40 Years Of Fascinating WWE WrestleMania Facts (Part 3)
Randy Orton = tribalist anti-WWE troll who lives in his mother's basement.
The timeframe that spanned WrestleManias 21 and XXX was the true birth of the Undertaker's Streak.
He'd wrestled some very good matches before, on the Grandest Stage, but most of them were garbage. WWE, in hindsight, did a quite remarkable job of marketing the Streak retroactively. What was impressive, exactly, about defeating a past-it King Kong Bundy in 1995?
Even by 2003, the Streak wasn't some meticulously curated thing. 'Taker defeated The Big Show and A-Train by himself at 'Mania XIX, and that is because the originally scheduled tag match was cancelled when it was made clear how green and unprepared his partner - Nathan Jones - was.
12 years in, the Undertaker 'Mania match was no pivotal, show-selling event. It was a vehicle with which to get a large man that Vince McMahon was quite taken by over - and not a great attraction unto itself. Vince never planned the Streak in 1991; the Undertaker simply won a lot of matches at the biggest show of the year because he was a pushed top act.
By 2005, WWE really started to market it and, as the man behind the character started to unravel physically, match quality was emphasised. Deeper into WrestleMania's third decade, 'Taker was intent on blowing you away. He saved it all for that one match.
But, according to one wrestling legend, none of those matches were the best ever...
10. WrestleMania 21 - A Legend's Favourite Match
At WrestleMania 21, Kurt Angle defeated Shawn Michaels in a true classic that, to this day, remains one of the very best matches held under the WrestleMania banner.
(Very quick personal anecdote: I know for a fact that the whole "casual fan" myth is just that. I watched the show in a sixth form reunion at a time when myself and six mates had gone to uni and left WWE behind. I still watched it weekly, but they didn't. They watched out of nostalgia and an excuse for a get-together. They lost their absolute minds at Kurt Vs. Shawn. A great bell-to-bell match drew the most out of them.)
Really, it was one of the best programmes WWE ever penned. Kurt Angle, in a complete blast of a weekly run, sought to prove that he could do everything Michaels could, even sing his theme song, in a bid to show that he was better. In a phenomenal twist, at 'Mania, Shawn proved that he could do what Angle could do by outdoing him on the mat in some slick early amateur wrestling exchanges. This infuriated Angle, coaxing the ultra-intense animal within. Between the build and the match, fans were treated to the very best of Angle's astonishing range as an all-rounder.
The finish was iconic, too, a perfect example of the old "one guy goes over, the other guy gets over" mantra. By withstanding the ankle lock for an excruciating amount of time, Michaels went out like a badass.
In a really cool trivia note, it was the unexpected choice of a legend's favourite match. No less an authority than Bobby Heenan - who wasn't involved in wrestling at the time, and had been mentally checked out for years in WCW - believed it was the greatest in-ring spectacle he'd ever seen.