WWE SummerSlam: Ranking every main event in history

28. SummerSlam 1995: Diesel vs. King Mabel

The WWE Championship made its way back to the main event at the 1995 edition of SummerSlam but the problem was that it was a match between Diesel and King Mabel. Again, that’s not a typo. Mabel actually once main-evented a “Big Four” pay-per-view. Wow.

The buildup and the match itself was about what you’d expect it to be. Fresh off his win at King of the Ring, newly-crowned King Mabel and his former tag team partner from Men on a Mission, who had been renamed Sir Mo (hilarious) to keep the royalty thing going, constantly attacked Diesel, which set up the match at SummerSlam, a storyline that also included a very strange heel turn from Davey Boy Smith.

I’d like to be able to say that this match suffered from having to go on after another epic Ladder Match for the Intercontinental Championship between Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon but that wouldn’t be accurate. This match was never going to be good and it wasn’t. It was slow. It got slower. It was messy. It got messier. It was just bad. There were a couple of big bumps due to the sheer size of the two competitors involved but that’s about it. For the second consecutive year, the main event of SummerSlam went less than 10 minutes (even the Barry Horowitz match, which he actually won, got more time than this one) and sucked the life right out of the live crowd, this time in Pittsburgh.

The only notable thing from this matchup was that it was the final appearance in the company for Lex Luger, who came to Diesel’s aid and stopped Sir Mo (I can’t type that without laughing hysterically) from interfering, thus allowing his future nWo Wolfpack mate, Kevin Nash, to pick up the win. Luger would be back in WCW the following week while Diesel would hold onto the title for a few more months before losing it to Bret Hart at Survivor Series.