Welcome to another edition of Wrestling Inc.'s retro reviews, where we take notable wrestling shows from the past and apply our universally celebrated loved/hated format! With SummerSlam 2025 coming up, we were already leaning toward covering the same event from 20 years ago, SummerSlam 2005 in Washington, D.C., and when Hulk Hogan passed away last week, the decision was solidified. SummerSlam 2005 was the last PPV Hogan ever main-evented, and the match with ShawnMichaels is legendary though perhaps not for the reasons other matches are legendary. This show also featured the ladder match between Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio for custody of Mysterio's real-life son, Dominik; 20 years later, Dominik is defending the WWE Intercontinental Championship against AJ Styles at the same event.
There are some other interesting things about this show as well, most of which are very 2005, including a world title match between Batista and JBL, a grudge match betweenEdge and Matt Hardy, and whatever was going on in the Eugene storyline.And of course, no journey back into the depths of mid-aughts WWE is complete without a look at just how sleazy Vince McMahon has always been, in plain sight, for actual decades. In honor of the 20th anniversary, here are three things we hated and three things we loved about WWE SummerSlam 2005!
We might have the power of retrospect in 2025 watching this particular SummerSlam twenty years later, but even still, this backstage segment of Stacy Keibler, Maria Kanellis, Torrie Wilson, and other members of the women's division washing Vince McMahon's limousine still felt incredibly demeaning by 2005 standards. Not only did McMahon's appearance inside the limousine age very poorly with all of the terrible things he allegedly did that have since come out, but it also felt random on this show as it didn't play into any other single segment or match featured on the show. It was completely unnecessary all around, and there was absolutely no reason for it to even be on this show at all.
Moreover, as my wonderful co-worker Sam pointed out to me, there were a total of 10 women on the show. Of those 10 women, half of them were featured on this segment while two of them were managers to other talent featured on the show, one of them was ring announced Lillian Garcia, and the remaining two were part of the Custody of Dominik Ladder Match in Vickie Guerrero and Dominik's social worker. While not all of these women are wrestlers, there still were enough women on the show and the roster on the whole at this time who could've been utilized in a better capacity such as a match (whether singles or tag team). Yes, it was a different era during this time in professional wrestling, but there's also no reason that there wasn't a single women's match on this entire card or to have half the women featured on this show wearing bikinis and washing McMahon's limousine.
Written Olivia Quinlan
Out of all of the matches on the 2005 WWE SummerSlam card, this was the one I was the most surprised by. For years I've had it in my head that in the very strange feud between Edge and Matt Hardy that their Steel Cage match at Unforgiven in September was the match to watch, their ladder match in October was just kind of okay, and their initial match here at SummerSlam was kind of disappointing, but I came away from this feeling somewhat satisfied.
The main thing I loved about this wrestling match was that it wasn't a wrestling match. Far too many times in WWE, they will build up these insane blood feuds filled with drama and hatred and things that would get a normal person arrested if they ever did them in the real world. Then, they would show up at the pay-per-view, people would be ready to see two men or women tear each other limb from limb, and be treated to a traditional wrestling match. If you hate someone that much, after everything they've done to you and/or your family, the last thing you're going to do in a fight is run the ropes are do a collar and elbow tie up.
This however was a fight. 80% of this match was strikes, two guys just trying to beat the other one up in a fit of hatred and fury. Was it clean? No, but that's the point. You aren't going to be thinking about hitting your cues or making sure a spot looks perfect in the middle of a fight are you? You're going to try and take the other person's head off, and that's what Edge and Matt did in this one. Even Edge hitting the Spear to the outside fit the vibe of the match because all that really is in theory is a tackle.
Then the blood started flowing after Matt landed on the top of the ring post, and from there it was even more scrappy. Matt trying to desperately to cover up while Edge swarms on him, and while the referee is checking on Matt, Edge straight boots him in the head, and given that he's taken more than enough blows to the head, the referee calls the match and that's it. Granted, I would have personally enjoyed this one even more if they went a couple of extra minutes just to get Matt back into it, but the abrupt nature of the ending is what would likely happen in a real fight. Both guys would be gassed, one of them would take a cheap shot, and it would finish when the other wasn't able to get up. It felt legit and real.
Edge vs. Matt Hardy from WWE SummerSlam 2005 was never going to win any match of the year awards, but it did what it needed to do. It was a blood feud with no rest holds and a lot hatred, just how it should have been.
Written bySamPalmer
Wrestling is weird. Starting out as a gambling scam, getting people to bet on fights they didn't know were staged, it has since gone through many different eras and adaptations, and the stories have gone in some... weird... directions, for the hilariously better or the sickeningly worse. Normally it takes a truly exceptional performer to take the weird and make it profoundly exceptional, and thankfully the wait for it Ladder Match for the Custody of Dominik Mysterio had not one but two of those exceptional performers.
Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio had well-established long before this bout that they could go and ten-fold when in the ring together, but in the world of WWE in 2005 it wasn't enough to wrestle. There had to be stakes, and titles were so 2004 by this point, so naturally the course of action was a Jerry Springer episode settled in the ring. Is that tasteful? Not exactly. Is it sporting? Of course not. But is it so unabashedly WWE that it somehow worked? Apparently, yes.
It wound up being one of the most emotionally charged matches in history, balanced with compelling combat between the competitors and melodrama centered on the future "Dirty Dom." At just eight years old, there he was at ringside watching the battle to determine his new father (wrestling is weird, go with it), and he both looked like he couldn't comprehend what was going on while also acutely aware that there were consequences.
When the moment came, he did exactly what was needed from him, choosing his side to ever so sweetly try and thrust Guerrero from the ladder. Guerrero, ever the man to sell the story above all else, came within a moment of striking the child he was trying to steal (wrestling is so weird), but then the hero Mysterio came to the rescue and the match still continued. When all was said and done, it was Vickie Guerrero of all people to provide the crucial interference for Mysterio to win and keep the kid he would one day beat at WrestleMania (wrestling, it is weird in case you didn't know).
Written byMaxEverett
Gen Z and Gen Alpha might not believe me, but Eugene might actually be one of the more sensitive parodies of a mentally challenged person that the mid-00s ever produced. Say what you will about it, but commentary -JR, especially- really got over just how sick and wrong it was for Eric Bischoff to put his nephew in such a horrifying position. It never quite stoops to the level of Justin Bartha in "Gigli" or Special Ed on "Crank Yankers," but that being said...Jesus Christ, that's a low f***ing bar.
Any Eugene match in 2025 is just a hard watch, and to say otherwise would be intellectually, philosophically, and ethically dishonest. This is a nightmare of bad taste in an era with no shortage of tastelessness. Kurt Angle is a talented wrestler, Nick Dinsmore is a real pro's pro, but this match is like cursed text; to watch it is to let some small part of your soul die. There is not a single Eugene moment that makes you feel good, especially because of the pathos-driven performance of Dinsmore, and it means that even the highest of Eugene's highs are still a total bummer.
There's a lot on this show that reaches a kind of vulgar glory, like fighting over the custody of Dominik, or Hulk Hogan and Shawn Michaels having a passive-aggressive-off, but watching a mentally challenged guy wrestle someone as vicious as 2005/2006 Kurt Angle, even with the silly premise of Angle's Olympic medal being on the line, is just a bad time all around.
Written byRoss Berman
While it might not come up in conversations for the greatest WWE SummerSlam of all time, the 2005 edition has its fair share of memorable moments. You have the fight between Edge and Matt Hardy, the chaotic ladder match between Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio that features a young Dominik Mysterio shaking a ladder with all the conviction of a pensioner trying to open a locked door, and Shawn Michaels doing his best impression of an octopus trapped inside of a tumble dryer in his match with Hulk Hogan.
Amongst all of that, you have a No Holds Barred match for the World Heavyweight Championship between Batista and JBL. Batista, still white hot after his feud with Triple H that ended a month earlier, was walking in as champion in his hometown of Washington D.C. to face John Bradshaw Layfield, who himself was just a few months removed from a barbaric "I Quit" match against JohnCena, and getting blackout drunk at ECW One Night Stand. On paper, a beloved babyface getting one over on the dastardly heel, who also happens to be a very underrated brawler, should have gone over massively, but sadly something was missing.
I will say that keeping the foreign object use to stuff they had already lying around like the steel steps, a belt, and the World Heavyweight Championship itself was a nice touch, as well as the crowd brawling. However, if you have No Holds Barred match, which in WWE lore is a step above a traditional No Disqualification match, you would expect it to be a little more brutal than what we got here.
There's no blood, which is kind of necessary in a match like a No Holds barred match, and while it's understandable given that we had already seen Hardy busted open, and were going to see Hogan bleed even more immediately after, you could have at least had Batista shed some of the red stuff to make his comeback more fiery, or JBL wear the crimson mask to really put the champion over as a dominant monster. Sure, Batista gets the win by hitting a brutal Batista Bomb on the steel steps, a move he hit after pretty much guaranteeing the win after his initial Batista Bomb, but it felt like we needed a bigger exclamation point on this one to make it stand out more.
For me, this match falls into a category that's actually worse than "a bad match," it's just kind of there. You don't feel anything during it, and once it's over you just sit there like "Yeah, that is a match that happened."It's a match that had a lot of potential, but left you feeling a bit short changed, and whether or not that's a product of the other matches on the card already bloodier and more nasty looking spots, or other matches eating into their time, remains to be seen. With that said, this match isn't recommendable, and that really is a shame.
Written by Sam Palmer
What better way to celebrate Hulk Hogan than watching his masterpiece with Shawn Michaels at SummerSlam 2005?
This has since gone down as one of the more controversially hilarious moments in both men's careers and professional wrestling altogether, a viscous mix of backstage politics and inflated egos that served as the zygote for the dream match between legends to take on new life. Honestly, Hogan was never going to produce an instant classic by just wrestling, because that was never his bag even before he was 52 years old, even if he did still want to be treated like the spring chicken (or cash cow) he once was. So leave it to a scorned "Heart Break Kid" to be the one that made this what it was. Even if, rarely, this wasn't a product of his dedication to having a good match. In fact it was very much to the opposite.
Michaels went out of his way to make a joke of the idea he had to put Hogan over, doing his best to sell every single move powerful and transitional alike like he had been hit by a train. Well, if one was to stand up from getting hit by said train only to fall over once again. This was a match that had it all; the crowd was electric because, obviously, look at the names on the marquee, Michaels was an entertaining jackass throughout, and Hogan was left dumbfounded by the product of his own backstage hubris. Hogan also bled, and the flow and story of the match, selling aside, actually made sense and carried a degree of conceited psychology to it. It would have been a slow, meandering path to tell that story if it hadn't been for Michaels' antics, so in many ways whether he intended it to or not that completed the whole experience of it.
Hogan vs. Michaels achieved something that no other wrestling match has really managed to for me drawing genuine laughter throughout and proving to be truly enjoyable. It was an exhibition of the profound silliness rooted within pro wrestling, and Michaels might have initiated that within the ring, but this was only made possible by the man behind the "Hulkster" meeting his match in the politics ring.
Written byMax Everett
