The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 WrestleMania Mixed Tag Teams

While WrestleMania is the biggest annual professional wrestling show in the world, it shouldn’t be mistaken as a show built to appeal to wrestling purists. On the contrary, it’s an event that often features at least as much sizzle as steak with celebrity appearances and part timers coming in for feel-good segments that inevitably take time away from full-time talents.

Amidst these attractions are mixed tag team wrestling matches. While, mixed tags are far from exclusive to WrestleMania (underscored by the Mixed Match Challenge), their recurrent presence at the Showcase of the Immortals feels emblematic of WWE trying to wedge more people onto stacked cards, provide unique spectacles that will appeal to a more casual audience, or protect at least one talent who isn’t fully trained (as may be case for Ronda Rousey if her mixed tag match (a rumor at the time I’m writing) comes to fruition). While mixed tag team matches can be quite good (check out Ivelisse teaming with Angelico and Son of Havoc in Lucha Underground for some great matches), they’re often cumbersome for rules dictating men will only compete with men and women only with women, except when those rules inevitably break down. Particularly for WWE’s understandable aversion to man-on-woman violence, you’d be hard pressed to find a WrestleMania example that cracks three stars.

For this week’s column, I’m not so much focused on match quality as quality of the component parts of a team and how they fit together. This list looks at the top mixed tag teams to perform at WrestleMania, with consideration to the talents of the team members and the team identity they built for their time together. The team’s quality of performance at WrestleMania was a secondary consideration. The team’s kayfabe success (e.g., whether they won their match) was not a major consideration. As always, my personal opinion weighted heavily in the ranking.

#7. The Artist Formerly Known As Goldust and Luna Vachon

Goldust is on my short list for most underappreciated stars in WWE history for his incredibly long and diverse tenure with the company. He never got a meaningful shot at the main event, but his groundbreaking work in the mid-card and the fact that he’s still going today as an effective lower card talent speak volumes to the man’s talents and his mind for wrestling. For all of those virtues, unfortunately Goldust was kind of at a low point come WrestleMania 14, working an awkward gimmick and not in his best physical shape—a part of why this team just barely makes the list.

His partner was Luna Vachon, another underappreciated talent who got over more for her crazed look than her considerable talent because the WWF never figured out how to feature her correctly, and scarcely had a women’s division during her prime.

There are ways in which Goldust and Vachon did what they did best in their WreslteMania mixed tag opposite Sable and Marc Mero, in making a pair of less polished talents (particularly Sable) look their best and get a big push coming out of this effort.

#6. The Miz and Maryse

The Miz and Maryse are strikingly similar as wrestling talents. They both tend to get dismissed for their looks and their non-indie style in the ring, but both are rock solid hands when it comes to working the WWE style, and each demonstrated over a periods of years their ability to garner heat from wrestling fans by playing their heel roles so well.

At WrestleMania 33, The Miz and Maryse took their real life marriage and on-screen wrestler-manager pairing to the ring as tag team partners and played their chicken shit heel roles admirably. Say what you will about The Miz, but he’s one of the few heels of the last decade to consistently get most of the crowd against him and behind John Cena in big match situations. This dynamic worked again in this setting, and facilitated Cena and Nikki Bella garner as positive of a reaction as they were going to get when they won this match and went on to have their own WrestleMania moment in the aftermath.

#5. Dusty Rhodes and Sapphire

WWE never really showed us the best of The American Dream Dusty Rhodes. His 1990s run pitched him as a fun-loving face in polka dots who lacked the severity of his NWA gimmick. By the time he was back as a part-time talent and backstage employee, he was well past his wrestling prime.

However, what did come across correctly in the yellow polka dot era was Rhodes’s sense of fun. He was committed to his bit, and got over with the WWE audience that was into cartoonish characters. And right by his side Sapphire—The Common Man’s Common Woman.

Sapphire wasn’t a trained wrestler, but her care-free attitude—the obvious truth that she was having the time of her life appearing on TV with Dusty Rhodes—made her a success in her spot, and it was only fitting that the two would at last team up in the ring come WrestleMania 6. Their silly style was a perfect contrast to the more severe pair of Randy Savage and Queen Sherri, and the sight of these two dancing in the ring with Miss Elizabeth to celebrate their victory was a minor WreslteMania moment in its own right.

#4. Bam Bam Bigelow and Luna Vachon

Much of what I wrote about the tag team of Goldust and Luna Vachon applies here, to Bam Bam Bigelow and Luna Vachon as well, as a pair of very skilled and under-appreciated workers whose most famous work involved getting other talents over. I would argue Bigelow and Vachon were a bit better fit for another in their respective badass gimmicks, and that, and Bigelow was right around his prime as an all-around performer come WrestleMania 10 when this team hit the ring together. It’s a shame that a pair with the kayfabe and real-life credibility of Bigelow and Vachon would get squandered in sideshow match, working Doink and Dink at WrestleMania 10. At least they went over.

While WWE would never fully unlock how to successfully use Vachon (she wound up leaving the company within the year, only to come back and still find little career advancement), Bigelow would interestingly enough find himself in the main event of the following year’s WrestleMania, albeit in another novelty match of sorts, working former NFL star Lawrence Taylor. That was purportedly supposed to mark the start of a big time push for the Beast from the East but politics and poor timing unraveled that.

#3. Marc Mero and Sable

In terms of pure wrestling talent, this pair would not rank nearly this high. But take Marc Mero as a solid enough hand, getting over with his increasingly misogynistic heel shtick, and pair him with Sable who was getting increasingly over as a magnetic female presence and you have a team that was a legitimately draw for WrestleMania 14.

The Mero-Sable story was something like a more modern retelling of Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth from a decade earlier, with Mero first playing her white knight, then revealing himself to be a controlling jerk. No, Mero, was no Savage, but Sable was a more interesting wrestling personality than Liz, as she stood up for herself and was game to get in the ring and kick some butt in this match, and ultimately stand up to Mero himself before she broke out on her own. Though Sable was purportedly not the most pleasant person to work with behind the scenes during this era, she was over—arguably right alongside acts like The Rock, The Undertaker, and Kane, trailing just behind Steve Austin and DX for the title of biggest draw in the company in this specific moment. That’s good enough to give her (and Mero) the number three spot in this countdown.

#2. John Cena and Nikki Bella

No, John Cena and Nikki Bella aren’t a cool couple to celebrate amongst the IWC, but these clean cut, fit, corporate favorites who just happen to be a real-life couple fit together nicely for Wrestlemania 33, and their post-match proposal offered a near perfect moment for Total Divas. Thus, their WrestleMania moment made good use of them and fit with the segment of the audience WWE wanted them to appeal to.

And, you can add on top of that an uncomfortable truth for smarks and Cena haters: Cena and Bella are actually quite good.

Since the influx of indie darlings that started with CM Punk and Daniel Bryan, and gave way to Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, AJ Styles, Neville, and the like, Cena worked hard to up his game. While he’s not the most innovative of in ring performers he has proven himself more than capable of hanging with indie guys and using his power and endurance to give them a worthy base to make the most of their talents.

Similarly, since WWE adjusted its approach to women’s wrestling to focus on legit in ring talents like Charlotte Flair, Sasha Banks, and Asuka, Nikki Bella was one of the few old guard Divas to similarly adjust and hang. No, she wasn’t one of the more exciting female talents by WrestleMania 33, but nor was she one of the talents whom the game had clearly passed by.

Together, Cena and Bella were an establishment dream team that was nonetheless still solid in the ring—one of the best mixed tag teams WWE ever featured.

#1. Randy Savage and Queen Sherri

Some bold and admittedly arguable statements. There’s no more talented professional wrestler to have ever been cast in a mixed tag team match at WrestleMania than Randy Savage. Furthermore, there’s no more talented female performer to have ever been cast in a mixed tag team match at WrestleMania than Sherri Martel (Trish Stratus, in particular, problematizes this claim, but her success in the mixed tag team format is mitigated by working alongside Snooki as part of her unit). So, take these two top talents, add on their well-built chemistry as the Macho King and Queen of the WWF, and you arrive at the single greatest mixed tag team in WrestleMania history: Savage and Sherri. Even if they lost their match.

To be fair, Savage’s talent was squandered at WrestleMania 6 in this match, and it stands out that in the years before and after he’d be staging classics with Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior—a one-on-one bout with Dusty Rhodes probably would have been the better match and more befitting his legacy. Just the same, without a mixed tag, Sherri probably never would have gotten a WrestleMania match onto her resume, and she and Savage in particular made their match with Rhodes and Sapphire as good was it was going to be within the context of the WWF in that era.

Which teams would you add to the list? Dolph Ziggler and LayCool was my top honorable mention. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.