10 Awful WWE Match Finishes That Ruined Everything

Sixteen months later, and people are still talking about Brock Lesnar’s shattering of the Undertaker’s undefeated streak at Wrestlemania. By WWE’s weird metric, that makes the angle an unqualified success. Of course, people are still talking about the Titanic 103 years later, but that doesn’t mean the ship made it to New York.

Still, everyone’s got an opinion. Was Lesnar the man to break the Streak? Should ‘Taker have taken 2014 off and had a better storyline (and a better match) with Bray Wyatt, giving the WWE’s newest supernatural monster the rub? Was there really any rub at all in breaking the Streak? After all, by 2014 it had been built up into such a monolithic thing that it’s possible that breaking it had the opposite effect. Should the Undertaker have simply taken the Streak and ridden off into the sunset with it intact?

It’s a sad fact that the Undertaker’s loss to Lesnar at Wrestlemania XXX wasn’t a legendary match. It wasn’t even a good match: bad conditioning and a shaved head made the Undertaker look ten years older than he actually was, and he moved like it, especially after the concussion he suffered. Couple that with the poor layout of the match and Lesnar’s decision to no-sell and laugh off any damage sustained in the match, and the Beast just looked like he’d put an old man out of his misery, not defeated a near-mythical force.

His punishing defeat of John Cena at Summerslam 2014 had fans far more impressed. WWE clearly wanted The Beast to look completely unstoppable prior to winning the WWE world heavyweight championship from Cena, given that Cena already owned a pinfall victory over Lesnar. However, that win was well over two years previously, and Paul Heyman had already dealt with Lesnar’s late-2013 leveling up into a true monster by claiming that he’d still been suffering symptoms of the debilitating diverticulitis that afflicted his final few UFC matches and that this was a Brock Lesnar back at 100% again.

Fundamentally, the Undertaker needed to keep it far more than Lesnar needed to take it. You can quibble over the right of a special event/almost retired wrestler to hang onto his greatest storyline accomplishment, but his annihilation and loss of the Streak lost him his aura. Come Wrestlemania 31, the Undertaker had virtually no heat coming up to his match with Bray Wyatt. When can you ever recall the Dead Man having no impetus leading into Wrestlemania?

The current build-up for the Lesnar/Undertaker rematch at this year’s Summerslam is far more exciting than the Wrestlemania XXX story. Mark Calaway looks like he’s on point this time, and the pull-apart brawl on RAW a few weeks ago was the best television the company has given fans in months. Here’s hoping that the Undertaker puts Lesnar over for the final time and looks like a true warrior doing it.