Top 7 Survivor Series Surprises

Survivor Series is the second oldest WWE PPV/PLE/whatever abbreviation WWE wants to use for their biggest shows. They’ve tried to phase it out, but the WWE Universe keeps bringing it back. Us wrestling fans love those shows that take place around Thanksgiving. Back in the day, Thanksgiving was the biggest day for a majority of wrestling territories. Starrcade started out as a Thanksgiving show. The WWF launched Survivor Series as an answer to Starrcade. It worked out pretty well for them. Didn’t work out so well for everybody else, but I suppose that’s just a fact of life.

YEAH.

Today, we look back at the seven most surprising moments of Survivor Series, with the knowledge that there will be more to come.

7. Helen Hart Throws In The Towel (1994)

Mr. Bob Backlund got written out of WWF for a long period of time, then came back in the early 1990s for a nostalgia pop. Which is kind of wild considering these days where wrestlers never really age out until they die, and Mr. Backlund always kept himself in tremendous shape. He still does, as far as I know. The man kept rejecting WWE Hall of Fame invitations because he felt he had one last run in him. They must have found Mr. Backlund’s price at some point because he finally accepted it.

Bret Hart & Mr. Backlund had a match on a WWF Superstars taping. Bret got the win, to the surprise of nobody watching the WWF at that point. What came as a surprise was Bob snapping, and procuring the crossface chicken wing on anybody he met afterward. Nobody expected that. Another thing nobody expected was Bret’s parents being dragged to ringside by Bob’s second, the King of Harts Owen Hart. Certainly nobody expected Owen to drag his parents through the mud, but that’s exactly what he did. Boy made his mom throw the Hitman towel in because that’s how jealous he was of Bret.

I would have almost excused it if Backlund didn’t drop the title to Diesel on a house show. Terrible. If you feel the need to screw your brother over, make sure the person that beats him keeps the title longer than three days. Free advice there.

6. Sheamus Cashes In (2015)

Survivor Series 2015 was headlined by a four-man tournament to determine a new WWE World Champion. Seth Rollins was forced to vacate it earlier in November due to injury, some probably thought it was poetic justice that his former Shield teammates ended up in the finals of this tournament three years after…well, we’ll get to that in a little bit. Roman Reigns & Dean Ambrose fought in the apparent main event of Survivor Series, and the Big Dog got the win to make himself a WWE World Champion for the first time. Seemed like a big deal for a minute or so, until Triple H came out to congratulate the new champion. Roman responded by spearing Triple H. Had Roman ignored his urge to spear somebody at this point, it would have saved himself & the WWE Universe a lot of trouble. Instead, we got Sheamus running down after said spear to cash in his briefcase and we got a new champion that wasn’t advertised as part of the proceedings. People tell me all the time that sort of thing is good, but I am not convinced.

Hulk Hogan dethroning the Iron Sheik, this wasn’t. I think most of us wrestling observers saw the potential in Roman Reigns, but we didn’t see the logic in how WWE booked him for most of the 2010s. I always thought a heel turn would be the catalyst to set him off, and I ended up being right. It just took too long to finally get there, and as somebody with undiagnosed ADD it didn’t work for me.

5. Brock Lesnar Loses Thanks To Paul Heyman (2002)

The Next Big Thing ran through everybody in the WWF like a hot knife through butter. He debuted just after WrestleMania XVIII, won the King of the Ring tournament, beat The Rock at SummerSlam for the Championship. Something needed to happen to throw an obstacle in his way. Now, it’s easy to say “What better way to do that than throw the biggest guy in the company at him?”, which is exactly what they did when putting Big Show against Brock at the Survivor Series.

Brock got over with the people during this push, which isn’t shocking since people love to root for winners. Paul Heyman isn’t the sort of person you want around somebody the fans want to root for. The people like Paul, but they like Paul as a heel, somebody they love to hate. As a babyface, Paul is out of his element. So it made perfect sense for Paul to turn on Brock and ensure his first defeat on WWF television.

4. Birth of The Shield (2012)

The main event of Survivor Series 2012 pitted WWE Champion CM Punk against John Cena & Ryback, his top two challengers of the time. We weren’t shocked that Punk won, but he had some unexpected help. A bunch of NXT guys out there in turtlenecks. That’s what Punk needed, even though he didn’t approve of everybody involved.

Kinda lame, but it did lead to The Shield being a thing that ran over everybody during 2013, which was pretty cool.

3. Sting Debuts (2014)

Sting was the last worldwide-known pro wrestler from the 1980s & 90s to sign with WWE. Almost everybody else in that era that had a name jumped between the two companies at one point or another. Sting was the one guy that was WCW-exclusive. Then once the Monday Night Wars ended, he went to TNA. He felt he had a debt to the Jarretts because they helped start his career, and Dixe Carter seemed nice. He did a lot of things with TNA, but eventually he ended up in the same place most wrestlers end up in. Sting needed to make his WWE run.

There were teases. Sting appeared on WWE Network/DVD programming to pay respect to the Ultimate Warrior, his first tag team partner. He appeared in a video game. There was merchandise & action figures. The only question at that point was when Sting would appear on WWE programming, and it ended up being at the end of Survivor Series 2014 to make sure that Team Cena beat The Authority.

I love this portion of Sting coming to WWE. Everything after went downhill, so we’ll ignore that here.

2. The Rock Goes Corporate (1998)

Survivor Series 1998 was Vince Russo’s masterpiece. There was a tournament for the WWF Championship, a Deadly Game if you will. Steve Austin was obviously Mr. McMahon’s biggest enemy at this point, but The Rock had become a strong #2 since he was the People’s Champion and obviously Mr. McMahon was not a fan of the people. Mankind was McMahon’s top choice, he even got an easy first round mystery opponent in Duane Gill. After various twists we ended up with Rock vs. Mankind as the finals, and Mr. McMahon threw us a curveball.

The Rock became the Corporate Champion, which led to a feud with Mankind that led into Rock’s match with Steve Austin at WrestleMania XV. As much as we like to knock most of the Attitude Era booking these days, and a lot of it deserves knocking, the WWF Championship scene worked out pretty well during this time period even if the reigns were tremendously short by today’s standard.

Gonna go off-topic here for a minute. Steve Austin’s longest reign as WWF Champion lasted 175 days, and started at WrestleMania X-Seven with a heel turn that killed a good portion of the WWF’s business. I loved Austin’s work during that time period, but most people didn’t. The Rock’s longest reign as WWF Champion lasted 119 days. The Undertaker’s longest reign as WWF Champion lasted 133 days. WWE has been telling us ever since CM Punk’s 434 day long reign as champion that the most important quality a champion can have is to last “x” number of days as champion, and WWE’s competition has fallen into that trap as well. To me, it’s more about what a champion does while they have the title. Guys like Austin, Rock, Undertaker & whoever else you’d like to name stand out more to me than today’s never-ending champions because they had better feuds & more drama as to who would win their title matches. These days, we all know a world champion will last at least a couple of hundred days with the title unless they get hurt. There’s no suspense.

I kind of blame the original Ring of Honor for this, because they got Samoa Joe over by making him champion for 645 days, and trained “smart” wrestling fans to think that was the way. Joe had a good set of challengers through his reign and did put that title on the map. Joe was the right person at the right time, but people harped more on the number of days & not the quality of competition. ROH learned the wrong lesson as well and kept their title on certain people way longer than they needed to.

Honorable Mention: The Gobbledygooker Debuts (1990)

As somebody that works in the sports business, I get the appeal of mascots. Kids love them! Kids might not get all of the rules of various sports at an early age, but they love the players & they love the mascots even more than most of the players. So I totally get what the WWF was going for when they debuted a mascot at Survivor Series 1990.

The main issue that killed the Gobbledygooker seconds after he arrived: the WWF made too big of a deal out of it. They hyped up this big egg for months, and wrestling fans thought that something truly special might hatch out of the egg. No, it was just a mascot meant to get the kids excited. Not good enough when you’re hyping it for months. WCW had Wild Cat Willie appear randomly in the mid 1990s, and he had a much better shelf life because he wasn’t pushed down the fans’ throats. Kids at WCW shows liked seeing Willie, so he got over. Willie wasn’t hyped as this big surprise in an egg or whatever wildcats are born out of. There’s a balance you have to strike with mascots. You push them to kids, but you don’t push them as such a huge part of the show that it turns the old folks off. You definitely don’t debut them as a Survivor Series Surprise.

1. The Undertaker Debuts (1990)

Sometimes things seem like a bigger deal in hindsight. Given the fact that the man behind the Undertaker persona hadn’t accomplished a whole lot in WCW prior to signing with the WWF, it’s easy for people to assume that Undertaker’s debut at Survivor Series 1990 wasn’t a big deal at all. As somebody that watched this show back in the day at a young age, it was pretty obvious that the Undertaker was going to be a force to be reckoned with for years to come. The guy stood out from the pack the moment he made his entrance. Roddy Piper yelling “TAKE A LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THIS HAM HOCK”, which is a phrase I use every so often when I see a tall person. Nobody gets it. Undertaker ran over everybody in the ring with him, only getting counted out because he was too busy kicking ass on the floor.

This was the perfect debut for someone who would become a big part of the company for decades to come. He got counted out of the ring while beating the hell out of people. Undertaker wasn’t one of those debuts that shocked people because he arrived from somewhere else, he shocked people by being so dominant & different. The Dead Man continued being dominant & different for many Survivor Series events in the future.

Thanks for reading! Hit me up at [email protected] or on the social media with thoughts, comments or suggestions. Until next time, true believers!