Oba Femi beat Brock Lesnar inside Hell in a Cell to close night one of SummerSlam, and if the Punk-Rhodes title match is still the conversation in your group chat this morning, you watched the wrong show.
WWE spent the card WWE built toward all summer hyping Punk’s title defense as the emotional center. Femi-Lesnar closed the show instead — the actual main event by placement, and it’s still not what anyone’s talking about this morning.
Femi pinned Lesnar with Fall From Grace late Saturday night at WWE SummerSlam in Minneapolis, according to ESPN’s live coverage, closing a trilogy that started in January when Lesnar eliminated him from the Royal Rumble. Femi got even at WrestleMania 42, beating Lesnar in Femi’s WrestleMania debut in about five minutes, in a finish that played like a retirement bow. Lesnar didn’t accept the bow — he attacked Femi on Raw and won the rematch at Clash in Italy, tying the series 1-1 heading into Hell in a Cell, per Last Word on Sports’ breakdown of the feud.
The cage was supposed to settle it, and on paper this wasn’t close to a fair fight. Lesnar tried the F-5 four times, according to Wrestling Inc’s recap: Femi countered two into chokeslams and kicked out after the other two landed. Lesnar then tore open the ring canvas and Tombstoned Femi onto the exposed wood underneath. Femi kicked out of that too.
Then he won anyway.
Lesnar’s entire act for a decade has run on the idea that the F-5 and a piledriver onto plywood should finish anybody. Femi kicked out of both anyway, inside a cage built specifically to guarantee an ending, and beat him with the match still going. My brother’s been texting me Suns summer-league highlights all week; a former SEC shot put champion from Alabama kicking out of two F-5s and a piledriver onto plywood did more for my Saturday night than any of it.
This is WWE deciding that a 28-year-old, two-time NXT Champion needed to beat Brock Lesnar for the second time in four months. Femi’s path through NXT already had him pegged as the next big thing before this trilogy started; SummerSlam just made it official on the company’s biggest stage.
Meanwhile, the match everyone had circled as the real headline, CM Punk defending the Undisputed Championship against Cody Rhodes, needed a surprise to get home. Randy Orton returned out of nowhere to RKO Rhodes, and Punk finished him with a GTS, according to Forbes’ results coverage. There’s nothing wrong with a run-in. It’s just that Randy Orton’s return to bail out CM Punk is a story about somebody else fixing somebody else’s ending, and Femi-Lesnar is a story about a rising star closing his own trilogy clean.
After the bell, Lesnar hugged Femi, grabbed a mic, and told the building Femi is the future of the company.
https://twitter.com/WWE/status/2083721429246464367
WWE hasn’t called this a retirement, and backstage reporting before the match already had the company planning on Lesnar sticking around either way. He said the other part out loud anyway, with the mic in his hand and the loss fresh.
The counter here is obvious: Punk-Rhodes ran roughly thirty minutes, carried the title, and brought back a legend nobody predicted. Fair. None of that changes whose night SummerSlam actually was.
Femi ended a trilogy Lesnar started. Lesnar ended the night agreeing with him.
