WWE WrestleMania: What every main event should have been

WrestleMania 2

Actual main event: Hulk Hogan vs. King Kong Bundy

What the main event should have been: Hulk Hogan vs. Paul Orndorff

WrestleMania 2 was a mess and is considered by many to be one of the worst WrestleMania events in history. In yet another massive undertaking, Vince had the show take place in three different venues (one each in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) and also had it on a Monday, the only WrestleMania in history not to take place on a Sunday. Throw in the fact that the majority of the matches on the card were disappointing and we’re not left with much to take away from it.

The main event that night saw King Kong Bundy challenge Hulk Hogan for the WWE Championship inside a steel cage. Oh, how I miss that blue cage. The buildup was fine as Hogan had to battle this monster, a formula that Vince would use for years. But the match wasn’t great, even if Hogan bucked the odds (and fought through that rib injury) to defeat Bundy by escaping the cage, which naturally sent the crowd home happy, including those watching around the country on closed-circuit television.

However, there was a better option for the main event, and while the feud did take place later that year, an opportunity was missed. In just a year, Paul Orndorff had gone from the main event of WrestleMania to jerking the curtain in New York, battling Don Muraco to a double countout in a match that went barely four minutes. He went on to battle Hogan in some epic matches later in 1986 in what turned out to be the best feud of the year, and it’s a shame that WrestleMania 2 couldn’t be the setting for the culmination of it.

In that later feud, Orndorff turned face and teamed up with Hogan on multiple occasions before eventually turning on him. In my eyes, Orndorff could have turned face soon after the original WrestleMania, saying he didn’t want to be aligned with Piper anymore. After taking the pin, he wanted to be on the winning side, which is why he joined up with Hogan. He could lure him in and lure him in and then do the turn, saying that it was embarrassing losing the first-ever main event at WrestleMania and he wanted to make things right by challenging Hogan for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 2. The story obviously worked later on and could have been bumped up to give us a better main event.