The Undertaker built a big portion of his legacy by delivering his best work under the brightest lights, making his moments count in the high-pressure boiling pot called WrestleMania.
He buried Mark Henry, forced Shawn Michaels into retirement and beat Triple H in the infamous Hell in a Cell. Year after year, 21 if you're counting (and everybody was), he bested the biggest stars in the business in matches that frequently stole the show.
But time waits on no man—not even the dead. And, while The Undertaker might live forever on the WWE Network, the man behind the character, Mark Calaway, aged just like everyone else.
As 40 turned into 50, delivering a world-class performance was no longer a given. Worse than just being average, his matches became something to actively dread, worry creeping in as you watched someone try to do something they he wasn't capable of anymore. He gave it all, bones creaking and wrinkles beginning to show, in exchange for increasingly diminishing returns.
Last year, The Undertaker didn't appear at WrestleMania at all. An era, it seemed, was over.
And then, like the magic he sometimes employed in his bouts, The Deadman was back at WrestleMania 36, matched against a wrestler who came only after his days were all but numbered. AJ Styles, the modern Michaels, had built a reputation for athletic, exciting and giving performances. But even he, surely, couldn't do the impossible and bring The Undertaker's career back to life?
It seemed a thankless task, but the two dove into it with abandon. They built a feud based on the uttering of their real names, mentions of their families and all the staples that made HBK and others such compelling rapscallions at the dawn of the Attitude Era.
But, frankly, it was a match that seemed doomed from the jump.
The coronavirus changed all that. Suddenly, matches couldn't be held inside the ring, in stadiums filled with thousands of fans. WrestleMania, if it was going to be the kind of show fans had come to expect, required something beyond the ordinary, something that couldn't be delivered in an antiseptic training ring in front of an audience of zero.
To be WrestleMania, to deliver the show fans needed and deserved in these extraordinary times, WWE had to reinvent wrestling. And it succeeded Saturday in Orlando, beyond everyone's wildest imagination, delivering an epic that was part-spaghetti Western, part-campy horror movie and wholly fantastic.
Styles' epic entrance swerved everyone when he arrived in a hearse and popped out of a casket—misdirection to make viewers think it was Taker making a grand entrance. Instead, The Deadman arrived on the back of a motorcycle, an aged, proud warrior looking for revenge.
Shot mostly like a movie fight scene, the match managed to hide all the limitations that have come to define the 55-year-old's bouts. Suddenly, The Undertaker looked tall and strong, his twangy trash talk adding to the beating he delivered.
Whether he was demolishing faceless druids, shooting fire at his foes or tossing people off a tin roof, he looked every bit the superhero who lives in our memories.
At one point, Styles appeared to have the advantage, sitting on top of a tractor about to bury The Deadman one final time. But The Undertaker, through movie magic, teleported himself out of trouble, appearing behind The Phenomenal One in true horror-movie fashion. It caused hearts to beat a little faster on coaches all over the world.
WWE says it is in the business of putting smiles on faces. No match in recent memory has done so quite like this one. While there will be critics—there always are when you try something new—the immediate response on social media was resoundingly positive.
The company took a tremendous risk here, whether by choice or because fate forced its hand, and it will walk away with a winning concept to add to its arsenal of ideas.
Wrestling has started down this route before. Matt and Jeff Hardy created their own film-style epic called The Final Deletion in 2016 and helped set the groundwork for all that will now, inevitably, follow.
However, this match took that vision to a different level, fully exploring the possibilities of cinematic wrestling. Whether it was the special effects, the reality-infused story of a dead man facing his own mortality for the first time, or Styles' vamping character work, the Boneyard match wrote its own chapter in the history of an already historic event.
In his 27th WrestleMania appearance, The Undertaker somehow, remarkably, managed to set a new standard for excellence. This was the first match of its kind at The Granddaddy of Them All. Something tells me it won't be the last.
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