wrestling / Columns
The 8 Ball 07.03.13: The Top 8 Most Overrated Matches
Hello and welcome to another edition of the 8 Ball for the wrestling section of 411. I am David McGregor and I better pull my finger out as Larry has hired a ton of new list writers. I think I might call the 8 Ball the premier list column on 411 just to be an asshole. That’s sarcasm to those who are immune to it.
Last week went pretty well, I got more comments than I have ever got for an article. I didn’t realise that many people paid attention to this column. Cheers for that.
Also I stand by Jim Cornette being on the list, mainly because it’s my list and opinions are like… well you know the rest.
This week you voted and you picked the Top 8 Most Overrated Matches. Now I am not old enough to have watched every match in the 70’s and 80’s, so there aren’t many of those matches.
There isn’t really much criteria other than me not thinking the match was that great, yet it being heralded as brilliant by many others.
Top 8 Most Overrated Matches
>This was all about Hogan slamming Andre, and to be honest there isn’t really much else before or after that. We know Andre’s best years were behind him, and sadly he would only be around for about another decade. But this match is always listed next to some of the greatest matches of all time just because of that slam that was heard round the world. And that isn’t hyperbole, well it is but not as much as usual, as Hogan slamming Andre was a cultural event that hooked millions of fans. But that doesn’t make it a great match; it makes it a great moment. The moment is one of the most defining in the entire history of wrestling; it made Wrestlemania a true mainstay and made the WWF “cool”.
But the match itself is a bit boring, and we all know what is about to happen and we are just waiting for it. The fans in attendance knew where it was leading to and I imagine the fans at home did so as well. Predictable isn’t always a bad thing, and obviously it wasn’t in hindsight, but there wasn’t enough there to make predictable interesting. Therefore bar the slam that made the WWE, we have a subpar match that many casual fans site as one of the greatest.
>I’m all for making a match dramatic, but was there really any need to nearly kill yourself to make something exciting? Well actually there probably was because it made Mick Foley a millionaire, and that fall from the cage is one of the most iconic moments of all time. But as we have seen from Andre and Hogan, one or two iconic moments do not make a match great. Bar the two falls from the cage what is there to this match, the rest of it is just Mankind being utterly annihilated by The Undertaker. It fitted in with the story they were trying to tell, but I think after the second fall everyone was exhausted by it and nothing could bring the audience back. If this had been a 15-minute match that went to the top of the cage and ended with Foley being thrown from the top, we still would have had one of the craziest moments ever but it would have worked a lot better. The WWE style of wrestling is to build to the dramatic finish, and this was the exact opposite. The match seems to end on the most uninteresting part of the match, I just don’t understand why the audience should care after the falls?
But because the match started on the top of the cage, it had nowhere to go but down both literally and in terms of match quality. They did what they set out to do, and that was create a moment that the audience would remember. Falls have gotten higher and more dramatic, but they have never got more impactful than Foley being thrown through the Spanish announce table. But lets not pretend that the match was anything more than that fall, even the second fall was pointless.
>When I first watched this match I loved it. I thought this was brutal and just completely different to any other Wrestlemania match we had ever seen. But when you watch it back now, it is just too much. There isn’t any real flow to the match, and it seems like Foley and Edge are just moving from spot to spot without any real emotion. This was supposed to be a real blood feud, and there was plenty of that, but a lot of it seemed awkward. Instead of wanting to kill each other they seemed content in trying to do exciting stunts, and I know that is the point of wrestling but in this context it seemed strange.
But my biggest problem with this, and more so with the Edge and Foley v Dreamer and Funk at One Night Stand from the same year, is that it is needlessly brutal. None of the tacks, barbed wire and fire adds anything to this match. Well actually the flaming table did work fairly well, and would have been a great finish if the match hadn’t already been littered with rubbish it didn’t need. It was like they went over the top with this match; even with the horrible Joey Styles on commentary screeching anytime something tiny happened. This was put in amongst the best matches of 2006, and I was one of those people, but looking back on it I wholeheartedly regret my pick. It was an over the top mess of a match, and you know it’s bad when Vince and HBK can put together a more streamlined match.
>
I have seen more than a few respected figures in wrestling list this as the greatest Wrestlemania match of all time. When you think of how many great matches there have been in the 29 years of Wrestlemania that is just ridiculous! Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels are two of the greatest of all time, and have had some fantastic matches together, but the Ironman Match at Wrestlemania XII just wasn’t the great spectacle that everyone hypes it up to be. There are moments in which the match is brilliant, in fact the first 25 minutes is fantastic, but they fail to capture the audience for the whole 60 minutes.
The difficult thing about the Iron Man Match is that everyone knows its going to last a full hour, therefore it is difficult to keep the audience interested after the initial surge of interest has drifted. That’s where Michaels and Bret failed, after we got half way through we realised they were going to go 0 – 0 for the whole hour, then end it on sudden death. It was a just reasoning for doing that, but it took a lot of the entertainment value out of the match. It could have easily been an hour-long match, and it would have been more captivating for the entire audience.
>This hurts to put this one in here. I adore the first Undertaker and HBK match, it was my first wrestling show ever and I witnessed one of the greatest matches of all time. Some people will call that match overrated but I have only ever been to one wrestling show, and I can’t honestly put that on this list.
When Wrestlemania 26 arrived and a rematch between Undertaker and Shawn Michaels was announced I was overjoyed. Then when Michael’s career was put on the line I couldn’t control my excitement. And when it was the man event of the show I knew we were in for something special. Yet when the bell rang I was left a little underwhelmed.
Maybe no match will ever recreate the feeling of watching a great match live. But it seemed like a bit of a rehash of what they had done the year prior, and bar the retirement stipulation nothing was really different from the year before. I think they should have done some kind of gimmick match; it worked very well in 1998 so it could have topped the whole thing off perfectly in 2010. There is nothing about the Wrestlemania 26 match that makes me want to watch it instead of their first Wrestlemania match, and that is the problem with doing rematches in subsequent Wrestlemania’s. They were so successful in their first match that they had a huge undertaking in 2010, and yet it didn’t work.
When I look at Undertaker v HBK 2 all I can think is that it wasn’t better than Wrestlemania 25. It would have taken a miracle for that to happen, but a lot of people still prefer the sequel and call it an amazing match. But I think it’s ok, and fails to live up to the hype they had created in the run up to Wrestlemania XXVI. But that whole PPV suffered from that exact same fate, one of the greatest wrestling cards ever wasted.
>Hear me out on this one. I probably will regret writing this, but I just don’t think the Royal Rumble match of 1992 is all that great.
The 92 rumble match is constantly rated the greatest of all time, yet there is a whole lot of boring points in which there isn’t enough going on to keep the audience’s attention. I admit that Flair puts in one of the greatest performances of his career in the match, but Flair seemed like the only one who brought his A-game to the match. There was a lot of wasted opportunity in this match, and if it were broadcast today it wouldn’t get the kind of adulation that it did back in 1992. It just baffles me that this match is put up there as one of the greatest matches of all time, regardless of whether it is a Royal Rumble mach or not. For me wrestling is about excitement and entertainment, and this match was missing a lot of that during many points.
I hate mentioning his name but Benoit did the same act as Flair 12 years later, and it was much more entertaining. I think the WWE have got a better running system for the Rumble match now compared to 1992, and maybe spacing out entrants and allowing for more exciting moments has led to a better overall product. You know the match isn’t as good as people claim when the greatest moment of the entire PPV is Flair’s promo after the match. “With a tear in my eye…” that’s a classic moment. Flair going 60 minutes in the rumble is a classic moment. The bit between Flair entering and winning is just quite dull at points, and that doesn’t make it the greatest royal rumble ever. Now 2001 that was entertaining!
>Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon did not invent the Ladder Match, but they brought it to the mainstream and put it on a pedestal on the biggest night in wrestling. The match is fairly entertaining and created the foundation for the next 20 years of Ladder Matches in the WWE and elsewhere. But when you look back at the match, it just doesn’t compare very favourably to the matches it influenced.
There are literally hundreds of matches that took the ladder match and bettered it. Whether that makes the Wrestlemania X Ladder Match overrated or not I am in two minds about, as at the time it was considered an instant classic. But now when you look at it you are expecting more, so many people have pushed the Ladder Match to its extremes that the initial WWE one in 1994 just isn’t all that good. There are some exciting moments in the match, but I’m sure they were a lot more exciting for the 1994 audience as opposed to the 2013 one looking back. Surely if someone can do something in a Ladder Match in 2013 they could have done it in 1994. But that is a very narrow minded view of a match type that had yet to be fully explored, so should the match get a pass because of that?
I do believe that a match has to last the test of time, it has to be able to excite on a level that it did when it was first aired. So in that respect HBK/Ramon just doesn’t cut it. But it was the beginning of one of the most exciting match types of all time. Truthfully, I just don’t know whether this should be here or not.
>The rest of the matches on this list I enjoy, in some capacity anyway. But this match just bores the left tit off of me. Yes I am sure it was a great moment for the fans in attendance, and maybe even for some of those watching live. But for everyone else, it was just a crappy match that the audience became the most exciting part of. Sometimes an audience can make a match seem great when it is indeed rather lacklustre, and this is an extreme example of this. Nothing of real note happens in the ring, it is simply Rock watching Hogan do the same shtick he did when he left the WWF in 1994.
Nostalgia is a funny thing; it can make us see things through rose tinted glasses. For example I recently just shelled out £60 for a N64 and a bunch of games. The graphics suck and it actually affects the gameplay. Yet I was ecstatic today when I sat for hours playing Goldeneye and Mario 64.
And that’s what happened here with Rock v Hogan. It had been so long since we seen Hogan do his thing in a WWE ring that we ate it up, yet when we remove the glasses we see that there was no substance at all to the match. Now that the allure of Hogan and the WWE being reunited has long gone we can look back and see what the match truly is. And for the WWE in 2002 this was just not up to the calibre they were achieving. Jericho and Triple H didn’t get away with it the very same night, so why should Hogan?
Choose Next Week’s 8 Ball Topic
1. Best PPV’s of All Time
2. Best Promo’s of All Time
3. Overrated Wrestler’s of the 21st Century
More Trending Stories
- Eric Bischoff Wouldn’t Put Money On Chances Of Vince McMahon Starting A New Wrestling Company
- Janel Grant Spokesperson Criticizes Rock, John Cena For Staying in Touch With Vince McMahon
- Oklahoma Athletic Commission Gives AEW ‘Warning’ Over Nyla Rose Match, Rose Responds
- Update on Life for Vince McMahon Post-WWE, Maintaining Contact With Donald Trump, WWE Employees Less Fearful Now
