Gimmick Some Lovin': The Buried Alive match

The Match

Mankind attempts to weaken The Undertaker with the Mandible Claw

Full disclosure here: I was very ready to hate this match. When I decided to have this be the first match in the series, I remembered enough of the post-match shenanigans to have a pre-formed opinion of the match itself. I thought it would be drawn-out, boring, and a little too reliant on the gimmick to be entertaining.

Was I dead wrong (pun fully intended)!

This might be my favourite match of the Undertaker-Mankind feud. It was a great bridge match between the Old School/New Generation era (with spots like Mankind being handed a mysterious "foreign object" to aid his punches) and a newer era of less cartoonish, more serious wrestling (with Mankind using said foreign object to bloodlessly stab the Undertaker repeatedly in the head, alongside some chair shots that looked BRUTAL to a 2017 viewer who hasn't seen a chair to an unprotected head on WWE TV in years).

There were some real standout spots, like Taker hitting a Kane-style flying clothesline from the top rope over the corner of the ringside barricade to Mankind in the aisle; or, after a brief crowd brawl, Taker flying over the barricade again from the arena floor to the elevated ringside area to nail Foley with another clothesline.

Foley's propensity for impressive-to-watch but probably career-shortening bumps added a lot, too, with a hip toss off the gravesite to the arena floor, a chokeslam into the grave, and a spot where The Undertaker reverses a Foley piledriver attempt on the floor into something that resembled Bob Holly's Alabamaslam, but then saw Undertaker simply fall backward and squash Mankind into the ring steps and arena floor.

The Undertaker hiptosses Mankind off the gravesite and into future hip replacement surgery

That's not to say there wasn't a bit of contrived silliness (this is professional wrestling, after all).

At one point, a suplex attempt next to the grave is countered with a small package that sent both men tumbling down the makeshift hill (in a match with no pinfalls), and, strangely, each man had a habit of dragging his foe back to the ring after big spots near the grave (from a live event perspective, this makes sense, but in the context of the match, it seems ridiculous).

For the finish, Taker chokeslammed Mankind into the grave, started shovelling, and got to some acceptable level of coverage (if it were snow, people in Atlanta might cancel school, but everywhere else in the world it'd be a mere dusting). The bell rings to officially award The Deadman with the win.

Taker is Taker, though, and keeps shovelling that dirt on, so a slew of referees try to stop him, albeit one at a time. This, however, is HIS YARD (well, it would be in six or seven years), so he throws punches (and, at times, referees themselves) to get them all away and I am all in for all of this.