Ranking every WWE Royal Rumble match in history

16. Royal Rumble 1995 – Shawn Michaels

On one hand, I want to put the 1995 Royal Rumble higher on this list and on the other hand, I want to put it near the bottom of this list. So I decided to put it close to the middle and just be satisfied with that. Allow me to explain.

What I really enjoyed about this Rumble match is that they decided to try something new. Nobody had ever won from either the number one or the number two position. The closest we’d gotten to that was Ric Flair’s 1992 win from number three. So what they decided to do in 1995 was to take the number one entry, Shawn Michaels, and the number two entry, The British Bulldog, and have them last the entire match, and I was completely down for that. This was really the first time we also saw the “both feet must hit the floor” thing come into play and the image of Michaels dangling from the top rope is one of the more iconic images in HBK’s Hall of Fame career.

The biggest problem with this match is the fact that they cut down the time between entrants from two minutes to one minute and that made everything look very rushed. Perhaps they were afraid that HBK and Bulldog couldn’t last that whole time but there had already been a couple of guys that had gone an hour and I’m pretty sure that Shawn and Davey Boy would have been just fine doing that. Instead, we got a rushed affair that didn’t even go 39 minutes and that really hurt the overall feel to the event. But it will always go down as the first time that the guy who drew number one won the whole thing and that has to count for something.