(Warning – this post contains detailed information about last Sunday’s Wrestlemania XXV Pay-Per-View Event. It’s not really a spoiler, since it already happened, but if you’re a DVR fan and haven’t had the time to watch it yet, bookmark this page and come back later.)

I know you’re not going to believe this, but your gambling prognosticator extraordinaire was 5-for-5 in his Wrestlemania Predictions last Friday. I’m starting to wish you could bet on these things…

Wrestlemania XXV had all the pomp and circumstance we’ve come to expect from an entertainment maven on the caliber of Vince McMahon. There were random celebrities; Evander Holyfield, Carl Edwards, Mickey Rourke – as part of the terrible “Jericho versus the Legends” storyline – Kid Rock doing a twenty minute medley that lasted about eighteen minutes too long, and others.

As for the matches…

CM Punk is once again Mr. Money in the Bank. After winning the match last year and immediately cashing in his contract the next night on RAW, this iteration of Money in the Bank looks to be a little more drawn out. Because of who currently hold the major title belts (more on that later), CM Punk will most likely be carrying that briefcase to the ring for the next few months. In fact, he might even hold onto it for a full year.

The Jericho vs. the Legends match was just as terrible as everyone anticipated, with Chris Jericho easily dispatching a fragile-looking Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and a horrifically out of shape Rowdy Roddy Piper before actually having to work to take down Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat. Steamboat looked surprisingly good in the ring, still able to display the hip tosses and top rope dives that made him a Superstar in the first place. After the match was over, Jericho called out Mickey Rourke from the front row for their overhyped and underperforming “confrontation” in the ring… during which Rourke hopped around with fists up as if he were reliving his ill-conceived boxing career. Unsurprisingly, Rourke landed three or four punches, “knocking out” Jericho and celebrating in the middle of the ring in front of 73,000 fans. All in all, the match delivered what it promised, and that wasn’t much.

In the “Huh?” moment of the night, Rey Mysterio took care of local Texan JBL in under thirty seconds to win the Intercontinental Title, leading to a stunned JBL staggering around the ring, holding his head and finally shouting into the microphone “Fine, I QUIT!” before storming back to the locker rooms. Not that anybody’s gonna miss him, it just seemed a little weird. We all assumed he had an undisclosed injury or else wanted to get back into commentating, but let’s face it – the man doesn’t need to do this for a living. He’s got money. His family is taken care of for the next three generations. Maybe he’s just tired of it all. And he officially announced his retirement yesterday on the WWE website – but who knows how long it will last.

The Heavyweight Title matches should have been the best fights of the night, but they weren’t. Triple H took care of Randy Orton in the final event of the night, the Smackdown title match, and possibly the most anti-climactic Main Event in recent Wrestlemania history. A ref got hurt, a sledgehammer mysteriously appeared under the ring, and somebody got punted in the head. Of course, in a little role reversal, the sledgehammer was grabbed by Orton while HHH landed the punt, knocking Orton just loopy enough to take away the sledgehammer, pop him upside the head, dispose of it and hit his finishing move – the Pedigree, which he hasn’t landed solidly in about four years – all just as the ref was “waking up”. Chalk up the victory for the good guys.

John Cena took back his RAW title after dropping the “Attitude Adjuster” – the new name for the “F.U.” – on The Big Show and Edge back to back. He attempted to put them both on his shoulders at once, but Big Show at 481 lbs. and Edge at 250+ was just too much for Cena to squat press. Edge “fell off”, so Cena dropped Big Show and then flipped Edge right on top of him, leaving Show primed for the pin and the Cena victory. No superstar today is as polarizing to the WWE fan base as John Cena – he is a solid 50/50 split between cheers and boos in every city outside of Boston, where he’s closer to 80/20 on the cheer side. But give the man credit, after the match, he picked out a group of fans in the front row with “We Hate Cena” shirts on, walked over to them and held up the title belt before shaking their hands, posing for a photo, and walking back up the ramp.

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Although the title matches were the “Main Events”, the Shawn Michaels / Undertaker match was THE match of the night. By my count, both superstars hit every one of their finishing moves, some more than once. Both used their submission holds and had them broken. And both made serious mistakes on other moves that could have resulted in awful injuries – Taker at one point hit the ground so awkwardly that we really thought he’d broken his neck. But when it was all said and done after nearly an hour long match, Taker was 17-0 at Wrestlemania, both men were completely exhausted (as was everyone in the house I was watching it in), and we had all witnessed one of the All-Time Great Wrestlemania matches. I said last week that I thought the match was contrived – I still think it was a hastily assembled storyline, but that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that this match is the one I’ll remember ten years from now, when one or both of these men is walking into the WWE Hall of Fame.

Speaking of the Hall of Fame, the “goosebumps” moment of the night was Stone Cold Steve Austin ditching his tuxedo for a t-shirt, ATV and cooler of beers when this year’s Hall of Fame class was introduced to the crowd. There’s no doubt that Stone Cold is the reason the WWE returned from relative obscurity in the mid-90’s to being the longest running episodic television program in history, and the highest rated cable broadcast in the world. Stone Cold is the reason I returned to watching wrestling back in high school, and his mic skills gave birth to other superstars like The Rock, John Cena, Edge and countless others. The man redefined “wrestling superstar” in a way that hadn’t been seen since Hulk Hogan was doing late night talk shows and making guest appearances on family sitcoms. If ever there was someone deserving of a place in the WWE Hall of Fame, it was Austin. And if his knees are ever good enough to do it, every wrestling fan would welcome him back for one more match.

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