WrestleMania 29 results: Recapping Sunday’s pay-per-view

Sunday night brought us WrestleMania 29 from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ. The highs were high, the lows were low and there was much entertainment and frivolity to be found. SB Nation’s Jason Kirk, Spencer Hall and Bill Hanstock are here to break down what worked and what ... was probably better left unsaid.

Bill Hanstock: The highlight of the night was easily CM Punk vs. the Undertaker. Great stuff, thrilling from start to finish and possibly the Undertaker’s shortest WrestleMania entrance ever!

John Cena is the new WWE Champion after defeating The Rock in their Wrestlemania 29 main event reprisal, reversing the result from last year. Following the match, Cena thanked The Rock for being awesome, and then the two shook hands and hugged. Aww.

The match, which was mildly interesting last year, had much less intrigue coming in this time around, and it kicked off with a staring contest of epic proportions, as no one actually tried to attack for more than 10 seconds at a time at the beginning of the match.

The original bad boy.

Triple-H will not have to retire, thanks to his defeat of Brock Lesnar. In a match that was right in his wheelhouse -- a no DQ match -- he used various dangerous instruments to incapacitate the former UFC champion.

Lesnar’s made a habit of breaking things since returning to WWE. He’s broken Triple-H’s arm twice and forced Vince McMahon into a hip replacement surgery, creating this feud. Then Paul Heyman insulted Triple-H’s wife and things got serious. Lesnar and Triple-H signed on for a match that would end the WWE COO’s wrestling career if he lost, and that’s how we got here.

The best streak in sports entertainment lives on. The Undertaker is 21-0 after he defeated CM Punk in an epic match, surviving a diving elbow onto the Spanish announcers’ table and some cheap tactics to defeat ‘The Best in the World’.

Quickly, some background: Bill Moody, the man who played The Undertaker’s long-time manager Paul Bearer in the WWE, died (in real life, not in the WWE) back in March. CM Punk not only disrespected the memory of Taker’s manager, but stole his urn and dumped his ashes on Taker. WWE did a good job of building up the personal angle here.

WrestleMania is a time for protecting your hands.

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Americans everywhere who hate bigotry have a champion! Alberto Del Rio retained the WWE Heavyweight Title by defeating Jack Swagger via submission at WrestleMania.

Swagger, who is a REAL AMERICAN, came into WrestleMania hoping to reclaim both the WWE Heavyweight Title and HIS COUNTRY from Del Rio, who is Mexican. Swagger’s manager, Zeb Colter, is hilariously racist and has convinced Swagger that he should also be racist. Del Rio’s best friend and announcer Ricardo Rodriguez, who had his ankle broken by Swagger, crutched out and delivered Del Rio’s entire intro in Spanish. So, this one had a nice, spicy build-up.

Mark Henry was able to defeat Ryback at WrestleMania 29 thanks to a botched finisher, but the loser stole the show at the end.

This feud was creatively ignited with a ‘no-contact rule’ that would presumably cause the fight not to happen if either man touched each other in the build-up to the fight. Mark Henry found a way around this by pushing a bench press bar into Ryback’s throat, which caused Ryback to retaliate by throwing a smaller person into him.

Wrestlers get hurt for realsies sometimes. Take this attempted diving takeout of Randy Orton by Seth Rollins of the stable ‘The Shield’, which went terribly wrong. Presumably, Rollins was supposed to make much more contact with Orton than with the barricade.

Ouch.

A NFL team and another football team already occupy MetLife Stadium, site of WrestleMania 29. But the enormous and expensive building has another tenant, the unfortunate individual pictured above.

He is battered by horrific New York conditions day and night, hiding under seats whenever rain or snow strikes, finding shade beneath the ass of that offensive lineman Mark Sanchez ran into and sustaining himself on $13 barbecue chicken sandwiches that are not at all barbecue by any definition.

Wrestling fans get to deal with more of this ‘The Shield is the best team ever’ storyline. They took apart the team of Big Show, Sheamus and Randy Orton at WrestleMania thanks to their teamwork and their opponents’ lack thereof.

If you’re not up on wrestling at the moment, the dudes from The Shield have a schtick based on both chemistry and generally being disruptive jerks. The three superstars they were put up against ... have no discernable connection. They’re just cool wrestlers who everyone wanted to beat The Shield.

This guy is doing it right:

The Miz is the new WWE Intercontinental Champion, claiming the title by forcing Wade Barrett to submit at WrestleMania. And we’ve already had enough Jersey Shore for the evening.

Barrett was introduced as a ‘native of Preston, UK’ who ‘is a working class, bare-knuckled fighter’. If you’ve ever met anyone from Lancashire, they don’t talk like Wade Barrett. However, he lives up to the other part of his description, the part that implied he’s a scrappy dude who doesn’t exactly rely on finesse or technical prowess. Early in the bout, he attacked the groin of The Miz on multiple occasions.

Starting at 7 p.m. ET, the WWE’s biggest stars are in action from New Jersey in the 29th edition of WrestleMania. The Pay-Per-View portion of the show begins then, and there are plenty of different ways to catch the action, including streaming live online.

WWE.com has the low-down on how to watch WrestleMania in whatever way suits you. You can order a live stream of the card for your computer through their website, and they also make it very easy to contact your television provider if you’d rather watch it the traditional way, on TV. If you don’t feel like watching WrestleMania at home and prefer to go catch it at a bar, click on ‘blast areas’ to find out where you can watch the event in your area.

Undertaker, now completely over as a face, comes to the ring with an American flag on the back of his motorcycle (it was just days after the Iraq war started). He was supposed to team with Nathan Jones, but Jones was taken out pre-match by Big Show and A-Train (you now know him as Tensai), and the contest became a two-on-one handicap match.

There are six really good matches in WrestleMania XIX, arguably the best WrestleMania of them all. This is not one of them. Undertaker dominates early. A-Train and Big Show take control after five minutes. Big Show hits a chokeslam, but Nathan Jones shows up to land a big kick to eliminate Big Show, then another on A-Train to set up the Tombstone. 11-0, but I have no idea how having an outsider enter the ring and take out the opposition isn’t a disqualification. Patriotism, I guess.

You’re six years old and flipping through the channels on a Sunday morning. You normally go to church but you stayed home today for whatever reason. When you get to the USA Network, you freeze.

Without warning, you’re staring at two huge men in face paint, roaring at the camera. They step into a ring surrounded by cheering fans. As you watch, these men toss two smaller men in bright tights around without effort. Finally, one of the men in face paint drapes one of the men in bright tights across his knee, while the other man in face paint climbs the ropes. You wonder what’s going to happen for only a second before the man on the ropes leaps off and lands with his elbow across his victim’s throat, flipping him off his partner’s knee and onto the mat. There is a pinfall, a three-count and a celebration as the bell is rung.

WrestleMania 29 takes place on Sunday and if you were worried you weren’t going to be able to gamble away all your money, you can now breathe easy. Brandon Stroud of With Leather alerts us to the fact that Bovada has posted betting odds for the notable WrestleMania matches. Some of these are pure suckers’ bets, but ... well, it’s just interesting, really.

I’m not saying to put all your money on Brock Lesnar, but maybe I AM saying that? Who is to say?! Some of these lines are real interesting, but most of them just confirm that what we all anticipate to happen will happen. There is no way in hell that CM Punk will beat the Undertaker, but heck, it might be worth putting a dollar on that. I mean, you’re gonna spend like $50 on WrestleMania anyway, right?

On Sunday, the Undertaker puts his vaunted 20-match WrestleMania win streak on the line against CM Punk. In recent years, the streak has taken on a life of its own, becoming a de facto third title on the line at WWE’s biggest event. This is how we got there.

This match starts with an odd twist, as Gorilla Monsoon (on commentary with Bobby Heenan) calls Snuka -- not Undertaker -- “The Phenom,” a nickname used on Undertaker for years following this annihilation. It gets weirder: Monsoon predicts Paul Bearer’s recent demise by calling him “a very sick person.”