We are less than a week away from Wrestling’s biggest night, Wrestlemania. So to continue with the Wrestlemania theme, I’m going to do a (you guessed it) Wrestlemania edition of Remember When.

Do you remember when the very 1st title match to open a Wrestlemania happened?

It was at Wrestlemania 9 and the match was Shawn Michaels vs. Tatanka for the Intercontinental Championship. That’s right, Mr. Wrestlemania made history at the grand stage.

It was 1993 and Tatanka was in the middle of a hot winning streak spanning over a year. Prior to the event, Tatanka held two victories over HBK (one in a non-title match and one in a 6 man tag match).

With having two wins over the Champion and not having lost a televised match since his debut, it seemed almost certain that Tatanka was going to walk away the new IC Champion. Unfortunately for Tatanka, it didn’t turn out that way. The match ended in a count out in favor of the Native American warrior.

I’ve always wondered why Tatanka was never given the title here. He seemed over with the crowd and I’m sure WWF was serious about him if they gave an undefeated streak. In fact, he still kept his winning streak in tact with the count out win.

Perhaps they felt he didn’t need a belt to be a star or perhaps HBK was playing the political card even back then. Whatever the reason was, this match was good and for it to end in a count out kind of took away something, in my opinion.

Flat ending aside, this match still made history as the first of nine Wrestlemanias to open the show with a title match. Not only that but this was the very 1st WWF match called by the great Jim Ross. Just wanted to point that out. Haha

Perhaps a title match will kick off this year’s WM. Maybe the IC Title match will once again kick the show off. Maybe we’ll have a repeat of last year and the World Title will start it off. What do you people think?

Here’s the very 1st Title match to open a Wrestlemania