9 Times WWE's WrestleMania Main Event Was The Worst Match On The Card

5. WrestleMania 25: Triple H Doesn’t Learn His Lesson

Triple H Randy Orton Wrestlemania 25
WWE.com

A WrestleMania where Triple H main-evented in a poorly received World title match while an absolute classic between two Hall-of-Famers tore the house down a couple spots earlier on the card? No, you’re not experiencing déjà vu, you’re just experiencing Triple H not learning his lesson from seven years prior.

Hunter and Randy Orton had been engaged in an “intense” feud that saw the Viper attack the entire McMahon family, with Triple H retaliating via a home invasion that looked downright comical. Seriously, an aspiring college filmmaker probably saw the segment and scoffed, “Amateurs.”

The WrestleMania 25 undercard was chock-full of matches that ranged from average to good, with the Miss WrestleMania battle royal being a special brand of car wreck. But Mania 25 also featured the all-timer Shawn Michaels versus Undertaker that stole the show and singlehandedly elevated the entire PPV from “good” to calling your friends and making sure they were watching it.

And then came the main event.

One would think a no-disqualification brawl with so much “heat” would bring the show home, but Triple H and Orton turned in a 23-minute snoozer with an anticlimactic finish that killed off all the good vibes created by the HBK/Taker classic. It’s one thing to pick the wrong match to main-event a PPV/PLE, but it’s another to run a craptastic match out there that deflates the crowd and viewing audience.

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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.