Mick Foley's WrestleMania Matches - Ranked From Worst To Best

5. W/Vader Vs. Owen Hart & The British Bulldog - WrestleMania 13

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For a while, it seemed like Owen Hart & The British Bulldog were going to be WWF Tag Team Champions forever. They held the belts for almost 300 days, an absolute lifetime to an 11-year-old fan. The tag team cupboard was fairly bare at the time, meaning their challengers at the biggest show of the year in 1997 were the fairly ramshackle team of Mankind and Vader. 

It's indicative of how poorly these two legends of WCW (at the time) were thrown into a tag team title match at WrestleMania when The Sultan and Ahmed Johnson received actual story-driven matches. The whole thing wasn't helped at all by the fact that all four men were heels too. Would Rocky Maivia not have benefited more from defending his IC title against Mankind or Vader? 

Anyway, booking questions aside, the match was absolutely fine. The bout ends in a double countout, fairly usual nothingness booking of the times in an attempt to 'protect' everyone. The match did get Mankind over as a hell for leather brawler though, and in some way may have worked towards his eventual acceptance as a super babyface. The stiffness of Foley and Vader mean the match is pretty hard-hitting and fun, but the inherent pointlessness of it drags it down.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.