If there’s one thing Nashville knows how to do well, it’s put on big events that feel like big events. It’s a lot like the WWE in that way. So when Nissan Stadium hosted SummerSlam, the promotion’s second-biggest event on the calendar — dwarfed only by Wrestlemania — there were high hopes that it would be A Show, even if the matches themselves were fair to middling. Fate intervened just days before, when Vince McMahon, embroiled in one last scandal he couldn’t shake, resigned, handing the reins of the promotion to his son-in-law Paul “Triple H” Levesque. Trip had a well-earned reputation for building good storylines and setting up compelling matches from his time at the helm of NXT, WWE’s developmental promotion, but he was being thrown into the fire. And he delivered an absolute work of art. From the curtain-jerker — a technical masterpiece between Knoxville’s Bianca Belair and Becky Lynch that concluded with some surprise returns — to the main event between Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar that included numerous spots involving, I swear to Gorgeous George, a tractor, SummerSlam portended a new era for the world’s largest wrestling promotion. And it’s an era that is already being lauded as a total turnaround from the mess McMahon left.
Best Wrestling Event
