5 most shocking Survivor Series eliminations
With the 31st annual Survivor Series less than one week away, excitement is building for a night that could be full of surprises up and down the card. There have been plenty of surprising and shocking moments over the past three decades of WWE’s November tradition.
Sometimes it’s a return or a victory you don’t expect. Sometimes it’s a little more nuanced, like a specific wrestler getting eliminated from a match that you would never have thought would have happened. That’s what we’re going to talk about here. These are the five more shocking eliminations in Survivor Series history.
#2 The Undertaker (Survivor Series 1990)
The 1990 edition of the Survivor Series saw the debut of one of WWE’s most iconic characters of all time, The Undertaker. He debuted as Ted DiBiase’s secret weapon and dominated the match anytime he was in the ring, earning two pinfall eliminations for his team over Koko B. Ware and Dusty Rhodes, but was eliminated soon after by being counted out. Dusty went after Undertaker’s then-manager Brother Love. ‘Taker chased after him and thus was eliminated from the match. Of course, there was no way that they were going to have Undertaker get eliminated in any other manner in his first ever match with the company, but his team ended up winning, so why not have him just win the match?
The show’s gimmick that year was that the surviving members of the winning teams earlier on in the night would face off in the main event in one final elimination tag match. The bad guys vs. the good guys, of course. It makes sense that since the good guys were going to win (Hogan and Warrior were two members of that team) so they were protecting The Undertaker on his first night, but why not have him win his first match to establish complete dominance, and then get counted out in the main event? He could have dominated Hogan and Warrior for a little while, which would have been a huge deal, before being counted out to save Brother Love.
Obviously, it all worked out in the end and it was a great debut for The Dead Man, but I would have done things just a bit differently.