A great wrestling match sticks with you for decades. These are the ones that broke through, the matches even casual fans have heard about, and the reason each one earned its spot.
The match that made WrestleMania a big deal. In front of a Silverdome crowd announced at 93,173, Hogan bodyslammed the roughly 500-pound Andre in a single moment that ran on every highlight reel for a generation. As a match, it's slow. As a piece of history, it's the Mona Lisa.
If you want to know what "great wrestling" means to purists, watch these three matches from 1989. Flair and Steamboat wrestled a trilogy across the NWA that year, and it's still the gold standard for pure, athletic, story-driven wrestling. No gimmicks, no shortcuts, just two masters at the top of their craft.
The greatest double turn in history. Austin, the villain, refused to quit in Bret Hart's submission hold, passing out in a pool of his own blood rather than give up. He walked in a heel and walked out the toughest man in wrestling. Hart walked in the hero and left the villain. One match flipped both men, and it lit the fuse on Austin's rise to the biggest star of the era.
The most infamous stunt in wrestling. Mick Foley, as Mankind, got thrown off the top of the 16-foot steel cage through the announce table below, then got chokeslammed through the roof of the cage minutes later. It's less a match than an act of controlled insanity, and it's the first thing a lot of people think of when they think "wrestling."
The two biggest stars of wrestling's most popular era, at the peak of their powers, in front of a red-hot Houston crowd. This is the match that sits at the summit of the Attitude Era. If you want to understand why wrestling was a mainstream phenomenon around 2001, start here.
Proof that the classics never stopped coming. Two veterans told a masterclass of a story built on near-falls and drama, with the crowd on its feet for the finish. Widely called one of the greatest WrestleMania matches ever, and they ran it back a year later just as well.
The modern epic. At New Japan's biggest show on January 4, 2017, Okada and Omega wrestled a match so acclaimed that a famous critic broke his own rating scale to score it above the previous ceiling. For fans who came up in the 2010s, this is the match that showed how high the bar could go.
You don't have to watch them in order or know the backstory. Pick one, watch it cold, and you'll understand why people give their lives to this stuff.
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