WrestleMania I (1985): The Show That Changed Wrestling Before WrestleMania Learned How to Be Great

The first match in WrestleMania history is fittingly uncomplicated. Tito Santana works with urgency, The Executioner supplies enough resistance to keep the opener from becoming a pure squash, and the figure-four finish points directly at Santana's continuing issue with Intercontinental Champion Greg Valentine. Nothing about the match announces a new era of wrestling technique, but that is almost beside the point. WWF needed the first WrestleMania match to establish normalcy before the card began piling celebrities and spectacle onto the building. Santana gives the audience a familiar babyface victory, the pace stays brisk, and history receives a perfectly serviceable opening sentence rather than a thesis.

Calling this a match requires generosity. Bundy crushes S.D. Jones almost immediately, and WWF later promoted an official time of nine seconds even though commonly cited actual timing places the bout closer to twenty-four or twenty-five seconds. As wrestling, there is almost nothing to evaluate. As presentation, it is efficient character work: Bundy looks enormous, dangerous and capable of ending someone's evening before the audience has settled back into its chair. The squash also demonstrates how differently the first WrestleMania uses its card. Not every slot is expected to be a major match; some exist to create an image. Bundy's image is considerably better than the match.

For a few minutes, WrestleMania I remembers that professional wrestling can be the attraction all by itself. Ricky Steamboat is smooth, athletic and immediately recognizable as someone operating at a different technical speed than much of the card. Matt Borne gives him enough substance to avoid a featureless showcase, including useful power offense and a willingness to make Steamboat's movement matter. The match never receives enough time or narrative weight to become memorable in the way Steamboat's later WrestleMania work would, but it is one of the easiest bouts on the show to watch without applying a historical-interest discount. The flying-crossbody finish is clean, decisive and refreshingly free of machinery.

The first WrestleMania discovers a problem that future WrestleManias would repeatedly rediscover: famous surnames and recognizable supporting characters do not automatically create an interesting match. David Sammartino and Brutus Beefcake receive nearly twelve minutes, more than most of the card, without producing enough urgency or escalation to justify the investment. Bruno Sammartino and Johnny Valiant are more interesting as looming personalities than the central wrestling is as action. Eventually the seconds become involved, everyone fights, and the match ends in a double disqualification. That finish may preserve future business, but on the biggest event WWF had ever promoted it feels like paperwork.

Junkyard Dog brings charisma, Greg Valentine brings a functioning Intercontinental Championship program, and the match brings an ending that manages to give the challenger a victory without giving him the title. The initial finish involves Valentine's illegal leverage, Tito Santana arrives to explain the offense, and the restarted bout ends when Valentine accepts a count-out loss. It is classic territorial logic carried onto a national supercard: keep the belt on the heel, give the babyface a technical win, and preserve another issue for another night. The crowd can follow it, but the finish feels small for an event whose entire purpose is to feel larger than normal.

This is the strongest conventional match on the show because it has structure, heat, movement and an outcome that matters. Mike Rotundo and Barry Windham work as an energetic babyface team, while Sheik and Volkoff understand that their job is to make the building dislike them before the bell and then survive long enough to steal the championships. The pace is brisk, the tags keep the match from settling into one speed, and Windham's late burst gives the audience a credible path toward a successful defense. Instead, Freddie Blassie's cane becomes the decisive weapon and the challengers leave as champions. It is not a hidden classic. It is simply a good, efficient tag match on a card that badly needs one.

Andre versus Studd is an attraction disguised as a match, and it works best when judged by the attraction. The stipulation is wonderfully primitive: Andre must bodyslam the enormous Studd, and failure means retirement. The crowd therefore spends the match waiting for one thing. The problem is that the waiting lasts longer than the wrestling can comfortably support. Retrospective reviewers regularly identify the bout as one of the weaker pieces of the card, and the slow exchanges provide plenty of evidence. Then Andre lifts Studd, slams him, wins the money and begins tossing cash toward the crowd before Bobby Heenan intervenes. That image is the entire argument for the match.

The Women's Championship match carries more cultural weight than its modest runtime suggests because it is the wrestling payoff to the Cyndi Lauper connection that helped push WWF onto MTV. Wendi Richter has the audience's sympathy, Leilani Kai has Fabulous Moolah beside her, and Lauper's presence gives the bout a mainstream identity no other women's wrestling match in the company could have claimed at the time. The wrestling is uneven and retrospective opinions vary widely, but the crowd understands the story and the title change lands. Richter reversing Kai's aerial attack into the decisive pin gives the segment the clean emotional resolution that several earlier matches avoid.

The main event is the moment WrestleMania I finally becomes the event advertised on the poster. Hulk Hogan is the promotional engine, Mr. T is the mainstream hook, Roddy Piper is the ideal antagonist, and Paul Orndorff gives the heel side a worker capable of keeping the celebrity experiment attached to a wrestling match. Around them orbit Muhammad Ali, Billy Martin, Liberace, Jimmy Snuka and Bob Orton. On paper it sounds like someone lost control of the guest list. In the building it works because every celebrity has a clear function and the audience is desperate to see the heroes prevail.

Nobody should confuse the match with a technical classic. Mr. T is protected, the action is broad, and chaos matters more than sequencing. But the heat is excellent, Piper behaves like a man personally offended by mainstream culture, and the finish protects the central rivalry while giving the crowd its ending. Orton's attempted interference catches Orndorff instead, Hogan gets the pin, and Piper can leave angry rather than conquered. Pro Wrestling Illustrated later recognized the match as its Match of the Year, an honor that makes more sense as a measure of impact and spectacle than pure technique.