10 Wrestling Matches That Buried Top Stars ON PURPOSE
As opposed to by accident, which Vince McMahon manages on every episode of WWE RAW.
Sadly - or hilariously - this often happens through total incompetence.
WWE is so spectacularly awful it its very worst nowadays that they have contrived - twice - to make fans feel pity on behalf of a psychopathic demonic entity.
The Fiend has twice been buried into the inner core of the earth under the most pathetic of circumstances. At Super ShowDown 2020, he was hip-tossed into oblivion by Goldberg's Jackhammer. It's a good job the poor bastard wears a mask so that you can't see his job face. Bray Wyatt, man. He's really, really quite funny. Those Firefly Fun House skits showed a real comedic flair. But if supernatural sh*te even belongs in wrestling anymore, WWE is at once the only and worst place to do it in. This is a company that sells Alexa Bliss materialising onto the RAW stage with a swing set as something mundane.
"What's Alexa Bliss doing out here?"
Defying all scientific understanding of the world! This is a thing you should be amazed by!
At WrestleMania 37, The Fiend was shelved after taking a single RKO which, in WWE canon, is as deadly as immolation. Hey, they do say that R, K and O are the three most dangerous letters in sports entertainment #longtermstorytelling.
Basically anything involving the Fiend is an accidental burial - with the exception of his inexplicably fantastic career peak...
10. Vader Vs. Antonio Inoki - NJPW, Year End In Kokugikan
Antonio Inoki did not like to lose.
Nor should he have; he was over to that megastar level nobody is anymore, and in an age where a promoter had actually had to sell tickets, Inoki, the promoter, sold tickets. But even by the standards of those politically rife doesn't-work-for-me-brother days, Antonio Inoki did not like to lose lengthy matches.
All of which rendered his shocking, controversial loss to the debuting (!) Big Van Vader in 1987 a level beyond.
Inoki had already worked Riki Choshu in the preceding match, weakening him ahead of the slaughter. The man was no idiot, and he of course entered the actual political arena two years later.
Nonetheless, his sub-three minute loss reverberated so seismically that the Sumo Hall crowd trashed the venue. This story is overstated, as it pertains to Vader's heat. The drunken crowd, deeply annoyed by the go-away heat orchestrated by celebrity stable leader Takeshi Kitano, were already disposed to such a scene. The Americanised booking, and the loss itself, hardly helped.
It was an effective enough man-handling - Vader had an inherent aura, but the fans only glimpsed the full effect of the agile behemoth - and before the unrest, the scene developed a quality not unlike that which played out at WrestleMania XXX.