Sunday, the biggest party of the summer (if youre a WWE fan) will kick up in full force for the 27th year. SummerSlam is one of the original Big Four WWE PPVs (WrestleMania, Royal Rumble and Survivor Series are the others) that the company has maintained for the last quarter-century. Whereas Royal Rumble is viewed as kicking off the Road to WrestleMania, SummerSlam in recent years has become the major summer show, capping off major storylines that began in the wake of Mania four months prior. SummerSlam has produced some truly amazing matches throughout the years, and its given us some turkeys and that range of match quality applies to the main events of each of the previous 26 SummerSlams. Some main events have bored fans to tears, while others have brought them to their feet. Ranking some of these matches are easy based on match quality alone or when taking historical context into account. But a lot of this is subjective, and the difference in rankings might be miniscule. Feel free to sound off in the comments about where you would rank some of these matches.
26. The Undertaker vs. The Underfaker - SummerSlam 1994
As a match, as a storyline and as a main event, this flopped. The backstory is that at the Royal Rumble that year, Yokozuna (and about 10 other wrestlers) beat Undertaker in a casket match. The casket started smoking, then Taker levitated into the heavens to be reborn. (Seriously.) In the interim, Ted DiBiase debuted his Undertaker, who very clearly was not THE Undertaker. At SummerSlam, the two collided. The match was doomed from the start because it followed the excellent WWF title cage match between Bret and Owen Hart. Throw in that the two Undertakers spend a lot of the 10-minute match no-selling moves and you have a recipe to suck the oxygen out of the arena. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWbFPrQbwiI You know its a bad match when its never referenced again, except by fans on Worst of compilations.
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.
