7. WRESTLEMANIA 23
This is one of the best start-to-finish wrestling cards of any WrestleMania, with very little to complain about. It’s very rare that everything on a show lives up to its expectations, but all the matches expected to deliver did, all the matches you expected to suck did, and the variables all landed somewhere in the middle.
The main event was sort of the final stop in the WWE’s three-year trek to making John Cena the most dominant Superstars in the company. He won the WWE Championship from Layfield at WrestleMania 21, was elevated into a much bigger match against The Game at WrestleMania 22, and here faced his greatest challenge yet in the “Heart Break Kid” Shawn Michaels. The more vocal fans may not have enjoyed the outcome, but going 30 minutes and submitting HBK gave John a lot of credibility.
The semi-main event featured The Undertaker recapturing the World Heavyweight title from “The Animal”, the two biggest stars on Smackdown at the time. The interchangeable rivalry between Undertaker, Batista and Edge turned the Blue Brand into must-see television. Their WrestleMania collision not only lived up to the hype, but may have exceeded it.
The third annual Money in the Bank match continued its excellent run of ladder matches, giving Mr. Kennedy a brief spotlight during the hiccup he spent in WWE. Bobby Lashley and Umaga were the willing participants in this show’s most ridiculous story, but Donald Trump brought some mainstream exposure to WrestleMania and the match turned out to be surprisingly fun.
The Divas “lumberjill” match was a dud. The Great Khali and Kane were atrocious. But again, nobody expected these matches to be any good, and mercifully they took up less than 10 minutes of the show.
I wish more WWE shows were as satisfying as WrestleMania 23. There are so many cards that if you were to fast-forward past the crap, you’re left with maybe one match worth watching (and it probably involved either the Intercontinental title or Ricky Steamboat). Even if you were to skip the bad, or simply medicore parts of WrestleMania 23, they still leave you with several hours of quality wrestling.
