10 Times WWE SummerSlam Main Event Was Better Than WrestleMania Main Event

3. SummerSlam 2002 > WrestleMania X8

John Cena Edge Lita SummerSlam 2006
WWE.com

Both of these main events were supposed to be the crowning of a new top champion. Unfortunately for WWE, they only had a 50% hit rate which, to be honest, is far higher than they usually score with their booking.

SummerSlam '02 - widely regarded as one of the best nights in the event's history - ended with Brock Lesnar winning his first WWE Championship after a thrilling contest with The Rock. Earlier that year, Triple H and Chris Jericho closed out WrestleMania X8 with the Game supposedly being crowned the company's new top good guy.

Triple H's big moment was undercut by a) a boring storyline that was more about his marital struggles than the World Championship, and b) the fact that Hulk Hogan and The Rock had stolen the show minutes before.

Rock and Brock had no such trouble, putting on a match that kept pace with the stacked SummerSlam card and crowning a shiny new champion in the Next Big Thing.

Perhaps this shows how eager the WWE audience were for new stars in 2002. After all, they'd had to sit through 48-year-old Hogan winning the World Title that year, so who can blame them?

Contributor
Contributor

Jacob Simmons has a great many passions, including rock music, giving acclaimed films three-and-a-half stars, watching random clips from The Simpsons on YouTube at 3am, and writing about himself in the third person.