Ranking The 26 WWE SummerSlam Main Events From Worst To Best
19. HHH (c) vs. Orton vs. Jericho vs. Goldberg vs. Nash vs. Michaels (Elimination Chamber Match For WWE Title) - SummerSlam 2003
Now we get into matches that were by all accounts pretty decent, and rankings come down to things such as historical context and personal preference. In mid-2003, Goldberg was on a roll. Amazingly, he had managed to capture lightning in a bottle a second time, getting his WCW act over in WWE. At SummerSlam, he faced off in an Elimination Chamber match against World Heavyweight Champion HHH and four others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN287YtnaqY After running through Orton, Jericho and Michaels, Goldberg finally got his hands on HHH. Logic said that the red-hot Goldberg should have won the title here from an already-injured Game, but instead, HHH used his trusty sledgehammer to prolong his reign for another month and damage Goldbergs momentum in the process.
With the departure of Hulk Hogan in 1993, Vince McMahon needed a new all-American hero to combat the evil forces in the WWF. He decided to flip Lex Luger from a self-absorbed heel to a Made in the USA babyface. Luger turned and kicked off his feud with then-champ Yokozuna by boarding the USS Intrepid on Independence Day and bodyslamming the behemoth. After campaigning cross-country, Luger got his title shot at SummerSlam. The two carried on a perfectly serviceable match, except for one notable problem: it lacked a finish. After slamming Yokozuna and knocking him out of the ring with a forearm smash, Luger won the match by count-out. Per the match stipulation, Luger would not get a rematch, thus having to wait until the Royal Rumble to earn another shot, which wouldnt go so well for him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5kSO4Ehh20 For WWE, it was a lost opportunity to turn Luger into a made man, and his next world title reign would come four years later in WCW.
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.
