10 Ups And 8 Downs From WWE SummerSlam 2016

1. Short-Circuited Main Event

brock lesnar randy orton
WWE.com

What can you say about the first PPV match between Randy Orton and Brock Lesnar? Was it overhyped? Sure. Did it fail to meet expectations? Absolutely.

Orton/Lesnar had the makings of a big fight, without the big fight feel. Sadly, this match was basically 10 minutes of Brock throwing knees in the corner and a bunch of German suplexes. Orton turned the tables with an RKO on the announcer’s desk, a draping DDT and another RKO, but a punt attempt got turned into an F5 for a long 2.

At that point, Lesnar mounted Orton and started raining down hammerfists and elbows, with one of them apparently cutting Randy so deeply that he bled like a proverbial stuck pig. It was so bad that the referee called for a stoppage, awarding the abbreviated match to Lesnar via TKO.

It’s understandable that Orton couldn’t continue, but that doesn’t change how disappointing of a main event this was, especially after the PPV was looking so strong for the first two hours. Hopefully we’ll get some ex post facto explanation on Raw.

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Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.