10 Wrestlers Who Broke The Muta Scale

10. Shawn Michaels

What's ironic about the first-ever Hell In A Cell match, between The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels at in Your House: Badd Blood, is that it promised the evolution of the steel cage contest - and yet it was the last genuine match of its type in how it was performed. Michaels sold as if suffocated by the mesh, frantically and desperately attempting to escape it and the unstoppable monster within. Nowadays, it exists as something for the performers to just bounce around and off, with the spectacle supplanting any sort of storyline logic.

The blood, as it so often did, helped; the mere sight of Michaels donning the crimson mask - more a cloak, really, given the grisly extent of the gigging - put the stipulation over as this utterly brutal battleground. Referee Earl Hebner failed to obstruct the blade job itself, which is a shame in and of itself and because Michaels must have really hurt himself to set it up. He flung himself back-first on the concrete to dropkick 'Taker against the cell wall. His second attempt was unsuccessful; 'Taker caught and catapulted him, while Hebner failed to mask the angle.

Michaels visibly sliced his own forehead, but it hardly mattered; every other second of this war was a masterpiece, in which blood elevated it to a work of art, not a cheap flea market exercise in carny-ism.