Hi Scott,
Wrestlemania X-7 and Great American Bash '89 tend to dominate the talks of greatest wrestling ppv ever, but with your recent bumping of the HHH/HBK Street Fight to *****, I wanted to raise Summerslam 2002 as another candidate.
The aforementioned match received the full monty, you've upgraded Rock/Brock to ****, RVD/Benoit falls just shy of 4* at ***3/4, Rey/Angle was a fun opener given *** by you (which I politely disagree and think it needs like a 1/2* more), and the other matches are completely serviceable. So wrestling wise, seems to be a really good show.
Historically, we've got Brock's rise to the top of pro wrestling (which leads to his success as a UFC draw), the end of The Rock's last WWE championship reign; Rey's ppv debut; and Shawn Michaels' return after a 4 year layoff, launching a comeback that skyrocketed past everyone's expectations.
I find the pace is of the show is good, nothing drags, and the Long Island crowd (almost unbelievably) is on fire.
Care to share your thoughts?
-Johnathan
Quality-wise it was pretty damn good, yeah. However, the main problem I have is that I don't remember ANY of it, outside of the street fight. It just wasn't a good period for the promotion, to say the least, and the show fell during a time when interest was low and thus I don't think it's a candidate for best ever. Two great main events? Sure. Greatest PPV ever? Not even close.
Another outside-the-box nomination for GOAT PPV: One Night Stand 2005. It may not have featured five star wrestling, but it's the one and only time that they managed to flawlessly fuse the crazy excitement of ECW with the excellent production values of WWE, and it REALLY got people excited about the prospect of the rebirth of an ECW that brought the best of both worlds.
ReplyDelete'Interest was low' does that even qualify as a reason? I'm sure interest in the WWE was far higher at that point than the NWA in 1989! Whilst there was a significant drop in popularity by 2002, it was STILL riding a wave of success they could only dream of now interms of buy-rates and ratings.
ReplyDeleteEasily the best Summerslam ever, probably top 5 of all time in my opinion.
2002 Scott was cynical as shit reviewing that show. Seriously, this is what he wrote after the HHH/HBK match.
ReplyDelete- Now then. Yes, it was a great match, but there’s mitigating circumstances. First, the greatness of the match was based on two primary things: Shawn Michaels knowing the EXACT moments to make his babyface comebacks, and Shawn Michaels bumping like a man on enough painkillers to tranquilize Anna Nicole Smith with the knowledge that he is never going to wrestle again. The match stood out in stark contrast to the mat-based wrestling surrounding it, and thus seemed different and edgy, even though it wasn’t really. The booking was extremely protective of both guys, and the question you have to ask yourself is this: Who does it help? Does it help Shawn Michaels, retired for four years and back into retirement again now? Does it help HHH, already a big star and no longer needing the rub given by Michaels? Does it help any of the guys below them who had to watch HHH sleepwalk through matches with people he should have been elevating and then lecture them about needing to work harder? Notice how HHH gets motivated – wrestling a Clique buddy who he is only all too willing to show ass and sell his ass off for. Does it help the people above them who have been trying for 4 years to get out from Shawn’s shadow, only to have him try to steal the show again? What it comes down to is that sometimes a great match shouldn’t necessarily BE a great match, when a good one would have done just as well to show that Shawn could still have ANY match, period. I’m not saying that everyone should start deliberately dogging it so as not to show up the main-eventers, but did we really need Shawn splashing HHH through a table and diving off a ladder? The story of the match – Shawn gets his back beaten to a pulp but comes back because he has heart and guts – was enough of a story without all the ga-ga on top of it. Sometimes less is more. And think about this – what if Shawn had done his comeback match against Brock Lesnar and sacrificed his bad back to the bearhug in the name of getting Brock over as a career-killer? That would be a worthwhile goal. This, as it is, was good, but at best served only as an egofuck for HHH & Shawn in terms of usefulness to the promotion. If HHH was really serious about doing what’s right for business, he’d go out on RAW tonight and make someone a star, no excuses, no self-serving bullshit non-finishes, no inspirational speeches before and after. But who needs action when you’ve got words?
Yes folks, you read that correctly, he's mad that HHH and HBK had TOO GOOD OF A MATCH. This rant is pretty hilarious in retrospect, as you could just tell Scott was reaching for reasons to shit on the match, despite it being awesome. I forgive you though man, you obviously realized your mistake and correctly gave that match the kudos it deserves.
Don't forget that 10 years ago things were MUCH different in the media. I don't think Nielson ratings are accurate enough to judge the popularity of the WWE nowadays, much less Impact and for that matter cable television in general. It's stupid that cable still have to rely on it for advertising.
ReplyDeleteAgree. Can't think of a better Summerslam card, probably followed by 2001 and 2000, in that order. Heck, even Taker-Test was solid (considering the string of bad matches Taker was having at the time). Another plus is that the crowd remained red-hot througout the whole PPV, and it helped to elevate the show from the usual PPV-standard feel (like a lot of the mid-2000s Summerslams)
ReplyDeleteLOL. Sometimes it is easy I think for people to forget that Scott is not infallible but a human being with biases and feelings like everyone. His HHHate definitely is showing in that review for sure, I agree.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, this was during the really, REALLY insufferable era of HHH which lasted from early 2002 to I'd say Mania 21, although the job to Benoit at Mania 20 was great. I mean I understand him wanting to portray a strong heel like Flair did back in the day but his political connections just made it seem like he was a no-jobbing dick.
ReplyDeleteI still defend Evolution though.
Yeah, 2002/03 Scott rants are all pretty hilarious as he just gets PISSED at so much shit, it's hilarious. His Undertaker hate made him completely shit on the epic ladder match he had with Jeff Hardy on RAW.
ReplyDeleteYeah I understand the HHH hate, he was awful during that time period, I just love the idea of the match being bad because it was too good.
ReplyDeleteYou don't remember Rock/Brock??
ReplyDeleteQuick, kill it, it's a Mutant From Outer Philly!
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, the first ONS was a fun show with an incredible atmosphere and emotion and it made the WWE a fair amount of bank. You're right that it was a flawless example of what ECW was all about with ladders, flaming tables, and Tanaka/Awesome reducing each other's brain cells at an alarming rate. Yeah, Benoit/Guerrero and Storm/Jericho were there to bring a bit of workrate but both matches were just ok with the talent involved (especially Benoit/Guerrero) and the end of the show was a big shmoz that made for a feel good ending.
So yeah, entertaining but not even close to a GOAT or even in the top 20.
In all fairness, no one knew that Shawn was going to be coming back full-time, inclduing Shawn himself at the time, so I can kinda see the points Scott was making. Obviously Shawn's coming back was a great thing for wrestling fans and he and HHH would go on to have bigger wankfests with each other that served no point (HIAC anyone?) but the point remains that the emotion in that match was off the charts and if it weren't for Hogan/Rock at WM, it would've easily been the markout highlight of the year.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely the best SummerSlam ever (though I am personally partial to '89 for some indiscernable reason).
Best Summerslam ever, definitely. I'd still put it behind the other two all-time great PPVs, but it's Top Five/Top Ten territory.
ReplyDelete"It just wasn't a good period for the promotion to say the least" WHAT? Maybe for Raw. I'll stack the SmackDown Six era of SD up against anything from any time period.
Love SummerSlam 2002. I'd put it in my top 5 favorite shows. Just running down the matches:
ReplyDeleteKurt Angle vs. Rey Mysterio ***3/4
Ric Flair vs. Chris Jericho **
Edge vs. Eddie Guerrero ****
Un-Americans vs. BookDust **
RVD vs. Chris Benoit ****
Undertaker vs. Test **
Shawn Michaels vs. Triple H *****
Rock vs. Brock Lesnar ****1/4
4 great matches, and one classic match. It saw the return of HBK, a guy who would go on to have an amazing 8 year run, and the emergence of Brock Lesnar as the man. Plus nothing horribly offensive. Add to that a good crowd, and the angle leading in between HBK and Triple H, and you got a classic show.
Wanna see something funny? Get the ONS DVD and watch it with JBL's alternate commentary. Absolutely hilarious, as he get's drunker and drunker ("Someone send the beer girl up here, I'm way too sober for this!") and by the end he's so trashed that he forgets he's supposed to hate the show and starts to get into the main event. All his anti-gay cracks about the crowd are pretty funny too. I still gotta wonder what the Blue Meanie did to piss him off though.
ReplyDeleteAs for the PPV itself, the energy was there, crowd was great, the main event was a great bloody brawl (plus Beulah was there), and taken out of context it was pretty good workrate-wise. But most of the card was matches what I was well past the point of being sick of in the late 90's. Especially Tanaka/Awesome, who had something like 8 matches in ECW, all of which were pretty much identical. And I think Joey even says that the Rey/Psicosis match was something like the 450th match they've had together.
I'm sure that a real Mutant would never single THIS show out as ECW's best!
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's because I hate the Undertaker, and I really hate Jeff Hardy, but I thought Scott wasn't shitting on that match enough. I thought it was terrible.
ReplyDeleteSummerslam 2002 was the show that got me back into wrestling. I stopped watching in mid 1999. I know the Attitude Era is loved, but I was tired of the trash tv aspect and lost total interest in wrestling when I moved to a new town and lost all of my wrestling friends. Summerslam 2002 was the first ppv I watched when I started slowly paying attention to wrestling again and I was blown away. One of the best ppv's ever, definitely.
ReplyDeleteExactly.
ReplyDeleteLets call it a glorified squash with 2-3 hope spots and a rub on the head.
It was fucking BALLZ.
I respect your right to be so wrong.
ReplyDeleteI don't have the money for the DVD. Couldn't we just get Ryan Murphy to talk about it?
ReplyDeleteYou're fucking bawlz.
ReplyDeleteOooh, good comeback!
ReplyDeleteIf he's not shitfaced...
ReplyDeleteThe Angle vs Mysterio match at Summerslam 2002 is one of my favorites of all time.
ReplyDeleteThe few times I've ever introduced someone to wrestling, I've showed them that match first. It's only about 10 minutes long, and is action packed from start to finish. Angle beat Rey by submission and still made him look good.
Le Sigh.
ReplyDeleteAnother one of these johnny come latelys trying to make a name against The Fuj.
Don't worry, I'm sure creative has nothing for him.
ReplyDeletestrangely Summerslam 2002, which I loved, was the very last ppv I ordered. My fandom started waning with Hogan's return and with changes in work. From this point until 2005ish, I watched most Raws, but it was no longer life or death to see them as in the past. And just after Batista's face turn (no correlation, i actually really enjoyed him and that angle), I pretty much stopped watching and haven't watched more than a handful of Raws ever since.
ReplyDelete"Another one of these johnny come latelys trying to make a name against The Fuj."
ReplyDeleteTo quote JR from the Jeff Hardy/Undertaker ladder match: CLIMB THE LADDER, KID MAKE YOURSELF FAMOUS!!!!
a GOAT PPV with no classic matches?
ReplyDeleteThis guy gets it.
ReplyDeleteand will be future endeavored with the rest of these no-talent hacks that permeate the board.
ReplyDeleteWho cares about who it helps lol. Do you have stock in WWE? Then just like what's good and dislike what's bad!
ReplyDeleteHBK-Trips was a damn classic. Way better match without the Strangler like at Mania 20. Hell they had to put Shawn in that match just so someone would buy the show lol.
What's interesting to me is that I ordered every single ppv from Summerslam 2002 until Wrestlemania 21. Much like you, I was into Batista's face turn as well, but after he won it, I really fell off. Raw and Smackdown all of the sudden went from appointment television where I had to be there to see it, to it not freaking me out if I didn't catch either for a week or two. After Mania, I remember ordering Vengeance and One Night Stand and I think those were the only ppv's I ordered that year. When Eddie died, that was the (shitty) icing on the cake and my fandom has never been what it used to be.
ReplyDeleteI still remember sitting in that crowd in the Nassau Coliseum seeing how psyched the crowd was FOR Lesnar and AGAINST the Rock. The chants of "Let's Go Lesnar!" still ring through my ears. I loved the Angle/Rey match. I thought RVD and Benoit didn't mix well though. The HHH/HBK match was fun to watch live despite the ending never being in doubt 9at least to me).
ReplyDeleteThe one with warrior v savage and bret v bulldog was pretty awesome though
ReplyDeleteI take it this post was supposed to go somewhere else, seeing as how I never mentioned Shawn or HHH anywhere in this thread.
ReplyDelete1992 version. Had a crowd of 80,000 and several great matches.
ReplyDelete"The booking was extremely protective of both guys, and the question you
ReplyDeletehave to ask yourself is this: Who does it help?"
Um, the fans who spent their money on tickets or ppv to see the best match HHH and HBK were capable of putting on. I think there's better means of elevation than asking the veteran to hold back so that Hurricane Helms doesn't have all his potential thunder stolen. Besides, you could just as easily apply this same criticism to Flair/Steamboat.
Yeah, I never understood Scott's original rant on that match - I mean, yeah, I get what he was saying about how (at the time), going forward, it didn't seem to help anyone or anything else around it, but I still figured the idea was to give the fans the best match possible. Fans pay X amount for it, the wrestlers should give the best effort they can.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea the DVD had alt-commentary - I'll have to get it ASAP.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info.
I still think "No Way Out, 2001" deserves consideration for GOAT status - I understand that, realistically, it didn't really have any type of historical impact (which may preclude it from being considered GOAT), but it had FOUR fantastic matches, and only about ten minutes of crap.
ReplyDelete"Money In The Bank, 2011" and "IYH: Canadian Stampede" also deserve consideration.
It also had the very last match between Austin and Hunter who had been main event feuding since July of 1999.
ReplyDeleteOnly for half the show. When JBL shows up in the balcony he's miked. Great stuff.
ReplyDeleteHBK totally sold me on this show. I had never ordered a PPV until this one. I remembered trying to record this (and ran out of tape about halfway through the Brock/Rock match, wow was I mad!!!). I don't think I could buy it being better Wrestlemania 17 (still have never seen Bash 89 so I can't comment on that one) but it's definitely one of the most enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteNWO 2001 is another PPV that I just about wore out my tape of. The fatal fourway was just incredibly fun, Steph vs Trish was shockingly good, HHH and Austin tore the house down, and what wasn't torn down Rocky and Angle finished the job. I'm not sure you can get a better 3 PPV streak than RR 2001 through Wrestlemania 17. (I'd even argue Armageddon 2000 was a good show and I enjoyed the hell out of the 6 man Hell in a Cell, but I've heard mixed feelings about that much so I'll leave that out...for now)
ReplyDelete"Tap out, you son of a bitch! I'll break your fucking ankle!" Agreed, NWO 2001 was amazing. As far as historical significance, it did have Rock ending Angle's first title reign to set up Rock/Austin at WMX7 and the last ever Austin/HHH match, so I'd say for a non-big four PPV it has some pretty good historical significance.
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, you just listed three of my top ten PPVs ever. Keep in mind I was always primarily a WWF/E guy who started watching in the Attitude Era, but my list would look something like this:
1. Wrestlemania X-7
2. Money in the Bank 2011
3. No Way Out 2001
4. Summerslam 2002
5. IYH: Canadian Stampede (would be higher if I'd been a fan and seen it at the time; as it was, this was several months before I got into wrestling)
6. Wrestlemania 19
7. Extreme Rules 2012
8. Wrestlemania X (see parentheses for Canadian Stampede; plus, the rest of these are pretty great shows throughout while match quality-wise, this is a total two-match show. Granted, two of the greatest matches ever plus a huge historical moment in Bret winning the title back from Yoko, hence why it makes the list)
9. Backlash 2000
10. Wrestlemania XXVI (underrated historically. Obviously a huge historical moment with Shawn's last match, and the poetic symmetry of Shawn and Bret coming full circle the same night- yes, the Bret/Vince match was atrocious but it was Bret and family beating the hell out of Vince, what more did you need for that- was great. Shawn/Taker was ****1/2, Cena/Batista was around ****, Edge/Jericho would've been ****1/2 if Edge went over like he should've but was still awesome, HHH/Sheamus and Punk/Mysterio were both ***ish, though if Punk/Mysterio hadn't been cut woefully short that could've been another ****1/2 match and taken this show to another level historically, just like Sheamus/Bryan could've with this year's WM)
This is gonna sound weird but Eddie's death was one of the things that solidified me being a fan again.
ReplyDeleteI know that sounds fucked up, and I'll explain. I'd kinda sorta started watching again around that time after a nearly three-year break. Cena becoming "The Man" got my attention, but I wasn't really fully back into it at this point. When Eddie died I found myself incredibly saddened and cried like a fucking baby watching Raw the next night. It made me realize that as fucked up of a business as it is, wrestling was capable of making me care more than pretty much anything else on TV save for real sports.
I recently watched Summerslam 2002, and while it still holds up today, I wouldn't put it on the list of greatest PPVs of all time. It definitely was the best WWE PPV in 2002.
ReplyDeleteI agree, it's not close to being better than Wrestlemania 17, still THE greatest PPV of all time.
ReplyDeleteNo Way Out 2001, another show that still holds up today also, is one of the most underrated shows in history. You're right about the four fantastic matches, and the undercard was very good either, nothing too bad. Even the Stephanie McMahon/Trish Stratus match was decent. Canadian Stampede was great too.
ReplyDeleteGood pick with Wrestlemania 19. This is another show I watched recently and I feel it's one of the more underrated Wrestlemanias. Excellent show overall.
ReplyDeleteThat 3 PPV streak of the Royal Rumble 2001, No Way Out 2001, and Wrestlemania X7 is possibly the greatest in history. Watching the buildups at the time was fun as hell.
ReplyDeleteI think Royal Rumble 2000, No Way Out 2000, Backlash 2000 and Judgment Day 2000 and Fully Loaded 2000 ist maybe the biggest streak. in Wrestling history - (if you can forget that little Wrestlemania and KOTR PPV...;-).
ReplyDeleteAs funny and great the Attitude was, but HHH vs Shawn was for me the first good wrestling match in the WWFe since 1997, even if it was a no dq street fight. ;-)
ReplyDeleteYes you can bring the Jericho, Benoits, Guerreros, Angle Matches, but I can't say why, but this match was different and had more of an old school WWF vibe than anythin in years.
That's interesting to think about right there. Let's see, overall I feel Royal Rumble 2001 was better than the 2000 edition. No Way 2001 smokes NWO 2000, and well, it's a complete understatement to say Mania X7 is WORLD'S better than Mania 16. Looks like the early
ReplyDeletefor about 2 years, I went to a local bar to watch the event. Summerslam 2002 was the last time I watched a ppv live for about 8 years (thank you illegal streaming)
ReplyDelete