get eye-rollingly bad by making it about his moral struggle or whatever the fuck that was in 2011.
It’s also a better role for The Undertaker to not be so sympathetic and to get his revenge. It’s not to say The Undertaker can’t be sympathetic, but it is to say that this specific match up is a lot better with Undertaker on offense than it is with him on defense. Yes, I know that was the point of the two match series. Fine. Just because it was the point doesn’t negate that this match is the better one for having the payoff. Taker’s a few years beyond being able to convincingly beat someone’s ass, as the header at WrestleMania 25 effectively knocked the greatness out of him, but he can throw a few shots, and there’s enough gimmick stuff here to make this just barely work. He’s specifically charming in the few moments where he makes Hunter eat his own shit, like stepping on the sledgehammer on the ground as Hunter crawls for it to start a big comeback, or later just catching the hammer when Hunter tries to tiredly swing it at him. “Brutal” isn’t the right word for cut offs like these, but given that they’re happening to one of the all time pieces of shit in wrestling history, they’re still little moments that feel good, even if this match has lost so much of the initial magic that was there on a live watch.
Time for dessert.
This match is fraudulent as hell. But not immediately.
“END OF AN ERA” was supposed to mean the end of Attitude Era guys facing each other in big spectacle matches at these massive shows. For a while, it was true. For a while, the gravity of this held it up and gave it a certain aura. I had rewatched this in 2013 or 2014 last, and I really liked it, because it did feel like an end. Nobody retires, but both slid into less prominent roles after this. Triple H got eaten alive by Brock Lesnar and spat out as The Authority. There’s a clear line from A to B between this and The Authority stuff. On the other side, The Undertaker scaled back to once a year, barely got past CM Punk in 2013, in large part due to Punk’s own mistakes, before being sent out . by The Shield, and then lost his fabled Streak the year after that. I’ll go into more depth when we get to 2014, but in so many ways, WrestleMania XXX felt like the series finale for WWE, and this isn’t a bad start to both men becoming once-a-year sorts of legend characters, people who stories acknowledge are past their primes in different ways.
Of course, like virtually everything in the WWE, things went bad in 2014-2015 and never really recovered.
Since then, Triple H got brought back to work an incredibly stupid and insulting match against Sting and kept coming around, now with this refusal to book himself as a lesser version of himself, as he had in the years immediately following this match. The Undertaker just wouldn’t go away either. A handful of stinkers in 2015 save the Lesnar rematches, embarrassing performances at WrestleMania, even another big WrestleMania match against another Attitude Era legend in Shane McMahon only four years after this last promised one of those. Beyond simply not being the end of an era, it wasn’t even the last time Triple H and The Undertaker would wrestle each other.
These two even fought each other again, as a quick fix on a series of overseas money mark shows, en lieu of doing something interesting or unique, because this is a company that hasn’t created a star (that it hasn’t later killed or tried to kill as a top guy) since John Cena.
So, anything that felt special or interesting about this match in the few years following it is gone, and we’re left entirely with everything else about it. And besides the broad strokes, holy shit.
The major thought I had for ninety percent of this match before it got interesting and Hunter got murdered was how badly this could have used blood. Or something. The match is laid out with all the bells and whistles of an Attitude Era brawl, fitting for the era they intended (?) on ending. Except these are old men now, and it was a slower and far more plodding version of that, without the same high caliber bells and whistles you can use to spice up just about any match (blood, unprotected chair shots, table spots). So, the whole thing winds up incredibly dry without any type of seasoning. A lot of punching and kicking, step shots, before they actually going into anything real.
Next, fucking Shawn Michaels. Fuck him. Fuck him on principle alone, but fuck him in this match particularly right now. The overacting is so much here. Beyond just that you can see it in every NXT match since like 2018, it just sucks. It sucks so much. Why does he care about The Undertaker now? They always hated each other. Even going into this, it’s not like they were presented as anything but enemies. Shawn as the referee was presented coming into the show as one more thing going in Triple H’s favor. He’d never lost a match before with Shawn Michaels as the referee, going back twelve and a half years. But Shawn is begging and pleading with The Undertaker to let him stop the match because of a few chair shots and one sledgehammer to the face? It’s a sudden change in character, and the only solace is that it goes away eventually, when Shawn tries and fails to cost Undertaker the match before going into histrionics and then, apparently, being scared off by that into playing it straight again? It’s So Much.
For all the positive things I said about how this match is slightly better than the one the year before because it allows you the destruction of Triple H…it’s still a Triple H epic in the year 2012. Triple H is unlikable as hell in this match, but it’s clearly not something he planned, because when it’s over, he tries to break out the heroics. Flair in ’08, Shawn in ’10, like his career is ending instead of it just being him losing a normal god damned match, with zero personal or professional consequence. The same on the knees selling before Taker drags a thumb across the throat before the final Tombstone, a would-be defiant crotch chop moments before that. This is not a man who deserves to die on his sword. He’s been an irredeemable piece of shit for most of his career, he’s a bad guy for eighty percent of this match, but because he gets to write his own endings, he suddenly gets to be the defiant cool rebel badass at the end. Even in the moments after the match, The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels are the ones propping Triple H up, as if he is the true hero in all of this. It’s a terrific bit by wrestling’s all time greatest politician.
I’d like to be more upset, but this is the WWE, and almost every story ultimately is about how cool and tough Triple H is.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
You weren’t stupid for liking this at the time though.
You are, however, an absolute dunce, a fucking mark, and an easily duped buffoon if you watch this again and it does a single thing for you. I don’t know what to tell you.
This was a match that largely depended on aura and significance to get past the increasingly obvious physical limitations they had, shortcuts and all. If this is the last of something, if it’s the start of these two scaling back more, this kind of works in spite of everything. I can get a lot out of a narrative. Triple H overreaching one last time, eating shit, and Undertaker beating the greatness out of him in a blaze of glory too is a nice one. The Undertaker taking Triple H out of relevancy with him is real satisfying. The problem is that the era never actually ended. It still hasn’t. And until it does, this match and the entire production becomes increasingly overwrought, laughable, and kind of embarrassing. Every year that the era persists — and it will until The Undertaker finally just fucking stops — this becomes a little funnier and a little sadder.
The saving grace of this match is that six and a half years later, these two will go on to have one of the absolute worst matches of all time, while this is simply Not Great. Things can and will always get worse. There is always a stupider and worse version of a thing right around the corner.
A perfect sort of 2010s WWE spectacle, as it’s a gigantic overreach featuring men close to a decade past their primes, relying entirely on an emotional connection that’s either worn thin from overuse or that it goes about shaming you for having in the first place because none of this means anything after the moment. A fun moment at the time, but like so many things involving these three men, there’s not much more to it once that moment’s passed. And if this match has any one thing to actually say to the world, it’s that the moment has more than passed.
HANDWERK 