WrestleMania X Retrospective

I’ve just finished watching my tape of WrestleMania X & have some comments I just felt I had to show with all of you, my lovely readers…

Where to start…well, let’s start with the beginning, the Bret & Owen Hart match. Don’t ask me about Little Richard doing America The Beautiful, cuz I gotz nothin to say about that…he’s not much better than Salt-N-Peppa the following year. What I wanted to emphasize here was that Owen beat Bret in a great wrestling match, something we really don’t see a whole lot anymore & I highly doubt we’ll see this year in the main event. This was a great back & forth match that really showed both competitors’ strengths. Bret hit his 5 moves of doom, Owen got the sharpshooter, Bret reversed it & it all ended up with Bret going for a victory roll & Owen catching him & turning it into a pinning combination. The great thing about this match is that Owen didn’t need to cheat to beat Bret, he did the clean job & Owen got the much needed win over his brother.

Next match worth discussing (cuz I refuse to talk about the Quebecers, Men On A Mission, Doink, Dink, Bam Bam Bigelow or Luna Vachon)…however, I will bring up a point on the squash win Earthquake got on Adam Bomb. What the hell was the point of that? What did that do for anyone? Was that supposed to get the crowd to believe in John Tenta? I’m just having problems understanding the purpose of having Earthquake beat Adam Bomb in almost record time.

Ok, now we move on & we get the first title match of the night…the mammoth Yokozuna defends against The All American, Man Made In The USA, Lex Luger. Actually not a bad match…but like most of Yoko’s matches, Luger doesn’t get much offense & the whole thing is to just knock Yokozuna off his feet. A lot of rest holds in this one, then Luger slams Yoko, then does the loaded forearm bit. Now here’s where it gets messed up…Luger knocks out Mr. Fuji & Jim Cornette, then goes for the pin. Everybody knows this, Mr. Perfect (the guest referee in this terrific match) then checks on Cornette while Luger covers Yoko. Then Luger gets mad, gets Perfect’s attention again, covers Yoko again, and Perfect checks on Fuji. Luger then gets Perfect’s attention again & pushes him, thus getting himself disqualified for putting his hands on a WWF Official. What the hell was the point of A) pushing Luger straight to the main event and never giving him any titles, and B) starting a feud that never really went beyond the PPV between Luger & Perfect?

Ok, after the match there’s a backstage interview with Jim Cornette, Yokozuna & Fuji conducted by none other than Todd Pettengill (called petting zoo by Cornette…god I miss this guy!). And in this interview, it’s SO obvious that Yoko’s NOT Japanese…why couldn’t we see this back then? I guess it’s cuz the WWF told us he was Japanese & that was fine. During the interview, Cornette had a Lewis Black moment & came up with something sounding a bit like the famous saying “If it weren’t for my horse, I never would have spent that year in college.”….here it is “He who made kitten, put snakes in the grass.” Again, do NOT think about that sentence for more than 30 seconds or blood will shoot out your nose.

On to the ladder match….Razor Ramon (Scott Hall) vs. “The Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels. Cool match, for the first widely viewed ladder match, this one was damn good. But Scott Hall….geez, what happened to this guy? It’s just such a sad story, he had everything going for him, built up his worth in the WWF, went to WCW & became a major player, then what? It’s just really too bad. Anyway…at the beginning of this match, they state that the match has no rules, except the only way to win is to climb the ladder & grab both title belts (yes, both…remember Shawn had left the WWF with his belt, then came back after Razor was crowned the new champ after a battle royal) my question is this…if there are no rules, why was Diesel (Kevin Nash) kicked out of the ringside area for interfering? Whatever, on with the match…this one goes on for awhile & get the Michaels ass shot of the night…gag me. Then they have the two guys going up opposite sides of the ladder spot…typical ladder match moves continue, then Michaels gets his leg twisted in the top & middle ropes while Razor climbs the ladder, and in one of the best moves I’ve ever seen, Michaels manages to untangle his leg while getting his arm in the same top & middle ropes….how he did that, I don’t know…but it looked really cool & stalled him enough for Razor to grab both belts, thus becoming the first ever World Wrestling Federation Intercontinental Tag Team Champion.

If you saw this show, you might be asking where the Macho Man Randy Savage/Crush match is….I don’t really care to talk about this match…it was stupid, had retarded rules & isn’t worth talking about. Macho won, that’s it…..Next.

Second title match…The Hitman Bret Hart vs. Yokozuna (still not Japanese)…this time with the guest referee being Rowdy Roddy Piper…this guy’s amazing, he’s not seen for a few years, he makes his return at WrestleMania & instantly he’s over. He’s amazing, absolutely amazing…now THERE’S star power. So the match goes back and forth, with Yoko getting most of the offense again, but somehow he messes up his finishing move, the Banzai Drop. I don’t get how they could have him mess up his finisher, isn’t this supposed to be the move he’s supposed to know how to do the best? Anyway, he falls off the ropes & the rest is history, Hart hooks the leg & gets his title back a year after he lost it.

The 10-man tag match never happened at WrestleMania, but if my memory serves me right, it happens the following night on Raw. The reason why it never happened…most likely time, but they passed it off as the heels couldn’t decide on a captain for the team. Sad.

Overall, some of the filler matches could have been dropped, but there’s always gotta be these matches on PPVs…at least back then it happened more often than it does now. Anyway…I’m outtie…I’ll try & write something on WrestleMania XI if there’s anything worth writing about on it. So check back here in a day or two, there might be something new.