Royal Rumble 1995: Shawn Michaels Wins by One Foot, While Bret and Diesel Save the Card

Jeff Jarrett and Razor Ramon start with an eighteen-minute reminder that the New Generation could wrestle just fine when it stopped introducing occupations. Jarrett is slippery, Razor is powerful, and The Roadie gives the champion a second problem to solve without turning every minute into interference theater.

The first countout is the key. Razor damages his knee after being sent outside, Roadie makes the injury worse, and Jarrett wins without winning the title. Double J cannot leave well enough alone. He calls Razor back, gets the match restarted, and spends the second half attacking the compromised leg until Razor's knee gives way during the Razor's Edge.

Jarrett stealing the championship by being smarter rather than stronger suits him perfectly. The restart is contrived, but the match earns the title change once it happens.

Death versus taxes sounds better on a poster than it does for twelve minutes.

IRS stalls, the Undertaker stalks, Ted DiBiase's druids interfere, and the match repeatedly pauses so another piece of the Million Dollar Corporation story can be moved into position. There is nothing catastrophically broken about the wrestling. There is simply very little reason to revisit it.

Undertaker eventually chokeslams IRS for the win, which should end the matter. Instead, King Kong Bundy arrives, the Corporation attacks, and the urn is stolen. The segment succeeds at creating WrestleMania business. The match spends most of its life waiting for that segment.

Bret Hart looks at a seven-foot champion and decides the answer is not courage. It is anatomy.

He attacks Diesel's left knee from nearly every available angle: ring post, figure-four, rope, tape, kicks, dives. Diesel answers by making every power move feel dangerous, and the contrast gives Kevin Nash one of the best matches of his first championship run. Bret does not wrestle around Diesel's limitations. He builds the match so those limitations become the story.

Then WWF becomes afraid to let either man lose. Shawn Michaels attacks Diesel after the Jackknife. The referee allows the match to continue. Owen Hart attacks Bret. The referee allows the match to continue. Eventually nearly every relevant heel in the building gets involved and the official finally abandons the idea of having a finish at all.

The overbooking is frustrating precisely because the wrestling before it is excellent. Diesel and Bret had built a title match worthy of a real ending. They get a traffic jam instead.

The tag tournament final is better than its place in history suggests, mostly because Bam Bam Bigelow spends fifteen minutes making the underdogs feel endangered.

Holly and the Kid are faster, the Million Dollar Corporation team is stronger, and the match keeps returning to that imbalance. The Kid gets thrown around, Holly gets isolated, and every babyface burst feels temporary until Tatanka accidentally knocks Bigelow from the top rope.

The Kid crawls over and wins the vacant titles. They will lose them to the Smoking Gunns the next night, which turns the championship victory into a footnote. What happens afterward lasts much longer: Bigelow reacts to the crowd, gets in Lawrence Taylor's face and shoves him. WrestleMania XI suddenly has its main event.

The 1995 Royal Rumble has one great idea, one great finish and a roster that keeps trying to expose everything in between.

Shawn Michaels enters first. British Bulldog enters second. They keep crossing paths while the ring fills with a collection of midcard acts so thin that WWF shortens the entry interval to roughly sixty seconds. The pace is fast because it has to be. A longer version of this field would not become deeper; it would merely become longer.

Michaels does the heavy lifting. Bulldog gives him the ideal opposite number. Bret Hart attacking Owen and Bob Backlund on their way to the ring adds continuity, and Lex Luger briefly looks like a plausible threat. Most of the middle is bodies entering, leaning on ropes and leaving before the audience has much reason to care.

Then the ending changes the memory of the match. Bulldog throws Michaels over, his music starts, and he celebrates. Only one of Shawn's feet touched the floor. Michaels skins the cat back into the match, attacks from behind and eliminates Bulldog.

It is brilliant visual storytelling attached to a mediocre Rumble. The final minute deserves the highlight reel. The previous thirty-seven do not suddenly become better because the landing stuck.