10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE In 1996
9. About That Iron Man Match
The WrestleMania XII main event is canonised by WWE to this day as a classic, a true highlight reel moment in the career of Shawn Michaels.
This promotion of the match has trickled down to the fandom. It routinely makes and ranks highly in Best Matches Ever lists. Wrestling is very subjective, as is every art form, so this list entry isn't something along the lines of "the match was Actually Bad" (even if, subjectively, the match was Actually Boring Until The Last 15 Minutes).
If you can apply objective metrics to the analysis of a subjective medium, however, you can make the argument that the match was nowhere near as successful as WWE claims. Before it unfolded, decades before Edge Vs. Randy Orton at Backlash 2020, the WWF practically guaranteed you'd see the best match ever. It wasn't even the best match in the WWF that year, but again, that's an opinion.
It is a fact that, about 99.9% of the time, evidence of a great or popular/over match is echoed by the crowd reaction, and the sheer, mind-melting extent they are into it. That's crowd psychology. On that front, Bret Hart Vs. Shawn Michaels was something of a failure: the crowd was dead.
In another indictment, many left as the match unfolded: VHS viewers could tell which colour the seats in the Arrowhead Pond were, and Dave Meltzer, who attended live, wrote in the April 8, 1996 Wrestling Observer Newsletter that "To say they were leaving in droves would be an overstatement, but there were probably a few thousand empty seats by the time the match reached its climax".