SummerSlam 1994: Bret and Owen Build a Classic, Then WWF Sends Out Two Undertakers

The opener has enough useful pieces to become something better than it does. Bam Bam Bigelow and Fatu move like men who should not move that quickly, Samu supplies the hot tag, and the crowd is willing to follow the action. Then the finish arrives like somebody unplugging the television.

Ted DiBiase distracts the referee, Afa enters, and the official calls for the disqualification. Nobody gains anything from it. The Headshrinkers had lost the tag titles one night earlier, Bigelow and IRS were not protected by winning clean, and a promising little power match gets remembered mostly for stopping.

Bull Nakano looks like she has wandered in from a different wrestling universe and brought better ideas with her. Her strength, submissions and balance give Alundra Blayze something unusual to solve, while Blayze wrestles with the speed of a champion who knows she cannot win a prolonged power fight.

Eight minutes is not enough. That is the enduring frustration. The match still finds room for Nakano's vicious leg work, a sit-out powerbomb, Blayze's comebacks and the bridging German suplex finish. In an era when WWF women's wrestling was frequently treated as an afterthought, this feels like evidence from an alternate timeline.

Razor Ramon and Diesel do not need to reinvent wrestling because Shawn Michaels and Walter Payton are already giving the match a clean story. Diesel controls with size, Michaels keeps cheating, Payton keeps trying to neutralize him, and Chicago treats Razor like one of its own because Sweetness is standing beside him.

The match gets better as Michaels becomes more aggressive. He exposes the turnbuckle, interferes repeatedly and finally tries to superkick Razor while Diesel holds him. Razor moves. Diesel eats the kick. The title changes hands, and one mistake plants another seed in the eventual Michaels-Diesel breakup.

It is not a classic, but the booking, crowd and personalities turn solid work into a satisfying championship match.

The angle is dramatically better than the match. Tatanka spends weeks accusing Lex Luger of selling out to Ted DiBiase, the audience is invited to wonder whether Luger has betrayed them, and six minutes of ordinary wrestling mostly exists to reach the answer.

DiBiase appears with the money, Luger gets distracted, and Tatanka rolls him up. Then the actual swerve lands: Tatanka attacks Luger and reveals himself as the newest member of the Million Dollar Corporation.

The turn works. The wrestling barely matters. WrestleFile grades the match, not the quality of the surprise waiting after it.

Country versus rap is the premise, which is already asking two wrestlers to climb a hill before they have done anything. Jeff Jarrett then spends most of six minutes trying to make Mabel mobile enough for a wrestling match to emerge.

There are sleepers, missed splashes and a few moments when Jarrett's timing nearly gives the thing shape. It never lasts. Mabel misses the sit-down splash, Jarrett grabs the opening and the match ends before becoming actively exhausting.

That last sentence is the nicest thing available.

The blue-bar cage turns thirty-two minutes into a family argument with no place to hide. Bret Hart and Owen Hart do not need blood, weapons or somebody falling from the roof. They need only one rule: escape.

Every climb matters because the feud has spent nine months making victory personal. The brothers know each other's counters, so an escape that would end another cage match becomes merely the next problem here. Owen drags Bret back. Bret catches Owen. Both tumble from the bars. The crowd learns to react to fingers on steel and feet near the floor as if they were finishing moves.

The famous superplex from near the top of the cage is enormous without becoming the entire match. The real achievement is exhaustion. Both men repeatedly create openings and then cannot capitalize because the fight has taken too much out of them. That makes the final escape feel earned rather than arranged.

Owen gets caught upside down in the cage, Bret drops to the floor, and the family war immediately gets uglier when Jim Neidhart locks Bret inside and helps Owen beat him down. The match resolves the contest without resolving the feud.

This is what an A+ match looks like: not flawless because somebody declared it sacred, but a match whose execution, story, crowd and legacy all occupy the highest tier.

The entrance is the match's best argument. Paul Bearer opens the glowing urn, the real Undertaker returns after seven months away, and for a few minutes WWF has exactly the spectacle it wanted.

Then the bell rings.

Brian Lee has the costume and enough of the mannerisms to make the visual work from a distance. He does not have the chemistry required to make nine minutes of Undertaker-versus-Undertaker offense interesting. The crowd grows quiet. Vince McMahon repeatedly treats the silence as awe. It is not awe.

Three Tombstones eventually end the imposter. The wrong match has gone on last, immediately after Bret and Owen emptied the building emotionally with a classic. The difference between the two matches is so extreme that it becomes the story of the entire event.