Top 10 Greatest WWE Matches you go back five years, though. A different sound. a little bell. WrestleMania XII saw Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart wrestle for sixty minutes before it broke, something King of the Ring 1996 couldn’t do. Iron Man wins, 0-0 at the buzzer, and you start to wonder if anything is really going to happen. Then time. One lapse, one superkick, one long breath.
Then time One lapse
At last Michaels gets it and he collapses like a man who has just run 26 miles without knowing he was doing it. Several fans say it was a bummer. That misses the point. The building slowed its heart-beat, so the conclusion could be punched through.
Hell opens at King of the Ring Pittsburgh 1998. The Undertaker throws Mankind from the cell and the gasp crosses oceans. Then, since one fall wasn’t enough for him and since the idea of ‘enough’ wouldn’t come into play that evening, he chokeslams him through the roof. It’s more about spectacle than structure, you might say. You’d be sort of right.
Pain entered the story
But wrestling lives on pictures and no picture from that era endures more than that fall, that stretcher and that determination to give up. Pain entered the story, and it didn’t need an ending to survive.
Then as you go back the temperature goes back up. Hulk Hogan is handed the simplest task in the most difficult way in a stadium-filling spectacle at WrestleMania III: lift Andre the Giant and carry the moment. Does he? When the slam hits and the leg drops, the selling point is scale.
WrestleMania 13 conceals a technical clinic.
Stone Cold Steve Austin and Bret Hart trade control instead of moves. Austin bleeds, doesn’t quit and passes out in the Sharpshooter. Twice turn. Months later, Hart beats the villain in his own country, Austin silently beats the hero. And that’s the problem. The finish ends the contest and changes identities too. Since then every heel turn has had a ghost of that night in it.
Chicago’s got a different vibe in 2011.
Somehow more quiet, more sharp. Money in the Bank 2011, CM Punk takes a mic and there’s a realistic looking fight with John Cena. “I’ll leave with the championship,” Punk says. The business is threatening to retain it. Before the first lockup, the crowd picks a side. Punk wrestles as a man willing to get out of the middle, Cena wrestles as a man trying to stay in the middle.
Punk hits the GTS and counts to three. The building exhales. It doesn’t blow up. Contracts turn into a voice referendum story. Still, it was a thing South Asian fans who grew up with dubbed commentary lived.
A cage falls.
At first it seems like a relic. Until it isn’t. Triple H and Cactus Jack Fight in a Hell in a Cell in No Way Out 2000 takes the glamour out of violence. A pedigree on the wrong object, barbed wire bats, tacks on the canvas. Witness Mick Foley, who put his body in places it does not belong because that is what the role requires. It looks ugly. It is destined to be. At last the clause has its sense again.
The South Asian fandom
And the counterpoint rolls on. Where is the murmurs of the Tokyo Dome, the five-star checklist, the pure workrate? That’s right. It just arrived in a different way. The South Asian fandom learned to appreciate characters before it learned to appreciate structure.
Which is why Austin-Rock is number one for many. You can reduce its consequences to one line, even though it is convoluted and compromised. He needed it more. He did what he said he would never do. The title took some of the audience’s faith with it.
I’ve seen them again and the pacing feels different. When it’s frenzied it’s slower. Camera looks old now. The commentary is sometimes too one-sided. But the nucleus is there. A ladder becomes a story. Submission is a metamorphosis. A handshake can be a backstab. When the time comes, you don’t need perfect symmetry.