22 Days Of WrestleMania (#9 Best WrestleMania And Match)

9. WrestleMania VII
After the previous year's highly successful WrestleMania VI, Mr. McMahon and company easily could have done a sequel to the Ultimate Warrior/Hulk Hogan main event. However, with the war in Iraq, he made an controversial decision. He turned Sgt. Slaughter into a heel, trashing America. Now at the time, it seemed like a terrible decision, and in many ways it may have been. But by him doing that, Hogan actually had a decent main event with Slaughter, and the Ultimate Warrior had the best match of his career that then led to one of the greatest moments in WWF/E history. This was the first WrestleMania I ordered, so you can imagine the excitement running through my 8 year old body. Every Saturday on Superstars they would announce a few more matches, and no matter how pointless of a match it was (Greg Valentine vs. Earthquake, Dino Bravo vs. Texas Tornado, Tito Santana vs. Mountie, and so on), I still would run around the house to go tell my whole family the news. When the event finally hit, it was pure joy. As I've previously documented, the Rockers/Haku And Barbarian match is a personal favorite of mine as is the historic reuniniting of Macho Man and the lovely Elizabeth. I've seen this 'Mania literally at least 50 times and I believe it to stand the test of time, even if they didn't end up going with no-brainer big money match.

9. Shawn Michaels vs. Bret Hart (WrestleMania XII)
This of course is the Iron Man match I was referring to in yesterday's post. At a time when the business was struggling, I enjoyed that they gave two great wrestlers the opportunity to go out there and do their thing. Even though we all knew Michaels was going to finally realize his "boyhood dream", you still watched in amazement of how these guys gave it their all for over an hour. We were led to believe that Michaels could not out-wrestle Hart, and the announcers played that out brilliantly. Michaels was able to show off his technical skills and Hart sold during this match like only he could. The one disappointment is that there was only 1 fall, I was hoping for 3, but everything else was near perfection. Unfortunately this was one of the major causes for the hatred between these two stars, as Michaels told Hart to get out of the ring after his victory, so that he could "have his moment". Controversial finish or not, this was a once in a lifetime main event that is one for the history books.