Loosely Formed Thoughts on WWF WrestleMania XIV. A Strong, Easy WrestleMania

1. 15 Team Battle Royal

I miss this. I miss getting way too many men in the ring at one time so that even the smallest action stands out. It makes punches and facial selling mean so much more, when you're working to stand out in a crowd of 30. We don't have that. We don't have situations where guys like Bull Buchanan and Recon are in between gear and on shaky gimmick ground. The audacity to run a 15 team battle royal when you only had, generously, 11 teams on the roster. 

Remember the BRADSHAW/CHAINZ team!!?! They gave us a Bradshaw/Chainz team because they needed 4 teams, which meant we got a great moment where Dirtbag Windham ran in just to blindside Chainz and eliminate Bradshaw without having to touch Bradshaw. Dirtbag as Crafty Spurned Lover. 

Sunny is wearing the least amount of clothing possible. In a better world she would have been wearing this flame bikini throughout 1998 and beyond. 

Ultimate Dark Horse: Jose Estrada

Scott Taylor earns points by picking a fight with Henry Godwinn. Taylor punches him in the face and gets his eyes raked instantly. 

Ricky Morton, Scott Taylor, and Hollywood Tatum Bob Holly took high backdrop eliminations. The New Midnight Express was a go nowhere idea but the tights really were fantastic. That rich blue with the gold lightning is so aesthetically pleasing. 

Brian Christopher stands out among 30 men with his bright lime greens, one of the few guys in the match who understands the importance of standing out in a crowded WrestleMania ring. Henry Godwinn and Bart Gunn also felt like they got it. 

Mark Henry hits a great press slam on Christopher, dropping him on his stomach and then just watching while Christopher flops like a fish in the ropes. 

Henry Godwinn in a giant worn Confederate flag shirt vs. a Nazi biker in front of 19,000 Boston males feels like a Where's Waldo of finding a specific type of racist in every frame. 

But I mean Jesus this Sunny outfit really is incredible

 

2. Taka Michinoku vs. Aguila

Let me tell you how many times I watched this match when it was my turn to borrow the WrestleMania XIV tape that somebody's dad's co-worker at Marin Municipal Water taped for us. It's six minutes long and all highlights. Here is one highlight per every minute of the match: 

~That Aguila moonsault off the top to the floor, a beautiful arc

~Taka's no hands running plancha that holds up as one of the most iconic highflying spots in wrestling history. The Insane speed and distance plus the impossible hang time haven't really been duplicated since Taka, and there has been no shortage of wrestlers in the US, Mexico, and Japan who have tried to innovate something as impressive. The camera angle on this one also couldn't have been better, which only adds to this specific plancha's majesty. 

~I'm not sure Aguila's corkscrew dive ever looked as good as it did here. His 10 match WWF run as Aguila, pre-Papi Chulo, long before Essa Rios, was as exciting as anything Blitzkrieg did, but we reacted to Blitzkrieg as something we'd never seen before. Were we that entranced by a standing corkscrew splash? 

~Taka's fast flipping bump off the top turnbuckle, directly onto his hip

~Aguila's slick leaping rana off the top

~Taka had the most gorgeous belly bounce on all of his missed moonsaults. Full commitment, full extension, no idea how it didn't completely rearrange his bones and organs. 

WWF were so proud of themselves for landing Gennifer Flowers. I hope she landed a great payday. I'm not going to pretend to know what a great payday for Gennifer Flowers looks like, but I think I'd know it if I saw it. WWF was really giving the greater Boston area a lot of credit for following presidential scandals. 

3. HHH vs. Owen Hart

The Chyna/Slaughter are handcuffed together and they do a chin to chin showdown and it was one of those moments that WWF loudly said We Know What We're Doing. They knew what we wanted to see when these two were cuffed together. 

Owen's "sledgehammer hitting an anvil" guitar shredding music should have stuck around. His "Enough is Enough" intro became one of the worst intros of the era. 

Owen has a nice nice standing rana, HHH has a killer bump jumping off the apron into the guardrail

HHH trying to go into Flair mode and I guess I still kind of like it here? It felt more earnest. His high knee was a move that would have played in 1998 All Japan. I would have liked to see HHH's work on a Patriot-level All Japan tour, maybe form a Wolf Hawkfield team. Lose a couple matches to Giant Kimala/Jun Izumida. Get his hairline fucked up by a Tamon Honda headbutt. Lose to a Masao Inoue clothesline. There are a hundred wrestlers today who I wish had never seen an All Japan match, but I think HHH could have actually pulled some positive influence from working tours there. 

Owen gets a cut on the bridge of his nose and I'm not sure where it comes from but it looks good

HHH does some legwork that is interesting enough. JR had a bunch of cheesy pro wrestling bullshit about Owen's leg. Things like "He just got the cast off today!"

I hate Owen Hart as a babyface comeback so much. He is so unimaginative in so many ways. Here he gets worked over so much, building to a big comeback, fighting back and finally making HHH show ass, which had hardly happened. And when his big spotlight came, he just kind of blandly punched HHH across the ring with zero conviction. Just a total boner.  

The best part of the match is Sgt. Slaughter taking bumps over the guardrail at age 50, a true Mt. Rushmore Bump King candidate. 

They made Owen look like such a weenie. Just a dumb babyface with a little baby dick. It felt like that's how he looked for essentially the next year and then well. I wonder why I liked this match so much when I was 17. What was the allure? What appealed to me? Then, I thought this was one of the best matches on the show. Now, I think it's arguably the worst match on the show. Shamrock/Rock is the worst, but I could argue this one there if I wanted. 

4. Marc Mero/Sable vs. Goldust/Luna 

Every single Goldust punch in this was great, and it made Mero's punches look even better..Goldust's punches were more clobbering shots to the side of the head and face, while Mero responds with some of his best worked amateur boxing, including some of his best uppercuts. All of the Mero/Goldust segments rock.

I need to see a list of every backdrop from 1998 higher than Goldust's in this match. Any fed, any wrestler, let's see any that went higher than Dustin in this damn match. He does a tight tuck and gets launched straight up by Mero, manages to look super dangerous and also incredibly safe. It makes sense for Goldust to do a big backdrop early in a match as it makes his dropdown uppercut spot make more sense later in the match. You need to establish that your opponents have a good reason to duck their head, show that you're susceptible to rafters-reaching backdrops, then that dropdown uppercut just makes your opponent look like he's chasing that backdrop dragon. 

You'd have to call Sable's first hot tag - and her first match as a whole - a tremendous success, right? It didn't matter how raw she looked, her energy was perfect the entire match. Her apron work was really strong, which is something that plenty of actual wrestlers don't ever get. I thought it was great during the Mero/Goldust segments when she would be annoyed that Mero wasn't tagging out. "Come ON Mark," in an irritated voice, managing to come off not like a nagging wife but as a woman who wanted to beat their asses. 

When Sable does tag in it really doesn't matter what her offense looks like, because she's screaming and breathing heavy through clenched teeth and all of her body language and energy reads like a girl who just beat her enemy's ass and is now being blocked from doing further damage. You already ripped out her weave, you don't need to damage the girl's bridge work. 

This all built really well and you can tell everyone treated it like a big deal. Mero broke out his big moonsault press for the first time in ages, and there were a few very strong nearfalls down the stretch that all felt like the actual finish. You wouldn't think a match that was hyped around Sable finally getting her hands on Luna would actually need false finishes, but the ones here are great.

When Goldust accidentally charges into and knocks Luna off the apron? Marc Mero's inside cradle on him felt like a real finish. Great two count. 

When Luna splashed Goldust, after Sable moved out of the way, and then Sable only gets the TWO COUNT with her powerbomb!? That's a huge nearfall. People flipped out about Sable doing a powerbomb so loudly in the arena, and that pop stuck with me so much that before this match I would have bet on my memory and said the match ended with that Sable powerbomb. That they actually did such an excellent late kickout shows how serious they were about this match. You didn't need false finishes to give this crowd what they wanted. 

When Sable did win, with the TKO, I love the little piece of drama around Mero raising her hand. Mero staring her down, about to flip out on her for taking the pin, but instead giving her a brief but sincere arm raise was handled the precise correct way within character. This whole thing was really great, really well done, and looking back I'm kind of in shock at how well they executed it. Everyone played exactly the role they should have played, and there wasn't a better mixed tag match in WWF until the Beulah/Funk/Dreamer match the next decade. 

5. Ken Shamrock vs. The Rock 

How many years did The Rock take off Ken Shamrock's life with chairshots in 1998? How many years did The Rock take, collectively, off every wrestler, over the years 1998-1999? Rock swung his chairshots directly at the soft spots of heads and faces, and he brains Shamrock with an all timer straight to the face. Rock hits Shamrock in the face harder than any chairshot used in any ECW music video. I remember watching this match while eating breakfast before school, and when Shamrock started going wild eyed, JR was going into histrionics with all of the "DOES HE EVEN KNOW WHERE HE IS!? HE'S LIKE AN ANIMAL!" My dad looked over his paper, looked silently at the TV for a moment, and then said "Stupid" as he raised the paper again.  

6. Cactus Jack/Terry Funk vs. The New Age Outlaws

Finally we get Funk's first actual appearance as Terry Funk. This guy is amazing. Any 50+ year old that gets a regular wrestling appearances in WWF has had a great career, but none of them got to come back to wrestle in their 50s and wear pantyhose and the weirdest fitting jeans while swinging around a chainsaw. Finlay just came back and started beating the shit out of people, but he did it while dressed like a man, not like a scarecrow. Terry Funk left a note about a horse over a decade earlier and then got paid money to stumble around in pantyhose for a couple months, then gets to look like an old badass action movie star as TERRY FUNK at WrestleMania. Funk came off like the toughest guy in WWF in this match, and it turns out the match is the best WWF match so far this year. 

Funk starts the match by punching Billy Gunn in the side of the head a ton, then headbutting him, right in front of the ring. 

Cactus Jack runs his whole body into the dumpster just to knee Road Dogg in the face and then hits a somersault senton off the other side of the dumpster. It's a sick bump, off the side of the can and onto the floor in a heap. But an extra brilliant part of the spot is Cactus hit the dumpster - and not Road Dogg - because Billy Gunn had done a baseball slide to KICK Road Dogg out of the way after Cactus had already begun his senton! That's a really incredibly timed and executed crash. 

Funk hits the guardrail full speed in front of a bunch of kids, then gets backdropped into the dumpster. These guys are all firing off an amazing amount of creativity working within and around the confines of this dumpster. Every time either Funk or Cactus are in and around the dumpster it's total brutality. 

Billy Gunn pays Funk back for all the chops and this suddenly turned into a violent southern brawl and one of the great brawls of the year. Road Dogg holding Funk prone while Gunn rips his Funk U shirt off him, slapping his chest, punching him in the forehead. These guys are all so good at brawling that they're making cookie sheets look downright evil. I feel the stinging obnoxiously stiff rubber of the dumpster lids slapping off my back, because Funk and Cactus are taking these beatings. 

I don't even think the match needed a ladder, but the work they did with the ladder only elevated this already great match. Cactus and Mr. Ass saved their best brawling for their climb up the ladder, which was brisk. They walked quick up that ladder and punched each other in the head the whole time, and the second they got to the top they got knocked into the dumpster by Funk. Funk got punched into the ladder and flew back into it like he was telling his story of climbing Mt. Everest. 

Everybody's fall into the dumpster looked great, but I don't know if they topped that Cactus/Ass ladder spill. Or, maybe it was topped by old ass legend Terry Funk getting powerbombed off the fucking apron, into the dumpster, onto his old ass shoulder like he was working an FMW show in a baseball stadium. 

After this spills to the back and every single man falls into a bunch of concrete and wood and giant plastic Powerade bottles, and after every man gets hit in the head with a chair or equivalent, Terry Funk gets to use a forklift to move bodies in real time. I'm proud to be among the percentage of people who have had a forklift job. I have used a forklift to unload and load trucks at two different companies in my life, even if I've never actually had a job where I realized I would be using a forklift at the time of my hire. Two different companies trusted me enough to use a forklift. One of the forklifts was a stick shift. I can't even drive a stick shift car, but I knew how to unload expensive pumps and engines off a flatbed with a manual forklift. Two companies trusted me with a forklift, and Vince McMahon trusted Terry Funk to use a forklift at WrestleMania. 

7. Undertaker vs. Kane

I remember at the time this felt like a big deal to me and my friends. I am not as excited by it at age 42 as I was at age 17. Who could have guessed we'd see dozens of these matches. 

Kane does a Tombstone/Oklahoma Stampede and it's at least an interesting idea. 

This is kind of a tough match for Undertaker, as Kane has to stand perfectly still and no sell all of Taker's strikes, so they all kind of look like shit. Meanwhile he makes Kane's punches look excellent at times and throws himself into bumps in cool ways. His corner bump on an Irish whip looked great. 

There's an electric chair spot that is cooler than it should have been. Undertaker gets up on Kane's shoulders like he's Robert Gibson doing a headscissors, and Kane sits down fast and sends Taker kind of toppling down headfirst. 

The match starts to feel a bit long in the middle. Kane was an unmovable object but also an object that would lie in a long grounded chinlock. Two brothers sharing a small bed. Too old to be in the same room, let alone sharing a bed. 

Undertaker takes an insane bump on a tope, flying over the ropes and getting sidestepped by Kane, basically doing running dive into an empty swimming pool that had a big table and Spanish commentators at the bottom of it. 

Even after the big dive, the fans stay pretty cold. It gets quiet down the home stretch and it's really odd. You can argue whether the match layout is to blame: Did the match go too long even though it was the semi-main and at worst the third most anticipated match of the night? I don't think so. Kane's heaving wind sucking stomach might think otherwise. Maybe Undertaker made his comeback too suddenly after 13 consecutive minutes of Kane taking no damage? It felt like they were doing the right things down the stretch but the reactions were not there. The three tombstone finish is a good finish for this match, and the tombstones all looked like the tombstone that Hogan pretended he had taken to break his neck in PRIDE in 1973.

Kane worked singles matches this long against Bret, but that was a different style, and three years before. This man was tired and after 15 minutes of a physical match suddenly Undertaker had to pick up his dead weight into three different standing 69s. Kane was going to get dumped on his head. It was inevitable. 

I thought this delivered what it should have, but was surprised by the cold reception for the biggest moments. What matches are even considered the best Undertaker/Kane matches? Is there a consensus? 

8. Steve Austin vs. Shawn Michaels

God there were so many years I'd die to have an Austin/Michaels match. We got a big one at King of the Ring 97 and we got this one. Both ruled. Both could have been incredible in 1992, or 93, or 96. 1997 and 1998 were great and I bet if we had any of their house show matches from 96/97, at least one of them was bound to outshine their big stage PPV matches. These are two guys with house show work even stronger than widely seen work, because they were that good. 

This has a great chase to start, ending with a killer Austin Polish hammer. Michaels takes the Hennig bump in the ropes and stooges around with his tight little ass 2/3 out of his tights. HHH is such a coward. HHH spent the worst years of our mainstream American wrestling fandom aping the most boring stretches of Flair matches, but he was too much of a puss to literally show ass. HHH had a complete aversion to any type of ass showing. A pathetic pro wrestler. Shawn Michaels would hang his tight set out there for us all and it's a shame we didn't get more footage of 1998 Michaels. He was still on one. 

His high speed upside down bump in the corner landed his body in such a painful way, jarring his entire skeleton off the turnbuckles, a brutal bump no matter the condition of his back. This would throw any body completely out of whack. His bumping in the opening half is nothing but painful spills and extra leaps. He wrecks his balls on an atomic drop, goes chin first into the announce table off the apron (gorgeous bump). He finds great ways to get run into every single one of the turnbuckles.

Austin throws perfectly worked Hitman-style falling elbow smashes. His huge swinging punches look fantastic.  

Home stretch builds to a series of different great bumps, an incredible back and forth. The best of them were: 

~Michaels aiming to wrap Austin's legs around the post, but Austin yanking him chin first into the post instead. Michaels was an incredible ring post bumper in the early 90s and is somehow still best in the world in his retirement match. It's so infinitely more valuable than making funny faces on 2 counts. What the fuck happened to this guy? How did going cross eyed and born again make him shy away from sick turnbuckle and ringpost bumps and into goofy never had sex o-faces.  

~Michaels taking an in-ring backdrop that would have stood out on any house show match in Memphis in any year

~An even better backdrop bump: Austin going breakneck fast over the guardrail, onto concrete, inches away from fans

Do we actually know if Michaels' selling during the final minute or two of this is his back just seizing up, or is this dude just a perfect carny worker in his final match ever, working a back injury in one of his greatest selling performances of his career. 

This match was the literal LAST of the best era of Shawn Michaels. I don't know if there were 5 of his matches from 2002 to 2010 that he made better. It's one of my least favorite runs in wrestling history. 

He never returns after WrestleMania XIV, he's Barry Sanders. 

Best Matches: 

1. Terry Funk/Cactus Jack vs. New Age Outlaws

2. Marc Mero/Sable vs. Goldust/Luna Vachon 

3. Shawn Michaels/Steve Austin