Shane McMahon’s SummerSlam 2000 Bump Is Still Insane 21 Years Later

Shane McMahon’s SummerSlam 2000 Bump Is Still Insane 21 Years Later

It’s almost bizarre to think that Shane McMahon, who has spent his entire on-screen WWE career embroiled in feuds with top tier talents, once had a championship match at the second/third biggest show of the year with Steve Blackman.

Now, we are not denigrating Blackman with that statement at all, as Wrestling Travel is very much a brand of ‘Lethal Weapon’ stans, but when you consider Shane was coming off major involvement with the Corporation and the McMahon Helmsley era, where he had been butting heads with the likes of Steve Austin, The Rock and Mick Foley, suddenly flexing over the Hardcore Championship, a title that was being defended 24/7 by Crash Holly only a few months previously, felt a little left field.

But, this being the Attitude Era, even the weirdest swerves still somehow worked and here we were, presented with Steve Blackman, a former half of ‘Head Cheese’ with Al Snow, doing battle with the son’s boss in a hardcore match.

It’s safe to say nobody, and we mean absolutely, positively nobody, anticipated what was about to happen.

The match itself stuck to the usual tropes of weapon shots and general arena wide brawling, until the pair made their way towards the top of the entrance ramp, with the interfering Test and Albert unable to help keep Blackman down.

The kendo stick wielding Blackman pursued a scampering Shane up the side of the titantron, gradually rising above the crowd and the staging area.

With death defying plunges presumably being saved for the first ever TLC match that was set to take part later on in the same show, Shane’s ascent originally didn’t seem to be anything more than a tantalising game of cat and mouse. Surely there was to be no jaw dropping plummet ala Mick Foley for a mid card title match with a little over a week’s worth of build?

How wrong we were to think that.

As Blackman caught up to the Hardcore Champion, he swung his kendo stick with increasing ferocity, cracking Shane multiple times but unable to dislodge him from the entrance rigging.

Finally, the killer blow landed.

Shane O’Mac propelled himself backwards, a solid 45-50ft through the air and into a conveniently placed dumpster.

Twenty one years and multiple chaotic Shane stunts later and we’re still in total shock at it happening.

Let’s face it, this was never a match that warranted such a potentially catastrophic spot. This was not a feud ending, blood and guts ridden Hell In A Cell. This was Shane McMahon vs Steve Blackman hitting each other with trashcans and sticks over a joke title that just two months earlier had been contested between Pat Patterson and Gerald Briscoe in an evening gown match.

But the madness wasn’t done there. Shane McMahon’s SummerSlam 2000 was about to get a whole lot worse.

Blackman himself decided that McMahon wasn’t going to be the only one to fly that night and, after taking a couple of precautionary steps south, hurled himself towards his downed adversary, delivering a decisive, mind blowing leg drop to the Boy Wonder, to score the pinball and another Hardcore Title reign.

With more than two decades passing since the match, Shane has consistently attempted to put himself in either a wheelchair or an early grave by flinging his body off various ludicrously high surfaces via feuds with the likes of Big Show, Kane, Undertaker, Braun Strowman and Kevin Owens, to name but a few.

Not going to lie, if they were to book a last minute rematch for this year’s SummerSlam, we would be all over it.

Make it happen, Vince.