WWE Survivor Series: 5 Best World Championship matches in the PPV's history

#1 First-Ever Elimination Chamber Match (2002)

Shawn Michaels won the captivating first-ever Elimination Chamber match.

This may be a somewhat controversial choice for No.1, as both of the Bret Hart matches on the list may be technically better traditional professional wrestling matches, but the point of the Elimination Chamber was to be anything but traditional.

Just a little over two months into his reign as the new World Heavyweight Champion, Triple H was put into one heck of a predicament. He had to face five of the men who hated him the most in one match. It wasn't a handicap match, as it was every man for himself, but he did have to survive five others to keep his title. Spoiler: he didn't.

Shawn Michaels returned from a four-year absence and was almost immediately attacked by Triple H, who nearly crippled him. After Michaels beat him in a match, Triple H hit him with a sledgehammer and darn near killed him. Rob Van Dam had spent the past month being belittled by the champion and taking cheapshot after cheapshot from Ric Flair.

Kane was utterly humiliated by Triple H (in the heinous 2002 storyline, not to mention what DX did to him a few years prior). Chris Jericho had spent the majority of his WWE career under the thumb of Triple H, both in real life and on-screen.

He was treated like an afterthought by Triple H and a second-class citizen by the company. Booker T was still a few months away from his horrific interactions with The Game, but he was super hot at the time and thus got the final spot in the match.

As for the match itself, it was incredible. It may not be the best Elimination Chamber match, but one could certainly make the argument that it is. Nobody had ever seen anything like it before. The structure looked just as amazing and scary as Eric Bischoff promised. The Superstars took chances and nearly destroyed their bodies fighting for the title (RVD hit Triple H with a Frog Splash from one of the pods and crushed the man's larynx, and he finished the match!) and it was a spectacle unlike anything we had seen before.

The heavy favourites in the match were Triple H and Shawn Michaels. At the time it wasn't absolutely impossible for any of the other 4 men to win the title, and many actually thought Jericho or Booker T might end up with the gold. At the end of the night, the final two men left in the ring were Triple H and Shawn Michaels. They had a fantastic 10-minute match as the final two competitors to end the 40-minute long contest, and Shawn Michaels, against all odds, became World Heavyweight Champion.

He only held the title for a month, but it signalled the likely return of HBK, something nobody thought possible even a month earlier. He would go on to wrestle for another eight years, wowing a whole new generation of fans.

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