wrestling / Columns

The Magnificent Seven: Ranking Brock Lesnar’s Summerslam Performances

August 14, 2017 | Posted by Mike Chin
Brock Lesnar Randy Orton SummerSlam Image Credit: WWE

Brock Lesnar is a force in WWE—a unique talent whom WWE has booked uniquely. He started out as a blue chip prospect and after some time away to pursue football and mixed martial arts, came back as arguably the most credible monster heel not named Andre the Giant.

It may be a direct result of Lesnar’s hiatus from WWE, but he’s never been “just another guy” in WWE, and SummerSlam has proved to be a particular showcase for him. He’s won two separate world championships, twelve years apart. He’s closed out the show with two other main event victories. And those other three years? His opponents were no lesser talents than The Undertaker, Kurt Angle, and CM Punk, and each of those matches lands in four-star territory.

Conveniently, as we head into SummerSlam 2017, Lesnar has had exactly seven previous SummerSlam performances, so this week’s column focuses on ranking them. The countdown focuses on the quality of Lesnar’s performance and presentation, with a special nod to moments that were, in one way or another, particularly befitting Lesnar as a man and as a character. As always, my personal opinion weighs heavily.

#7. Crushing Randy Orton

When your least impressive outing at the second biggest show of the year includes winning the main event by physically dominating a consistent main eventer and bloodying him in a worked shoot moment that the pro wrestling is buzzing about for weeks to come—well, I’d say you’re a pretty special talent.

That’s Brock Lesnar.

Lesnar-Orton falls to the bottom spot on this countdown on account of the match itself being just OK—probably a high two-to-low three star affair—and for the very reasonable argument that Lesnar elbowing Orton until he bled was legitimately barbaric and an unsafe choice on the part of WWE management. The visual of Lesnar standing over a completely wrecked Orton works for the story WWE was telling, and helped to rebuild Lesnar as a world beater after he’d lost some of his aura over the preceding year.

#6. Putting On A Classic With Kurt Angle

Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle put on their share of great matches together in 2003, including their two most memorable bouts—the main event of WrestleMania 19 and an Iron Man Match on SmackDown. While there’s a fair argument that this match rates behind those other two, it was nonetheless a worthy and unique addition to the catalog.

One of the awkward facets of WrestleMania 19 was that, while Angle certainly had the real life and kayfabe credibility to hold his own with Lesnar, the face-heel alignment felt off. The heel was the plucky under-sized underdog, not to mention the specter of Angle’s real-life neck issues hanging over the match. This SummerSlam bout re-cast Lesnar as the big, arrogant, young villain, Angle as the grizzled veteran coming back from injury for a shot at redemption. Better yet, Angle succeeded to deliver what may have been the best feel-good moment of the rivalry.

#5. Making Triple H Tap

I attended SummerSlam 2012 live and remember heading into it with a bit of trepidation. I wanted CM Punk to retain the WWE Championship, but recognized that wouldn’t exactly be a happy note to end the show on. Similarly, I thought it was important that for Brock Lesnar’s credibility that he beat Triple H, but recognized that that wouldn’t offer a happy ending for the crowd either. Surely, WWE wouldn’t have heels win both of the biggest matches of the show.

After Punk retained, and it was clear Lesnar-Triple H would main event, I feared the worst—that Lesnar would go 0-2 on his comeback tour, in service to Triple H’s ego.

I was in for a surprise, though, when WWE did say to heck with it and let the heels run wild. Lesnar not only won, but kayfabe broke Triple H’s arm and made him tap.

While this match wasn’t as good as Lesnar-Cena from a few months earlier, it was nonetheless a rock solid main event, and benefited from a better overall build that Lesnar-Cena (which most leaned on the shock of Lesnar being back at all). While this match loses a little luster in retrospect for the knowledge that Triple H would get his win back at WrestleMania, it remains good in a vacuum, and helped keep Lesnar special at this stage.

#4. Giving The Undertaker The Finger

While I thought the original Undertaker-Brock Lesnar feud during Lesnar’s very first world title reign was a solid enough piece of business, I had little interest in the 2014 reprisal. The build to their WrestleMania 30 bout felt like retread of other Undertaker angles, the match itself was lackluster, and, especially at the time, I hated the decision to end The Phenom’s WrestleMania undefeated streak.

I got slammed at work when The Undertaker returned to target Lesnar in summer 2015, and so caught spoilers about WWE revisiting the feud on the way to SummerSlam. I rolled my eyes, thinking it was a waste of Lesnar.

However, when I had time to catch up on WWE programming, I watched The Dead Man return at the end of Lesnar versus Seth Rollins, and then watched footage of the pull apart brawl between the two giants on Raw. Seeing it for myself, I cast my cynicism aside, and got excited for SummerSlam.

Lesnar and The Undertaker delivered. While I don’t think it was either man’s best match at SummerSlam, it also wasn’t the kind of match you could leave out of the conversation—fast paced, heated, and it felt like a very big deal. Moreover, while I hated to see Lesnar lose at that point when he was still such a uniquely over talent, seeing The Undertaker resort to cheating—making Lesnar think he’d given up, then using a low blow en route to locking Hell’s Gate for the choke out victory—confirmed that Lesnar was still being protected.

The best part of all? Lesnar, absolutely defiant. While his character may have accepted he wasn’t getting out of Hell’s Gate, he wouldn’t give The Dead Man the satisfaction of tapping, but rather gave him the middle finger as he faded into unconsciousness.

#3. Beating The Best in the World

CM Punk vs. Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam 2013 was special on a number of levels. First of all, as a total mark for Punk at the time, I loved that WWE was giving him the green light as a talent who could compete with Lesnar—an honor only bestowed upon guys like John Cena and Triple H up to that point since Lesnar returned to wrestling. Secondarily, I loved that, even in defeat, WWE saw fit to protect Punk with interference from Paul Heyman proving crucial to his loss.

Personal biases aside, Lesnar-Punk was an excellent bout. While we can argue the merits and unique spectacle of the match from the number one spot, I’d go so far as to say this was the best overall wrestling match Lesnar has had at SummerSlam, and on the shortlist for Punk’s best, too, probably falling just a nudge behind his work with Jeff Hardy in 2010. It told a fun story, living up to its “The Best vs. The Beast” tagline with the smaller Punk leaning on skill and resolve against an overwhelming opponent, only for the addition of Heyman’s interference to make the odds insurmountable. For me, the best stand alone moment in the match goes to that point when all three moving parts worked in concert, with Lesnar savagely throwing Punk up onto his shoulders, Punk both desperately and shrewdly reaching out to grab Heyman’s tie from the apron, and Heyman selling the moment like he really might get choked to death and/or get decapitated if Lesnar said F it sent both Punk and Heyman flying with a modified F-5.

#2. Defeating The Rock For His First World Championship

When it comes to historically important moments in a wrestler’s career, few can touch his first world championship win. It completely fits the Brock Lesnar story and Lesnar’s image as not just a beast but a phenomenon that he won his first when he was only twenty-five years old—a record at the time—in his first year on the main roster, and over no lesser mega-star than The Rock.

Rock-Lesnar is a solid match—not a classic, but in no way an embarrassment either. I think the biggest knock on it, watching the match fifteen years later, is that neither man was yet what he was destined to become. Rock arguably peaked as a wrestler a few years earlier, but would go on to become so much more of a mainstream star in the deade to follow. He was already one of the top ten biggest stars in wrestling history, but didn’t yet have the aura he would develop as one of the biggest stars in the world, period, no wrestling qualifiers necessary. Lesnar would enjoy what, on paper, looks like similar growth, but rather than going ot Hollywood to become a true housheld name, would enter and excel in the world of mixed martial arts and come back to wrestling as one of the most terrifyingly credible pro wrestlers to ever live. Add onto that that Lesnar would cultivate a unique style, in some ways becoming a less complete wrestler in the second act to his pro wrestling career, and yet becoming all the more unforgettable and irresistible for the realism and blunt force of his repetitive, suplex-centric offense.

The gist of what I’m getting at—looking back, the actual Rock-Lesnar match doesn’t feel as special as it feels like it should. Just the same, it was a prototype for what Lesnar would become as an overwhelming monster heel, and a true passing the torch moment as The Rock lost the last world title he would hold for over a decade, and Lesnar picked up his first in conquering fashion.

#1. Squashing John Cena

There are only two perspectives from which I can imagine not liking John Cena vs. Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam 2014, and not loving it. One is if you were a child watching it live and loved John Cena. Two is if you were the parent or caretaker for a child, didn’t really care about pro wrestling, and had to deal with a distraught child in the aftermath of this massacre.

Cena-Lesnar at SummerSlam 2014 wasn’t technically a squash—it lasted sixteen minutes, and Cena did get his hope spots, most notably locking in an STF in the latter stages of the bout. Just the same, if ever there were a main event scenario in which Cena was booked to work from behind and not really look competitive, this was it. To my knowledge, this outing was unlike any WWE match before it, worked in brutal realistic style that saw Lesnar crush Cena with suplex after suplex. When Lesnar defeated The Undertaker at WrestleMania 30, he established he was going to be a very big deal again; for me, this match was the even more awe-inspiring spectacle for the message that WWE was willing to sacrifice its tip-top hero in favor of making Lesnar the dominant force. The intended end game seemed to be to, in turn, sacrifice Lesnar to establish Roman Reigns as the new face of WWE—an effort that got muddled when Reigns wasn’t ready (or the fans weren’t ready for him) at WrestleMania 31. Just the same, there are very few, if any times in WWE’s history when it more clearly set aside one performer as so physically superior to anyone around him as Lesnar dominating Cena to take the top title.

How would you rank Lesnar’s SummerSlam appearances? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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