10 Most Berserk WWE Matches Ever
9. Kurt Angle Vs. Shane McMahon - King Of The Ring 2001
Kurt Angle and Shane McMahon didn’t mess around in New Jersey.
Angle hit the ring and immediately decked Shane with a double leg take down and a Greco-Roman-style throw as, brilliantly, a shaken Jim Ross claimed that we wouldn’t see any amateur wrestling in this Street Fight. To be fair to the man, he was quickly proven right.
The drama was heightened instantly when Shane, as he is wont to do, butchered Angle’s face with his terrible worked punches, which achieved precisely the opposite of the intended effect. They’re meant to look convincing and inflict no damage. Shane’s looked pathetic and caused Angle to bleed from his eyes and brow.
It would be churlish to bury him too far underground: this high-octane fight was far better than it had any right to be. Angle, incensed that Shane got the better of their amateur-leaning exchange, adopted a position of vulnerability. He was playing possum; he smoothly escaped and rained hard blows across Shane’s back. The storytelling was sublime; even Shane’s harshest critics (your writer included) totally bought him as a gutsy underdog with a puncher’s chance.
The match gained infamy when the two men fought outside of the ring. Shane cleared the announce desk with a flying lariat. Angle recovered to smash him all over the staging area. And, in one of the most nuts WWE spots ever, Angle failed to shatter the shoot glass with three overhead belly-to-belly suplexes. Angle, p*ssed, broke the glass by simply throwing Shane face-first through it in a fit.
Those shards may as well have been expectations.