WWE SummerSlam: Ranking every main event in history

2. SummerSlam 2013: John Cena vs. Daniel Bryan

You can call the 2013 Summerslam main event between John Cena and Daniel Bryan number two on this list but I might even go with 1A on this one. The call was that close as I was deciding the final two spots on this list.

A year before taking his beating at the hands of Brock Lesnar, John Cena had the chance to choose his opponent at SummerSlam by then-GM Brad Maddox (yep, that was a thing) and chose fan favorite, Daniel Bryan, who was just becoming bigger and bigger by the minute. After his partnership with Kane, Bryan was on his way to becoming perhaps the most popular star in the company, even bigger than Cena, and this match for the WWE Championship was easily the biggest of his career in WWE, even with him having held the World Heavyweight Championship. This was a main event with John Cena and it doesn’t get much bigger than that in this era of WWE.

This had a real big-fight feel to it, perhaps not quite at the level of the face vs. face matchup of Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VI (what with Bryan coming in as a big underdog), but with these two and Triple H as the guest referee, there was a lot of star power happening here. Even better is that the two went out and delivered a classic match. This was power vs. skill but Cena, as he does more often than not without getting credit for it, put on another great match against someone who would be considered by most to be a better “wrestler.”

The two went back and forth for close to half an hour before Bryan hit the running knees and pinned Cena clean, which is something that really just doesn’t happen all that often. The celebration began as confetti fell to the ground and it was a truly great moment in WWE history. Now, the swerve usually doesn’t come as late as it did here and you kept waiting for Triple H to do something. Just when you thought we were going to get the graphic and fade to black, The Game hit a Pedigree and kicked off one of the best storylines in recent years. Randy Orton would come down and cash in his Money in the Bank contract, thus starting Bryan’s program with The Authority that would go all the way to WrestleMania XXX.