WrestleMania 41: The greatest celebrity matches in WrestleMania history, from Lawrence Taylor to Bad Bunny
From the very beginning, WrestleMania has been a balance of in-ring wrestling and Hollywood glitz and glamour. The excitement around the first WrestleMania was built on pop star Cyndi Lauper, who was managing women's champion Wendi Richter and television/movie star Mr. T, who was in the main event tag match. Celebrities have donned the tights many times, and while the results have been sort of hit and miss (no one is going to be looking to rediscover the greatness of Maria Menounos's WrestleMania 28 tag match), there have been some truly excellent celebrity WrestleMania matches.
From WrestleMania 1 all the way to last year's Philadelphia showcase, here is a list of the best:
Bunny is a huge music star and has to be given a lot of credit for how he clearly prepared for this match. He broke out a bunch of high spots, a satellite head scissors, plancha and Canadian destroyer.
The match never really felt like a fight, though, a feeling significantly less polished celebrities were able to pull off. Miz and Morrison are experienced hands and certainly did their best to install some credibility, but this ended up feeling more like a handful of cool twitter gifs than a complete match. (Still some admittedly cool twitter gifs.)
Taylor was one of the greatest pure athletes in football history, and that athleticism jumped off the screen in this match. You get the sense that Taylor spent less time preparing for this match than any other celebrity on this list. If he tried to do anything complicated, it didn't look good — but the match still completely worked.
Most of Taylor's offense were these leaping forearm smashes where he just sprung himself through the air and landed with the kind of explosive force that terrorized quarterbacks throughout the '80s and '90s. Bigelow was a pro's pro, and you could see him moving "LT" around into positions and feeding him openings and gamely taking the potatoes that Taylor was delivering.
Bam Bam was always a bit of a what-if — for whatever reason he never really reached the heights that his talent and look should have taken him to. But in his most high-profile moment, he totally delivered.
An incredibly 1980s moment: Muhammed Ali as the special referee, Libarace as the time-keeper and Billy Martin sitting at ringside. A sea change in the way professional wrestling was presented. A great Piper performance — just an all-time s***-stirrer, getting in Mr. T's face, cheap-shotting, stooging for Hogan, injecting the entire match with an unhinged energy, a little grit in the gloss.
Mr. T did a nice job with his role as well, hitting some nice takedowns, being a good hot tag and coming off like a tough guy. Hogan in 1985 was a master of this kind of spectacle, playing to the cheap seats with big expressive selling and moves, delivering what the crowd paid to see.
While Ronda Rousey would go on to have a pair of runs as a full-time wrestler, she was fully a celebrity attraction at this point, coming into the WWE after being one of the biggest sports stars in the world as a UFC champion. This was one a great example of the excellence of structure, a classic southern tag where the catharsis is deferred and deferred to make the moment when it hits mean so much.
The rules of the match only allowed men to wrestle men and women to wrestle women, so the beginning of the match was Triple H trying to keep Angle from tagging in Rousey and forcing his wife into the threshing machine. McMahon could certainly outstay her welcome as an on-air character, but this was her masterpiece, a cheap-shotting obnoxious heel, who the crowd is begging to see get her comeuppance.
They actually use a lot of bells and whistles to have a competitive finish run, with Steph in full hair-pull, eye-rake mode, keeping the audience from the moment where Ronda catches her, to the point where the crowd comes unglued when Ronda finally snaps her arm with the armbar.
Logan Paul has become a staple of the WWE in the past three years, but came into this match as a social media star without previous in-ring experience — and he demonstrated here what would make him such a successful wrestler. Paul just seemed to intrinsically understand the way to dig under the skin of fans. There is a moment where Paul does Eddie Guerrero's signature combos to taunt Mysterio. It's a spot that has been done hundreds of times since Eddie's death, but just watch how Paul pauses after each suplex to maximize the boos — and his absolutely contemptible little shimmy on the top rope before the frog splash.
A lot of wrestling heels these days exist in a sort of meta world where fans cheer them for 'being a good bad guy.' Paul in this match channels the kind of hate which would make old ladies try to stab Tully Blanchard.
Basically a live action Tom and Jerry cartoon. Knoxville did a tremendous job translating what made "Jackass" so special over the years into a wrestling match — and Sami Zayn took the kind of insane bumps necessary to pull it off.
Giant hands, tables full of mousetraps, bowling balls to the privates, crazy amounts of punishment. It was like if Kevin versus the Wet Bandits happened live with no special effects or cutting. Most celebrity matches are built around how the celebrity can integrate himself into the world of wrestling. This was basically Sami Zayn dropped in an episode of "Jackass," and he fit in perfectly.
One of the great pro-wrestling spectacles of all time, the ultimate glitz and glamour celebrity fight. Mayweather was the biggest boxing star since Mike Tyson and someone who was facing off with a behemoth who was 250-pound heavier and a foot and a half taller. Somehow Floyd's natural brand of hateable charisma made the crowd root for Goliath to take his revenge against David.
Mayweather came equipped with an entourage to run interference and take bumps, but when he got his chances, he showed off his blinding hand speed and power, throwing maybe the nastiest body shots ever in a pro-wrestling ring. Big Show got his licks in too, stepping on Mayweather's chest and arms and chucking him around the ring — huge bumps for an active champion boxer (although Mayweather was technically in the middle of one of his many retirements.)
The finish was incredible, with Floyd using distractions to wallop Big Show with a chair and then crush him with a brass-knuckle assisted right hand, which he didn't appear to pull even a little bit.
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