5 Champion vs Champion matches in WWE you may not remember

#4. John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 23

Shawn Michaels hitting John Cena with a moonsault at Wrestlemania 23. #WWE pic.twitter.com/CYvz61aLRO

— ProWrestlingMoments (@Pro__Moments) May 28, 2014

You may remember this classic WWE match being an absolute hit with main-eventing WrestleMania in 2007. What you may not remember is that this was in fact a Champion vs. Champion match. Both John Cena and Shawn Michaels were World Tag Team Champions on Monday Night RAW.

The World Tag Team Championships were introduced into the storyline by WrestleMania to see if the two could co-exist. Of course they could, until the night after WrestleMania when Michaels turned on John Cena. Michaels was still reeling from tapping out to Cena the night before at Ford Field in Detroit.

I'm prepared to die on this hill, but I firmly believe that Shawn Michaels should've beaten John Cena at WrestleMania 23 to become WWE champion pic.twitter.com/9ZgVhNeBFJ

— 🎥 Film Connoisseur 🎥 (@The_TJCalhoun) September 22, 2020

In an interview with Michael Morales Torres of Lucha Libre Online, Mike Chioda discussed the match. Chioda was the WWE referee for the match between Cena and HBK at WrestleMania.

"That was a phenomenal match. To me, John Cena, and Shawn Michaels is phenomenal, don’t get me wrong, but that time John Cena was on top for quite some time and busted his a** for the company and stuff like that. So, was I surprised they didn’t give it back to Shawn? Shawn’s not going to run around for another year or six months with the title, I don’t think he wanted to travel that much anymore at that time, you know?" Mike Chioda said.