wrestling / Columns
Cook’s Top 7 WrestleMania Moments
Image Credit: WWE
We’re just hours & minutes away from this year’s edition of the Show of Shows, WrestleMania. I won’t get into too many predictions here, but I can tell you one thing for sure: At some point on Saturday & Sunday, the phrase “WrestleMania Moment” will be uttered by one of the announcers, or maybe even a wrestler. Almost every wrestler has a WrestleMania Moment listed among their goals upon entering the business. We hear the phrase “WrestleMania Moment” all the time, to the point where it loses a bit of meaning. Not everything is a classic WrestleMania Moment.
What is?
Well, I figured today was as good a day as any to look back at some of my own personal favorite WrestleMania moments. These are the moments that I enjoyed most, that still come to mind today without much effort. My seven favorite moments from the biggest show of every wrestling year, ones that I managed to witness as they happened. Sure, I love Steamboat vs. Savage as much as the next guy, but I didn’t see it until years later. These are the moments that stuck with me when they actually took place.
7. Owen beat Bret?
My parents weren’t big on buying PPV wrestling events. This made me angry when I was a kid, now that I’m older and have a greater awareness of finances I totally understand why they didn’t want to spend their money on monthly wrestling shows. I didn’t see WrestleMania live as it happened until WrestleMania XIV. Before that, I had to resort to something that today’s kids have no clue about. That’s right, your humble correspondent turned on the PPV channel and tried to watch events through the static. It was kind of like trying to watch ECW on a local low-powered television station, with even worse quality. The best you could hope for was hearing the announcers talking about what was going on.
Sometimes you’d hear the announcers say something that didn’t make any sense. Like during WrestleMania X, when Owen Hart was announced as the winner of his match with his older brother, Bret. Hey, I was 10. I didn’t know a whole lot about Owen other than he was Bret’s younger brother and didn’t have as good of a win-loss record. I figured he’d be light work for Bret early in the evening. I couldn’t believe what I heard and went back to an actual TV channel.
Sure enough, Owen beat Bret and made a name for himself on the Showcase of Immortals. He would go on to feud with Bret throughout 1994 and begrudgingly gain my respect as an in-ring competitor. I dunno, something about younger siblings turning against their big brother didn’t sit well with me.
6. Hogan vs. Rock Reaction
People find it hard to believe, but I never really considered myself a Hulkamaniac. When I became a fan in 1990, Hulk Hogan wasn’t appearing on the shows I watched. This led to my being less connected to Hulk than I was to guys like Bret Hart & Jake Roberts that were wrestling on TV every week. When he went to WCW, I was disappointed because I liked WCW the way it was and it turned into WWF Lite with Hulk and all the old WWF guys coming in. The Hollywood Hogan stuff was cool, but I tended to buy into the line of thinking that the Hulkster’s day had come & gone. People were tired of Hogan.
At least, until WrestleMania X-8 when he faced The Rock. Then he became the Lord God of Skydome and everybody inside the place lost their damn minds. We knew Hogan was popular, but how was he this popular? It led to a remarkable match that people still talk about today. It lived up to the pre-match hype of icon vs. legend, past vs. present and all that flowery stuff, becoming a WrestleMania Moment.
5. One of Flair’s Last Matches
Ric Flair had one of the most legendary careers in the history of pro wrestling. He came back from a plane crash to hold the World Championship somewhere from sixteen to twenty-four times depending on who you ask. While most of his career took place outside WWE, the company still honored his legacy as part of Jim Crockett Promotions & World Championship Wrestling & recognized his various achievements. It only made sense to have his farewell match take place at WrestleMania XXIV, and for it to be with the man known for always having classic matches at WrestleMania.
Shawn Michaels & Ric Flair indeed had a classic match in Orlando that ended up ending Flair’s WWE in-ring career. It was the perfect way for Flair to go out, but I think most of us knew it wouldn’t really be his last match. I’m kind of surprised Flair had as few matches as he did after WrestleMania XXIV. Four matches in Australia with Hulk Hogan, some stuff in TNA and then the Nashville match in 2022. Believe it or not, the Naitch actually showed some restraint in his in-ring activity after 2008, probably due to health issues. Fortunately, I think most people remember the HBK Mania match more than anything else he did afterward.
4. The IWC’s Best Day Ever
I don’t want to speak for everyone that frequents a website like 411mania.com, but I feel safe in saying the following: We’ve all gone through a phase where in-ring wrestling ability is the #1 thing that matters to us when judging a wrestler. Talking, appearance, potential star power all pale in comparison to what wrestlers can do in the ring. This is where I was at in the late 90s & early 2000s, right alongside most other Internet wrestling fans of the time. We would bitch and moan about how WCW kept pushing the same old geezers over & over again while workhorses like Chris Benoit & Eddie Guerrero were left to twist in the wind. Terms like “vanilla midgets” were used to describe wrestlers that the Internet liked more than casual wrestling fans did. We wondered if the likes of Benoit & Guerrero would ever get a chance in the biggest spots.
They did! Eventually, Eddie overcame his demons and became one of the most charismatic people in the business. He had to be pushed to the top. As for Benoit, he just kept on delivering in the ring and eventually earned the respect of just about everyone watching WWE at the time. Eddie ended up winning the WWE Championship from Brock Lesnar the month before WrestleMania XX, where Benoit won the World Championship in a triple threat match with Triple H & Shawn Michaels. Both men celebrated at the end of WrestleMania, and smarks that had watched them for years got to rejoice.
Of course, this moment was tainted by what came afterward. At that time it was one of my favorite moments as a wrestling fan and I must include it here because of how much it meant to me.
3. The Prodigal Son Returns
The best thing about there being multiple places for established wrestling stars to work is that it gives wrestlers the chance to remain fresh & relevant. When their star loses its luster in the place they’re at, they can go somewhere else & start over. The beginning of AEW gave folks like Chris Jericho, Jon Moxley and others that had grown stifled in the WWE environment of the time to start over and re-establish themselves as proper stars. Others like Swerve Strickland & Ricochet have found similar success. Of course, this also works the opposite way. People that grow stagnant and can only reach a certain level in AEW can find their way to WWE and gain new life.
Cody Rhodes had done everything he could in AEW. He was an important part of the company’s beginning, but a multitude of factors led to him no longer being a presence that AEW fans welcomed. Cody had become an odd fit in AEW, and it turned out that he was a perfect fit for the direction WWE was moving towards. WWE’s fans hadn’t forgotten about Cody, in fact he became more popular with them during his time away. Cody showing up at WrestleMania 38 as Seth Rollins’ mystery opponent, with the full-on American Nightmare effect that he’d developed during the past few years, was taken so warmly by the live crowd that you knew he would be a big deal in WWE for at least the immediate future. Maybe we didn’t know he’d be the top babyface & long-running Undisputed Champion within a couple of years, but it was obvious that Cody Rhodes was going to be one of the key cogs in the WWE machine.
Even if the next couple of years hadn’t happened, watching that crowd go insane for Cody’s return was still an incredible moment.
2. Bryan Overcomes The Authority
We mentioned earlier how Chris Benoit & Eddie Guerrero mostly got over with the Internet audience based off their workrate. Bryan Danielson had a similar rise to glory on the independent wrestling scene. For years, he was considered one of the best wrestlers in the world. He might have been limited as far as his size went, and his personality was an acquired taste, but he still brought it every night in the ring and worked a style that Internet fans tended to like. Most people didn’t think his style would really translate to WWE, and it took some time.
Eventually, Daniel Bryan got the WWE Universe behind him to the point where they had to push him to the top. He was wrestling fans’ representative against on-air heels & backstage powers that represented the traditional WWE way of doing things. In order to even get in the main event, Bryan had to beat Triple H. He managed to do that, then got the win over Randy Orton & Batista so he could end WrestleMania XXX as the WWE Champion and everyone could lose their minds. I know I did, and there was a period where I thought that would be the last time I really enjoyed wrestling as a fan. It felt like wrestling had peaked for me. Fortunately, some cool things have happened since then and I still enjoy wrestling!
Honorable Mention: The Boneyard Match
You know, I almost went this entire column without mentioning the guy that’s more identifiable with WrestleMania than almost anybody else. The Undertaker won his first twenty-one matches at WrestleMania. I doubt anybody will equal that record, at least not anytime soon. The Undertaker’s streak became one of the selling points of WrestleMania after about the first ten years or so. Unfortunately, most of the Dead Man’s matches at WM weren’t exactly matches that would make a list like this for me. Eventually he started having bangers with Shawn Michaels & Triple H, but there’s a lot of forgettable stuff within The Streak.
My favorite Undertaker WrestleMania Moment ended up being the last of his in-ring career. Perhaps the only good thing about the pandemic was the fact that Undertaker was finally able to have that tremendous match that sent him off into the sunset on a good note. He met the Phenomenal AJ Styles in a Boneyard Match at WrestleMania 36, and from where I sit the Boneyard Match was the only cinematic match that actually delivered. Undertaker looked like a total badass, Styles put on the type of performance you expect from him, the whole thing was stupidly fun and gave me some faith that pro wrestling could survive 2020. It also gave us one of the best wrestling meme pics of all time with Styles cheesing it up while Undertaker had the death stare going behind him. Good times.
Honorable Mention: Rollins Cashes In
I wish I could have enjoyed this more, but way too many 411mania writers at the time predicted it, the same way they predicted Seth Rollins cashing in at every PPV prior to this event. This is a large part of why I hate the MITB gimmick, it just leads to writers predicting they’ll cash in every time until it actually happens, and then saying they called it.
1. The Austin Era Begins
WrestleMania XIV was an important night in deciding who would win the great pro wrestling war of the 1990s. The biggest development was the ascension of wrestling’s next top star to the very top of the WWF. It was the night that Stone Cold Steve Austin won his first WWF Championship. Austin had been the most popular wrestler in the WWF for some time, and this was when he officially became The Man.
I had been a fan of Austin’s since he formed the Hollywood Blondes with Brian Pillman in WCW. It had been interesting as a fan to watch him work his way from WCW to ECW and finally to the WWF, where after being a ringmaster he finally assumed the persona that would lead him to stardom. It wasn’t surprising that Austin beat Shawn Michaels that night, but it was still an amazing moment that paved the way for many more to come. As longtime wrestling fans can attest to, there’s little better than watching someone work their way up to the top of the profession after many years of trying. As my list here shows, I’ve been lucky enough to do that several times now.
Thanks for reading! Hit me up at [email protected] with thoughts, comments or suggestions. Feel free to hit the comment section and tell us about your favorite WrestleMania Moments, which are likely different than mine. I left plenty on the table. Until next time, true believers!
