The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 WWE PPVs

Though most major wrestling promotions of the last thirty years have some number PPVs in some format, WWE is nonetheless the brand that popularized the genre of recurring super shows that fans pay to see. Though the inception of the WWE Network has changed things a bit, including making that actually pay-per-view concept less literal, in favor of most fans who would pay using the subscription service instead.

That’s not to say that WWE has necessarily had the very best wrestling PPVs, much less that all of them have been all that good. But WWE has had its share of excellent super shows, and this model of booking toward televised super shows has stuck and expanded over the years to happen more or less once a month for the company.

So this week, I’m looking back at seven of the very best shows. Factors include match quality (with more weight on upper-card to main-event matches), how memorable the show was, cohesion, flow, and heat. While storylines going into a PPV were inevitably fundamentally important in shaping the card, and great shows tend to have stronger aftermaths, my focus here is on the shows “in a vacuum” as opposed to focusing on their broader context and impact. As always, my personal opinion factors in very, very heavily.

For the purposes of this countdown, legit pay per view events, the closed circuit television shows that preceded them, and the WWE Network live events to follow them all counted, but I did not consider NXT events eligible, nor did I count free TV specials such as Saturday Night’s Main Event or special editions of Raw.

Without further ado, here are my picks for the top seven WWE PPVs of all time.

#7. Royal Rumble 2001

Like so many children of the eighties who have remained pro wrestling fans, I am a sucker for the Royal Rumble. While I will stand by the 1992 Rumble match as the best of all time, I’d call the 2001 iteration the top runner up, and as an overall PPV have to give 2001 the nod as the best show of the Rumble brand.

The PPV opened with a solidly worked chapter in the book of the Dudleys vs. Edge and Christian that ran ten minutes and, given how solidly over each team was, served its purpose as a hot opener. It would get followed by a lost gem of an Intercontinental Championship Ladder Match that would probably be better celebrated were it not for how complicated it is to celebrate Benoit’s body of work after the way he ended his life. Just the same, this is a fast-paced, hard-hitting bout that doesn’t get bogged down in slow climbs up the ladder or too many contrived spots, in favor of these two men—who were just so hungry at this point before either had claimed a world title in the WWF—putting on a super intense, smash-mouth bout. To round out the undercard Ivory successfully defended her Women’s Championship against Chyna. This one is more story than match, with Chyna all but squashing Ivory, only to sell a preexisting injury and get incapacitated in the final moments of the match, all setting up the eventual pay off at WrestleMania 17.

On to the top of the card, Triple H challenged Kurt Angle for the world title. While this isn’t a great main event, particularly given the talents involved, and it got overbooked with Stephanie McMahon, Trish Stratus, and ultimately Steve Austin getting involved, it wasn’t a bad main event either and served its purpose in furthering all sorts of stories including the eventual McMahon explosion at ‘Mania, and setting up Austin-Triple H for No Way Out, which would, in turn change the stakes for Austin’s ‘Mania world title bid when he had an extra something to prove and had a new willingness to cheat to ensure he could get the job done.

But for Austin to hit the road to WrestleMania, he’d first need to win the Royal Rumble. The Rumble match itself got the final spot and positively excelled, built of of Kane’s monster run and setting the record for eliminations at the time with eleven. The match had it all with plenty of star power, plenty of good action, and even some comedy beats like Drew Carey briefly entering the fray. But in the end, it would be Austin clobbering Kane with a steel chair three times to set clotheslining him out for the big win.

For me, the Attitude Era breaks into to two pieces—great storytelling and great matches. Unfortunately, these elements did not always line up. One of the main criticisms of the Era is that it got too caught up in the stories to really deliver a solid wrestling product. For me, this show marks a pinnacle of carrying on, setting up, and turning a variety of stories while also delivering some excellent in-ring action. The IC title match and Rumble are clear-cut four-star-plus matches, and everything excluding the women’s match comfortably clears three stars (and even the women’s match does what it sets out to in terms of successfully setting up an angle). This is a show with no real holes or weak points that, if anything, I was tempted to rank higher—it’s just that I like the shows to follow even more.

#6. SummerSlam 2013

Full disclosure: I went to this one live and while I don’t doubt that it would be in close contention for a spot in this countdown regardless, the memory of experiencing it still stands out as one of my all-time great wrestling memories, so I’ll acknowledge that I may be overrating it a little.

That said, this SummerSlam was special. It opened with Bray Wyatt squaring off against Kane in a Ring of Fire Match. No, this was not a classic, but the Ring of Fire did offer a spectacle, and the Wyatt character was still new enough that he was blowing off his first real rivalry and so there was some immediate excitement embedded there. Other undercard bouts included the Rhodes Scholars exploding as Cody Rhodes got the best of Damien Sandow in a good, short bout, and Dolph Ziggler and Kaitlyn besting Big E and AJ Lee in a wholly inoffensive confrontation.

On the higher end of the card, Alberto Del Rio put on a very good World Heavyweight Championship full of good counter wrestling and ending in a clean submission for Del Rio. And then there was the double headliner. CM Punk vs. Brock Lesnar was electric—a No Disqualificaiton Match that saw Paul Heyman show why he’s the best traditional manager in wrestling as he was a continual presence, and even got physically involved (most memorably in a spot when Punk grabbed his tie and held on to block an F5) to remind us of the source of the issue between these two performers, but the spotlight remained on Punk and Lesnar in a hard-hitting, back and forth match. While Lesnar, the presumptive victor, did get the win, Punk created legitimate doubt and this would wind up being one of his final showcases as an elite performer in WWE.

From there, Daniel Bryan and John Cena squared off in an epic main event. Bryan is a masterful in-ring worker, and Cena has proven time and again that he can more than hold his own given a top performer to operate opposite. This was a simply terrific face vs. face match, with the sub-narrative of Cena still playing a good guy but implicatly representing business-as-usual while Bryan represented the possibility of change. With overwhelming crowd support behind him, Bryan kneed Cena’s face off to pick up the clean pin for a truly exhilarating moment.

Folks will surely have mixed feelings about how the show ended—not with Bryan’s celebration, but in Triple H and Randy Orton each turning heel to form the foundation of a new Authority stable, robbing Bryan of the title via Money in the Bank cash-in. While I’ll concede that the aftermath—up to WrestleMania season—was lackluster and hurt Bryan’s buzz, I get the logic here as Triple H and Orton became something like a next-generation Vince McMahon and Corporate Champion Rock for Bryan (playing the Stone Cold part) to chase in the months to follow.

Watching this show, you couldn’t help but feel you’d witnessed not only a solid show with two MOTY candidates, but also a paradigm shift. In pinning Cena clean, Bryan came across as *the guy* and in the heel turns at the end of the show, the landscape of WWE’s booking had shifted dramatically.

#5. WrestleMania 3

I found this to be a particularly tough PPV to rank. If we’re to be completely objective and put it side-by-side with other PPVs, I’ll concede that it doesn’t really belong, with only one truly great match, another match with an iconic moment, a handful of feel-good moments, and a lot of short matches that felt as though they were there to cram as many people as possible on the card.

But it’s WrestleMania 3.

At a time when there were far fewer PPVs to go around each year, and in what was arguably the WWF’s single most successful era in terms of crossover appeal and mainstream acceptance, this show marked the pinnacle with a main event of the iconic hero of the day, Hulk Hogan, squaring off with the seemingly insurmountable challenger, Andre the Giant, with the world title on the line, in front of a record-setting crowd of (reportedly) 93,000. This was not only a clash of icons, but booked masterfully with Andre’s heel turn leading up to the bout, and the WWF’s apocryphal claims that he was undefeated (he wasn’t) and had never been body slammed before (he had been, including by Hogan himself). This match was a sign of its times—a pitch-perfect 1980s showdown in which the All-American hero Hogan came out victorious.

The show’s other highlight was a truly great clash between Ricky Steamboat and Randy Savage over the Intercontinental Championship. The match paid off a great, heated program between the two and put each of these men’s technical prowess, athleticism, and intensity on display. The sequence of two-count false finishes is particularly iconic, and particularly imitated with varying degrees of success. Perhaps most notably of all, this match, like the main event, gave the fans exactly what they wanted. Too often in the decades since, promoters don’t deliver the happy ending, in favor of extending storylines and prolonging chases but WrestleMania 3 demonstrated the WWF’s ability to set up the fans to want a particular outcome and then to deliver on it.

As I wrote earlier, the rest of the lengthy show, twelve matches long, didn’t offer much to write home about. Roddy Piper’s supposed retirement bout loses some of its luster given he was in the ring for decades to follow, including quite a few more WrestleMania matches, though his victory over Adrian Adonis and Brutus Beefcakes face turn that facilitated it were nice moments. Harley Race vs. The Junkyard Dog was a well-conceived feud, but the resulting match didn’t exactly light the world on fire. The six-man between Hillbilly Jim, Little Beaver, and The Haiti Kid vs. King Kong Bundy, Little Tokyo, and Lord Littlebrook is probably the next most memorable outing for all of its absurdity, but was in no way a good match. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the largely forgotten bout between Jake Roberts and The Honky Tonk Man was probably the next best thing on the card—not a classic to be sure, but Roberts cut a wicked pace early on to put this one a cut above the rest of the card.

WrestleMania 3 earns this spot on the countdown for memorability and the degree to which it represents everything that the WWF was at this time, including the company’s massive drawing power. From here, however, we do move on to better wrestling shows.

#4. WrestleMania 19

While all was not necessarily well with the WWE brand in the aftermath of the Attitude Era, the influx of talent from WCW, availability of legends with nowhere else to go, and embrace of nostalgia helped foster some excellent WrestleMania cards. WrestleManias 18 and 20 were both in the running for this countdown. WrestleMania 19 coasts into the number four spot.

The undercard first half of this show features a number of good matches. Matt Hardy and Rey Mysterio cut a blistering pace for a very good five minute match. The Undertaker put on his working boots and Big Show and A-Train bumped like crazy to make their handicap match more entertaining than it had any right to be. The Trish Stratus-Victoria-Jazz triple threat was a solid enough short encounter, and Team Angle vs. Los Guerreros and Chris Benoit and Rhyno, while not as great as we might have hoped, was nonetheless entirely inoffensive.

But then we get to the back end of this card. I won’t make any excuses for Booker T vs. Triple H, a bout in which two very good performers spent too much time selling and the booking delivered an utterly unsatisfying resolution to the story being told. But putting that one aside, the other four top matches truly clicked, and better yet clicked in a variety ways, including an epic, fast-paced, emotional bout between Shawn Michaels and Chris Jericho; a solid exhibition of over-booked sports-entertainment brawling between Hulk Hogan and Mr. McMahon; a wonderful final chapter to the Steve Austin-Rock WrestleMania as the two legends on their way out the door delivered another top-notch bout; and finally, the main event match between Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle, too often dismissed because of the botched Shooting Star Press, when we ought to celebrate Lesnar’s combination of power and agility, paired with Angle’s pure guts to work a match this hard-hitting with a badly injured neck, besides having the wherewithal to call the finish on the fly after the Shooting Star Press spot went awry.

This show opened well, and its final stretch provided four iconic matches for its time that crossed generations, gave us our nostalgia fix, and ultimately delivered a rock solid wrestling match in the closer. There are very few PPVs before or since that were any better.

#3. In Your House Calgary Stampede

This show is a strange one. It’s the shortest to make the countdown at only two hours, and if you look at the booking surrounding it, it would be easy to dismiss this show as filler in between bigger ones, two months after The Undertaker turned back a challenge from Steve Austin for the WWF Championship, a month after Triple H began his ascension by winning the King of the Ring, a month before Bret Hart would reach the climax of the Hart Foundation stable angle by winning his last WWF Championship. This four match show would feature a world title match with a predictable outcome, a rematch from the month before, a good but not entirely memorable bout between two Japanese stars, and a ten-man tag match main event that didn’t really move storylines so much as tide us over before Hart claimed the top spot again.

Against all of this logic, this was one of the best shows the WWF ever assembled.

The Mankind-Triple H opener was a truly exciting brawl, and while it ended in a double count out, it felt like a worthy chapter to their ongoing rivalry that would eventually explode onto the main event scene. The Great Sasuke beating Taka Michinoku was fast-paced and fun to watch. While no one really thought Vader was winning the WWF Championship at this point, he was still a credible challenger to ‘Taker and the bout was something of a dream match that fans of the WWF and WCW three-to-five years earlier would have salivated over.

And then there was the main event. There are but a handful of times when everything has truly clicked for the WWF and just the right kind of hometown crowd losing its mind has elevated an excellent match to an all-time classic and this is one of those occasions, when the Calgary-bred Hart Foundation stable of Bret Hart, Owen Hart, Jim Neidhart, Davey Boy Smith, and Brian Pillman squared off against the ostensibly face team of Steve Austin, Ken Shamrock, Goldust, and The Legion of Doom, whom the crowd absolutely loathed. The action was fast and furious the crowd bought in for all twenty-five minutes, and the booking was spot on with an injury angle for Owen after Austin bashes his knee with a chair, causing Owen to be taken to the back. Then Bret injures Austin’s knee to take him out of the equation. Austin returns to the fray to nuclear heat, only for Owen to return as the conquering hero who ultimately steals the pin on Austin to win the match and give way to the Harts, their family, and their friends flooding into the ring for a huge celebration. The match itself is conservatively a four-and-a-half star affair. Add in the crowd reaction and aftermath and it soars right past five stars to legendary status.

Whil this show did further a number of storylines and works in its context, a part of what’s always impressed me about it, since I first viewed it in its entirety nearly a decade after it happened, is how well the show, and particularly its main event also works in a vacuum. It’s precisely the sort of compact show, with no excess, and wall-to-wall action that works in any time period, and given two hours, may well be the first option I’d turn to to convert a pro wrestling skeptic.

#2. Money in the Bank 2011

There’s a fair argument to be made that the Money in the Bank concept is played out. We’ve seen heels cash-in on faces and faces cash-in on heels. We’ve seen the briefcase as a vehicle for heel turns. We’ve seen it (twice) cashed in the same night it was won, and we’ve even seen it cashed in mid-WrestleMania main event.

In 2011, the concept wasn’t one-hundred-percent fresh, but it was still only six years old, and only in the second year of a dedicated Money in the Bank PPV. Multi-man ladder matches still had a fair degree of novelty and with two on the card, plus plenty more built around the ladder matches, Money in the Bank looked very good on paper, only to over-deliver in practice.

This show had just one dud—a forgettable Divas Championship bout between Kelly Kelly and Brie Bella. Aside from that, the show featured Mark Henry getting the push of his career, decisively defeating the Big Show in a key match for getting Henry over and continuing a push that would culminate in him winning the World Heavyweight Championship in the fall. Besides that, the show included a match between Christian and Randy Orton over the World Heavyweight Championship. These two demonstrated excellent in-ring chemistry throughout their summer-long program, and this match was no exception. While Orton losing via DQ, and thus losing the title due to a pre-match stipulation, was a bit underwhelming as a finish, it did provide good reason for the feud to continue, and to facilitate a better no-DQ bout at SummerSlam the following month.

Moving on from there, the show featured two Money in the Bank ladder matches, one to represent each brand. On the Smackdown side Wade Barrett went in as the favorite, with Cody Rhodes arguably the dark horse behind him. In this opening match of the PPV, WWE played perfectly to the Chicago crowd of smart fans, however, in giving the career-changing win to Daniel Bryan, capping a very good match with surprising finish that electrified the crowd. Moreover, because of this surprising and crowd-pleasing finish, I think we were all a little more ready to accept Alberto Del Rio—the presumptive Raw winner—taking the briefcase in the other ladder match which, while not quite as good, was also an exciting piece of business with a nice finish that saw Del Rio unmask Mysterio to incapacitate him long enough to get the win.

All of this action would be enough for an excellent PPV, but we haven’t even touched the main event yet. That final match saw CM Punk, on what was billed as his last night with the company, challenging John Cena for the WWE Championship. In the aftermath of the Pipe Bomb Promo, Punk had his hometown crowd absolutely rabid behind him. We can debate whether Punk was actually a face or a heel in this match. He hadn’t had a clear cut face turn, but had also gotten crowds (not just in Chicago) behind with the Pipe Bomb and its aftermath, and hadn’t done anything particularly heelish since. Not unlike the Calgary Stampede main event referenced above, this is another example of an excellent match pushed to broach five-star territory based on crowd reaction as the crowd positively buzzed on the initial exchanges and just kept going over the half hour to follow. The back and forth action was great, only to culminate in Vince McMahon and John Laurinaitis coming to ringside to ensure Cena would win and Punk wouldn’t walk out of the company with the title. In a twist, however, it was Cena who got distracted by their presence which set up Punk to hit Cena with the Go to Sleep to steal the pin. WWE masterfully teased an unhappy ending with Alberto Del Rio storming the ring with his briefcase, only for Punk to incapicate him with a kick and then escape through the adoring crowd with the title in hand.

With one of the best openers and one of the best main events in WWE PPV history, and only five-minute women’s match to take anything away from this card in between, Money in the Bank 2011 was easily one of the best shows WWE had ever put on.

#1. WrestleMania 17

Though I know the votes aren’t unanimous that this the best WrestleMania, let alone the best ever WWE PPV, when you didn’t see it listed until now, surely you saw it coming.

WrestleMania 17 is the quintessential WWF supercard, which unofficially capped the Attitude and Monday Night War eras. It was the PPV to follow the WWF’s acquisition of WCW. It was the show that included Steve Austin ending his hellacious run as top face when he turned heel and allied himself with Vince McMahon.

A big part of what makes WrestleMania 17 stand out, and why I do place it firmly in this top spot is the variety that it had to offer. Yes, there was the heated face vs. face main event in which two of the biggest stars of all time squared off on essentially even footing as megastars, and they delivered an all-time classic main event. But scroll down the card from there. This is also the show that featured TLC II: Edge and Christian, the Hardys, and the Dudley Boyz reprising their rivalry for another three-way collision, in my opinion the best of the bunch, most famously featuring Edge leaping from a ladder to spear Jeff Hardy, who hung high from the contraption that secured the tag title belts overhead. Is it any wonder that each of these two fearless young stars would move on to main event glory and world championshps, not to mention Edge main eventing a ‘Mania seven years later?

While I rate those two matches as classics, and all-time top-ten WrestleMania confrontations, WrestleMania 17 also included the magnificent trainwreck of street fight between Vince and Shane McMahon, complete with Linda and Stephanie McMahon, Mick Foley, and Trish Stratus to getting in on the action and playing off of their respective McMahon-centric storylines from the preceding months. There was Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit turning in an excellent technical match—not their best, but did these guys ever not clear three stars when they locked horns? There was the Gimmick Battle Royal for nostalgia and comic relief purposes to boot, and an ultra-satisfying squash match in which Chyna paid off her months-long storyline with Ivory. The rest of the Right to Censor faction got its comeuppance, too, at the hands of Tazz and the APA in an action-packed four-minute romp of a six-man tag.

Even the less memorable secondary title matches on this show delivered, including Chris Jericho opening the show successfully defending the Intercontinental Championship against William Regal, Eddie Guerrero winning the European Championship off of Test, and Kane beating The Big Show and Raven for the Hardcore Championship in a match that was nicely representative of the plunder-fests surrounding that title at the time.

My only real knock on ‘Mania 17 was The Undertaker-Triple H bout. Not that it was awful, but given the talent and star power involved, I’ve always reckoned it ought to have been a classic, but got too caught up in brawling outside the ring to tell a cohesive story, and ran overlong at, nineteen minutes, for the kind of non-directional brawl it wound up being. Just the same, when your biggest complaint about a card is bona fide legends (not to mention past and future WrestleMania main eventers) not tearing the house down, that’s not much of a gripe.

WrestleMania 17 had something for everyone, paid off a variety of storylines, was a lot of fun and had a great main event. While hindsight tells us that the main event’s storyline may not have played out so well in the long-term, and we may have all been better off without the Austin heel turn, it made reasonable sense from the storyline perspective of Austin doing anything to reclaim his top spot, not to mention that this was the biggest heel turn in wrestling since Hulk Hogan joined the nWo. That’s newsworthy stuff, and a nice cherry on top of my pick for the best WWE PPV of all time.

Which WWE PPVs would you add to the list? My narrowest misses included One Night Stand 2005, a number of WrestleMania shows, and The Royal Rumble 1992. Let us know what you think in the comments.

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