Until 1995, the WWE’s pay-per-view card was shockingly meager. Today’s newbie fan would scarcely believe, let alone be able to conceive, that the WWE survived on 5 pay-per-view events (and only one “brand” to boot!). With 1995, the WWE added the 2-hour, budget-priced In Your House series (complete with hilarious, WCW-esque subtitles like “Good Friends, Better Enemies”, “It’s Time” and “Beware Of Dog”); but prior to that, there were only 5, and almost every one of them was unique for one reason or another.
There was the PPV that started as the “Thanksgiving Tradition”, Survivor Series. The annual November event (one of the four co-branded events, currently) started off with a series of 8- or 10-man elimination tag matches. Over time, the tag matches would be phased out and brought back on an irregular basis, but by then, through notoriety and circumstance, the event would be synonymous with something else: the Survivor Series
Screwjob, which almost became as annual as the event itself (as when they repeated it in 1998, the surprise opponent of Big Show in 1999, the Angle switcheroo in 2000, and on and on).
Then, there’s the Royal Rumble, which became famous on the strength of its sprawling, 30-man over-the-top battle royal, complete with fluctuating time periods for competitor entries. As the 90’s bloomed, the #1-contendership stipulation was added, except in 1992, when the Rumble filled the vacant title. The event would host other matches, but the event’s signature was obvious by it’s name.
Then you have WrestleMania. The importance and unique stature of this does not need explanation, and the event itself, courtesy of it’s historical importance, doesn’t need an identifying match to make it special; it simply is, and everyone accepts that.
(There’s also the late (1993-2002), lamented King Of The Ring in June. Central to this event was a tournament to crown a “King Of The Ring”, a purely titular honor that wasn’t defended save for the following year’s tournament, nor did it carry any specific, publicly stated connotations or position within the company. Unofficially (and the audience knew this), it was viewed as a stepping stone to an upper-tier push, although the success rate was negligible (for every Steve Austin or Triple H, you have Billy Gunn and Mabel). This event was bulldozed into the trash heap to make way for Bad Blood in 2003, in a move no one seems happy with even to this day.)
Now, keep in mind, Survivor Series, Royal Rumble and WrestleMania are very near in proximity on the calendar; SurSer and RR are only a month apart (both brands have an event in between), and a single event stands between RR and ‘Mania. Three huge events, all between November and March. This leaves one more event in the Big 4 calendar, a lone tent pole propping up the dog days of summer all by itself. It isn’t the centerpiece of the year … and it doesn’t have some big, unseen match stipulation. It is just an event. A good event, no question, but an event with a weird pattern to it.
SummerSlam began in 1988, a midway point between March’s WrestleMania and November’s Survivor Series (it would be a couple more years before the Royal Rumble would bow on PPV). The Survivor Series had just been introduced the year before and, as a nice stopover in between the late-fall Survivor Series and the centerpiece that was WrestleMania, SummerSlam was debuted in the dog days of August. Since its inception, the event has played host to some memorable events … Paul Bearer turning his back on The Undertaker after 6 years of service and joining his nemesis Mankind … the Undertaker mirror-match … the wedding of Macho Man Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth … the British Bulldog beating Bret Hart in England … the Ultimate Warrior ending Honky Tonk Man’s year-and-a-half Intercontinental Title reign with a 30 second blitzkrieg of offense.
No doubt, since its creation, SummerSlam has cemented its position in the Big 4 and, to this day, can always be counted on as a sort-of junior-Mania in the summer. But yet … try as it might, there’s something odd about SummerSlam. Something that has never sat quite right in comparison to the other members of the “Big 4”.
For starters is its lack of a distinctive identity. Quick, time for a word association game. I’ll throw out an event title, and you think of an adjective or something significant about it:
Survivor Series (betcha thought of the Survivor Series Screwjob, or classic Survivor Series matches).
Royal Rumble (the title says it all: the Royal Rumble, the precursor and decider of the main event of WrestleMania).
WrestleMania (grandeur, spectacle, the Super Bowl Of Wrestling, The Grandaddy Of ‘Em All, blah blah blah).
I’ll even toss out some non-WWE PPV names …
Fall Brawl (WarGames, how we miss thee).
Starrcade (the original “Grandaddy Of ‘Em All”, WCW’s WrestleMania).
Bash At The Beach (home of two of the biggest events in WCW history: the formation of the New World Order, and the “Is it a work/shoot?” mystery with Hogan and Russo).
World War III (huge clusterf*ck of a battle royal).
November To Remember (carnage, craziness, ECW’s WrestleMania for sure).
But when I say SummerSlam, what do you think of? Good matches? Sure, there’s been a share. Fond memories? I’ll bet; I got my own. Memorable moments? Of course, every event does.
But nothing that makes it stand out from, say, Bad Blood, or Backlash, or The Great American Bash (the WCW incarnation, please), or Spring Stampede. For being one of the Big 4, SummerSlam’s only real claim to being “big” is that it’s been around since ’88. It has no signature of any kind, no outstanding feature, no trademark match or event. July rolls around, and we all get twitchy for the big SummerSlam extravaganza in a month … but none of us ever know why. These days, fine, at least it has the distinction of being the first co-branded PPV after ‘Mania, a long four months after the big dance … but being “co-branded” does about as much to sell PPVs as a Brooklyn Brawler/Gillberg match might do to sell PPVs.
And when you look at the history of the event, the stature of the event gets even murkier. Take, for instance, the first year. Aside from Warrior’s decimation of Honky Tonk, and a Demoltion/Hart Foundation match to please the workrate fans, SummerSlam ’88’s selling point was (obviously) the main event of The Megapowers (Savage & Hogan) vs. The Megabucks (Ted DiBiase & Andre The Giant). Certainly a marquee match-up for 1988 … but a total stop-gap maneuver, when you think about it: Hogan still wanted revenge on Andre & DiBiase for screwing him out of the title in February, Savage was still proving himself as champ after winning with Hogan’s help at ‘Mania, and DiBiase & Andre were looking at payback for a cunning plan gone awry. A tag match was hardly the way to bring all these factors to a head, and it didn’t. Bottom line, this was a Saturday Night’s Main Event match that Vince got us all (or our parents) to pay money for.
And ’89 was no picnic either, pulling the same gambit as ’88, only this time we got the ultra-painful combination of Hogan and his buddy Brutus Beefcake facing Savage and Zeus. Who’s Zeus, you ask? Well, if you’re new to the game, Hogan made a movie in 1988 called No Holds Barred, and Zeus portrayed his opponent in the movie. Vince McMahon thought it would be a swell idea to have the actor who played Zeus (Tiny Lister, the big wall of a man in Friday who beats the ever-loving shit out of Ice Cube before being felled by a brick) cross over into the WWE and seek revenge for what happened in the movie. Yes, you read that right: Zeus was coming after Hogan in a WWF wrestling ring, looking for payback for something that happened in a movie. You just can’t make that kind of stuff up, folks. Plus, you had the other story of Savage wanting revenge for losing to Hogan at WrestleMania V, but really Hogan and Zeus were the centerpiece here. And we’re all still mentally scarred for it to this day.
’90 finally saw a WWE title defense, with the Warrior retaining against Rick Rude in a steel cage. It was a shocker, to say the least, for two reasons: 1) Hogan wasn’t main-eventing, and 2) Rick Rude was pushed to the main event. At least it wasn’t a tag match, but it set the bar for the event’s being host to weird World Title matches.
’91 saw Vince try one more tag main event, aptly dubbed “The Match Made In Hell”: Hogan & Warrior against Sgt. Slaugher, Col. Mustafa and Gen. Adnan. This was intended as a blow-off for the horrid “Slaughter turns against America” storyline that had Slaughter become an Iraqi sympathizer during Operation Desert Shield/Storm. The less time spent on this, the better; just know that, with two guys past their prime (Iron Sheik had been given a gimmick change and lumped into Slaughter’s group, and Slaughter was no spring chicken either), Hogan and Warrior in the same ring, there was a lot of projectile vomit on a lot of television screens. Special mention should be made, though, for the co-main event: the Savage/Elizabeth wedding. Yes, a wedding co-main-evented. You’d think Stephanie was writing back then.
’92 would mark the event finally getting regular WWE Title defenses, with Savage retaining against the Ultimate Warrior when Savage was counted out. A crappy end to the match, for sure … and even more interesting was that the WWF World Title match-this is the pinnacle of the company mind you, the most important belt in the company-played third string behind a clash between Undertaker and Kamala, and the Bret Hart/Davey Boy Smith IC Title match. Sure, they put the hometown boy in the main event, but still … third string?!? Behind a Kamala match?!? If the intent was to make the champ look credible, the execution sucked more then 5-dollar Blowjob Night at the Mustang Ranch. ’93’s event, at least, had the World Title headline, but for the second year in a row, the champion, Yokozuna, retained by countout. Only this time, it was the champ who was counted out. See, he was hit by Luger’s loaded forearm … they made a big deal about Luger having a steel plate in his forearm from a motorcycle crash, and when Luger … oh, never mind, it’s not worth my effort. It makes my head hurt. Anyway, it all boils down to being the first in a series of choke moments for Luger in the WWE … a label that he had carried with him from WCW anyway.
’94 would see the first definitive WWE Title victory at SummerSlam since Warrior’s victory over Rude … and, coincidentally, also in a steel cage. This one featured the supposed blow-off for the Bret Hart/Owen Hart family feud … only, when the match ended, half the Hart family was in the ring, along with Davey Boy and Jim Neidhart, inexplicably continuing the angle. Hey, I loved the angle as much as the next guy … but Owen wasn’t being pushed as a credible main event threat. He was a convenient opponent at a time when they didn’t have a real credible main event heel. Oh, and this big match, this NWA-esque family feud didn’t event main event: the infamous Undertaker vs. Underfaker match took those honors, in a match and an angle so horrible and insulting, it was booed out of the building. Vince quietly and quickly cancelled the rest of the angle, but the damage was done.
And speaking of bizarre choices for a #1 contender,’95’s edition has the coup de grace, with the god-awful, negative-5-star anti-classic of Kevin Nash against King Mabel (for the uninitiated, that’s Viscera). This was a stupid, stupid angle (we all try to forget “The Royal Plan”, which involved Mabel squishing Diesel at every event with his Fat-Ass Splash Of Doom), a stupid contender; just plain stupid at every turn. And speaking of stupid, that brings us to ’96, with the Shawn Michaels/Vader match that had three different endings!!! How, you ask? Shawn lost by countout … and the match was restarted … and then he lost by DQ … and the match was restarted. All so he could pin Vader, who had been built up as a terrific monster for months and months. Sure, the match was a decent big vs. little man match, but the power of the Clique was too strong for Vader, who wasn’t just cut off at the knees … they went for the hips.
’97 proved to be a historical SummerSlam, but not all for the best reasons. For one, it marked the first time in SummerSlam’s history that the WWF Title changed hands. But Bret’s victory over the Undertaker took a backseat to the angle that surrounded the match, thereby relegating the WWF Title to a second-tier player. The angle was that Shawn Michaels, Bret’s biggest rival, was the referee, and a set of wacky stipulations decreed that if Shawn didn’t call it down the middle, he’d be banned from wrestling in the United States, and that if Bret attacked Shawn or couldn’t win, he’d never wrestling in the United States again … and if the Undertaker didn’t dance a jig, he’d have to kiss a goat, and if Jim Ross didn’t say slobberknocker, he’d have to light a fart, and on and on and on. All the wacky stipulations and the insertion of the Bret/Shawn rivalry overshadowed the fact that Undertaker and Bret had never wrestled to a definitive ending, thus negating the importance of the title, the match, and making Undertaker’s championship reign look impotent.
But if ’98’s stipulations killed the title match, the very match itself at ’98’s did so. Austin’s match with Undertaker was built up with nothing besides Undertaker being #1 contender. There was no rivalry, no animosity, no real anything of context or value going into it … and when Austin hit a low blow on Undertaker as he went for his Old School Arm Drop From The Ropes (it needs all capitals, surely it does) and landed the Stunner to end the match, it sucked the wind out of the sails of the match. A match shouldn’t end on a sudden move that, really, could’ve been hit at any time in the match prior to it, and it made Undertaker look like a real chump (and made Austin look desperate for the win).
If ’98’s lousy, out-of-the-blue ending wasn’t enough for you, ’99 would give you an even bigger version of it, when Mankind defeated Steve Austin and Triple H in a triple threat for the WWE Title (with then-Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura as the referee). The match itself was a last-minute swap, spoiling what had been a solid build-up for an Austin/Triple H match, complete with a fluctuating #1 contendership that went from Triple H (won at the previous month’s Fully Loaded PPV) to Chyna, to Mankind, to
Triple H, to my aunt Christa, to Lou Thesz, to Dan Rather, to the Energizer Bunny, to Booker T (god bless Vince Russo’s wacky booking), all before finally being split between Triple H and Mankind. Because the focus of the build-up had been spoiled, and the push of Triple H had taken a backseat to hotshot booking, and with Mankind pinning Austin (clean, no less), it dampened the Austin/Triple H feud and had no impact for the residual issue between Mankind and Triple H. The same kind of crazy booking would undermine 2000’s main event, with The Rock defending against Triple H and Kurt Angle; the focus of the match wasn’t so much the WWE Title as it was the long-simmering love triangle of Angle, Triple H and Stephanie McMahon. In a sick karmic twist, Angle would be taken out of 90% of the match due to a botched table spot that gave Angle a concussion, thus all but spoiling the plans for the evening and reducing the match to (gasp! The horror!) a one-on-one title defense with only a title between the combatants. But without Angle, or the angle, the match was nothing but a lame-duck title defense, even when Angle (with the concussion … what a man!) hobbled back down to the ring to participate in the finale.
2001 would finally, after years, get a main event that seemed big time and not a placeholder match … if not for the problem that, at the time, the federation was mired in the disastrous InVasion angle, and thusly, had two titles–the WWE and WCW World Titles, specifically-to defend. The WWE Title took the second banana slot, and a good thing, too, as Austin retained the title over Angle by way of a cheesy disqualification (he attacked the ref after failing to put Angle away). The sour ending was lightened, for the marks anyway, by The Rock’s triumphant return and victory over WCW Champion Booker T to take the title in what felt, to the casual fan, like a big match … but for anyone with an IQ bigger then their shoe size, the victory was telegraphed, and it sucked the life, and anything remotely “main event” out of the match. 2002’s main event for the Undisputed WWE Title (which would cease to be undisputed 24 hours later) suffered from the same obvious ending, as the pet project of Vince McMahon, Brock Lesnar, was coronated the new Undisputed WWE Champion and ushered into the main event with a crushing, and plainly obvious, victory over The Rock.
That brings us to the abortion of SummerSlam’s 2003 twin title matches, and the striking differences in presentation and content between them. For Smackdown, the WWE Title was defended by Angle against Lesnar in a rematch of WrestleMania XIX’s main event … although this had far less of the stature of the climactic ‘Mania battle, and not just because the match was third down from the top; the feud had, more or less, raged since December of the previous year, and at 8 months and counting, the feud was no longer fresh or unique. The offering of another Angle/Lesnar match might’ve been made special again with a stipulation of sorts, but with no such thing to spice it up, it didn’t have the marquee value of the previous match, and fell flat in comparison. On the Raw side of things, the main event did have a stipulation; namely the Elimination Chamber, which was put in at the last minute, aborting a one-on-one meeting of Raw Champion Triple H and Goldberg due to a (suspect) Triple H groin injury. The match, which also featured Evolution teammate Randy Orton, perennial main event flirt Jericho, and two recently vanquished Triple H opponents in Kevin Nash and Shawn Michaels, showed its cobbled-together roots, and the result-a retention of the title for Triple H-helped kill Goldberg’s drawing power in the WWE, despite his winning the belt the following month.
And finally, we come to last year’s event, a virtual carbon copy of 2002’s event, where a beloved face champion (this time, Chris Benoit) saw his title reign brought to an abrupt end by a pet project of Vince McMahon (this time, Randy Orton) in what amounted to little more then a coronation.
So, having gone over that, let’s break it down into some simple, cold, hard stats, ‘kay?
The event, this year, will present itself for the 18th time. In 17 previous events, the WWE/WCW/World Championships have been defended a total of 16 times, but only at 14 events (the ’88, ’89 and ’91 iterations featured tag-team main events). Of those, the main title(s) have only changed hands five times. The only one of the Big 4 to have a lesser ratio is the Royal Rumble (4 title changes, counting Ric Flair’s claiming of the vacant title in ’92), but it has a built-in excuse; the Royal Rumble match-up itself is the big draw there, and for several years, wasn’t on cable and only featured the Rumble itself. Furthermore, the Rumble is only two months prior to WrestleMania (SIXTEEN title changes there), so changing the champion while the #1 contender is going to be declared later on in the evening seems somewhat counter-productive. Even Survivor Series, which didn’t have a title defense until its 5th iteration (and didn’t have title defenses at the ’93 or ’01 events, and only of the two shows defended titles in ’03 and ’04) has seen more title changes, 9 in all.
Of the 5 title changes at SummerSlam, the first did not occur until 1997, the 10th SummerSlam overall (and 7th title defense). Three title defenses have ended on non-pinfall/submission means (two countouts and a DQ, if you don’t count the three-in-one match of ’96). Three matches have been multi-man matches, but the title changed hands in only one of these.
Suddenly, the “prestige” of the annual summer event doesn’t seem so rosy anymore, does it? 5 title changes in 16 matches and 17 events overall. A lot of lame-duck title defenses, a few coronations, more then a few abortions, and three years where the WWE Title didn’t even get the decency of a defense. Just based on the statistics and not even taking opinions into account, SummerSlam is a red-headed stepchild, a filler event in the middle of the summer when the federation is simply treading water until the big Road To WrestleMania starts getting paved.
This is the event we have before us; an event where the champion (or champions) are merely on cruise control until something more important pops up (usually in the fall, definitely by Survivor Series). An event where the champion is sometimes treated as no more then a fulcrum, a person to get the belt from point-A to point-B (and, usually, to give the new person a rub). An event where the World Title, the centerpiece of the promotion, the item and title which all wrestlers are supposed to be driven to pursue and acquire, and the World Champion, the person whom all competitors are supposed to be going after, have often played a backseat to some other storyline or rivalry.
So, if this is SummerSlam in a nutshell … if it has nothing to offer the viewers in the way of something special … if it’s nothing more then a co-branded In Your House with almost 20 years of history … why is it afforded such a lofty position in the hearts and minds of the fans and the company? Is it simply due to the event’s age? Is it that, at one time, the event was an oasis of “big-time” wrestling in the seemingly endless chasm between WrestleMania and Survivor Series? Is it some kind of mistaken, misguided nostalgia? Or perhaps some clouded projection of importance we wish the event contained?
Whatever the reason, it doesn’t change the fact that SummerSlam, that mid-year mutant of an event, a co-branded event that has no real reason to be so, is shortly upon us. The events of SummerSlam usually either wrap up short-term storylines started in the spring, or begin new arcs that propel us into the fall and winter. And with the Draft Lottery now being officially a scant two months before the summer spectacular, it all but assures that SummerSlam’s awkward tradition of bring the Big Fish Out Of Water will continue … and, like some kind of nervous tic, we’ll all sit and salivate, waiting for the annual summer spectacular, with no conscious memory of the peculiar history and tendencies the event has shown in years before.
