Have you ever had a dream where you’re about to screw a really hot chick and then all of a sudden she turns into some sort of unicorn-human hybrid with claws instead of hooves and teeth on her hoo-hah and they chop your unit off and you bleed to death while kids point and laugh at you?
Because I haven’t.
I have, however, witnessed the real life equivalent of the above description play out in real life in the form of the WCW InVasion.
It was July 22, 2001 when my childhood died. That was set to be such a historic night. Like many people, I got hooked on pro wrestling as a child, in 4th grade (1998) to be exact. Now I still keep up with wrestling from time to time, and let me tell you that it will probably never be as good as it was back in the late-90’s. Back then there was the World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, showcasing talent such as “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock, Mankind and D-Generation X. If you got bored watching their Monday night television show, you could switch channels and watch World Championship Wrestling, or WCW. They had their own roster of stars, including Goldberg, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and Rey Mysterio, just to name a few.
Now to make a long story short, WCW was run by some very stupid people, the kind of people who create wacky divisions for the Big Ten Conference and label them “Legends” and “Leaders.” WCW had tons of wrestlers but only showcased a handful. Older guys like Hulk Hogan and Kevin Nash were given all of the attention while younger guys such as Chris Jericho and Eddie Guerrero were given airtime but never given an opportunity to showcase their true talents.
Eventually all of the younger stars jumped ship to the WWF, leaving WCW with a roster full of broken down has-beens and newer wrestlers that nobody knew of and really, really sucked. Combine this “talent” with the insane swerve-ridden booking of Vince Russo and you have WCW in the year 2000, which lost $60 million dollars during that year.
So by 2001, WCW is dead, and parent company Time Warner decided to put the company up for sale. When Jamie Kellner canceled WCW’s television time on the Turner networks, all of the potential buyers fled. Only one man was left willing to purchase the company – Vince McMahon, owner of the rival WWF.
A deal was struck on March 23, 2001, with Time Warner allowing WCW to air a final broadcast of its flagship program Monday Nitro on March 26. Storylines were resolved and the remaining wrestlers were sent off into the sunset. The show ended with a promo from Vince McMahon talking about how there would NEVER be any WCW wrestlers setting foot in the WWF. However, his son Shane came out and announced that it was actually HE who had purchased WCW (in the storyline of course). Shane hinted that he would be introducing his new talent to Vince’s programming sooner rather than later.
Fans were excited. Ask anyone watching wrestling in the late-90’s, all we ever wanted was a big crossover show featuring WCW vs. WWF. Who would win a match between WCW’s hottest star Goldberg and WWF’s hottest star Steve Austin? Keep in mind that we were still stupid kids back then and didn’t know that outcomes were predetermined. BUT I DIGRESS.
Anyway, after March 26, WWF was the only show left in town. They picked up several of the cheaper WCW contracts, meaning that younger, lesser-known talent such as Lance Storm and Chavo Guerrero would immediately be working for the WWF. Bigger “name” talents were given an offer: either take a buyout from your WCW contract and work for the WWF for less money or sit-out the rest of your WCW contract. Now guys like Goldberg and Kevin Nash are no fools, and they really like money. Why should they go to the WWF for less money when they could sit at home doing nothing and making millions of dollars for 18 months?
And so in late May, after top WWF stars Triple H and some child murderer both were put out of action with serious injuries, the WWF decided it was time to start the storyline everyone who had ever watched wrestling had dreamed of.
The first WCW invader was Lance Storm, who appeared on the May 28 edition of WWF’s flagship show Raw. Instead of attacking a big name WWF star, he attacked Perry Saturn to fire the shot that started the war. The next week, Hugh Morris (wrestling names, sigh) attacked… someone, I want to say Christian (who at that point was still kind of a nobody). A few days later Stacy Kiebler debuted, mooning Rhyno. Other than Stacy Kiebler’s ass, nobody wanted to see these things. The fans wanted WWF vs. WCW matches.
At the King of the Ring pay-per-view on June 24, WCW Champion Booker T debuted, attacking WWF Champion Steve Austin during a title match. Finally! The war was on, and shit was just starting to get real. The next night, after Vince McMahon declared that no WCW stars would set foot inside WWF’s “home court” Madison Square Garden, WCW star Mike Awesome won the WWF Hardcore Championship, which was the first time a WCW star held a WWF title. Days later on SmackDown!, WWF CEO Linda McMahon challenged Vince to hold official WWF vs. WCW matches at the July 22 pay-per-view event. Vince accepted, and renamed the July 22 show InVasion.
The road to InVasion was a bumpy one, to say the least. The July 2 Raw featured a main event of Booker T defending the WCW Title against Buff Bagwell in what can only be described as a trainwreck of a match that derailed any hopes of the WCW Invasion being good at all. The match consisted of Bagwell performing many restholds and the crowd booing unmercifully at the participants. The match ended in a disqualification when Steve Austin and Kurt Angle interfered and threw both wrestlers out of the building. The crowd cheered like crazy, despite Austin and Angle being the WWF’s two biggest heels, or “bad guys.” It was obvious that fans didn’t want to watch WCW matches on WWF programming. If we wanted to watch WCW matches we would have watched WCW. We all wanted WWF vs. WCW, interpromotional matches.
After this disaster of a main event, WCW joined forces with ECW on the next week’s episode of Raw. ECW was a smaller promotion based out of Philadelphia that operated from 1993 to 2001 when it declared bankruptcy and went out of business. ECW and its owner Paul Heyman strived to create a true alternative to WWF and WCW in the 1990’s, focusing on more mature storylines and “hardcore” matches featuring lots of blood, weapons and brawling through the crowd. Of course the WWF adapted this same style around 1998 and became a huge success because of it. ECW was also responsible for bringing many luchadores to America, most of which went on to work for WCW.
So Paul Heyman, now a commentator on Raw, announced that wrestlers from both the WWF and WCW rosters were joining the Invasion under the ECW umbrella. At the end of the show, Heyman and Shane McMahon SWERVED everyone and announced that WCW and ECW were actually working together to destroy the WWF, the company that put them both out of business. They also announced a new owner of ECW: Stephanie McMahon, daughter of Vince and sister of Shane. This was all fine and dandy until the Stephanie announcement, as the Invasion was essentially turned into yet another “McMahon vs. McMahon” feud, which WWF fans had already been watching in various forms since 1999.
So InVasion was relabeled as “WWF vs. the WCW/ECW Alliance” or The Alliance for short. It was actually a fairly decent show, with every match being an interpromotional affair, such as WCW Cruiserweight Champion Billy Kidman vs. WWF Light Heavyweight Champion X-Pac. However there was still a bunch of crap on the card. For example, there was a match between WWF head referee Earl Hebner and WCW head referee Nick Patrick. Why? There was a horrific women’s match between the “ladies of the WWF” and the “ladies of WCW.” Perhaps the best match on the card was the WWF Hardcore Title match between Rob Van Dam and Jeff Hardy, where RVD became a star.
The main event was the “Inaugural Brawl,” a ten-man tag team match consisting of Team WWF (Steve Austin, Kurt Angle, Chris Jericho, Kane and the Undertaker) vs. Team Alliance (Booker T, Diamond Dallas Page, Rhyno and the Dudley Boyz). The match ended when WWF Champion Steve Austin betrayed the WWF and joined the Alliance, later explaining that he was jealous that Vince wanted The Rock (who was in Hollywood filming The Scorpion King) to come back and defeat the Alliance. It was a huge letdown to see Steve Austin as the main face of the invaders. Though he had wrestled in WCW in the early 1990’s, almost everybody knew of him and associated him as a WWF wrestler.
And the Invasion struggled along until November when it was finally ended. More WWF stars switched sides, as management decided that the actual WCW wrestlers weren’t able to “work the WWF style” and were sent to developmental territories to hone their skills. Top WCW star DDP was booked to lose matches to the Undertaker’s wife. Guys like Test joined the Alliance and were made out to be huge deals despite the fact that months earlier they were nobodies in the WWF. The Hardy Boyz wrestled the Dudley Boyz in a feud that had been going on since 1999. Two whole years, although now it was supposed to somehow be fresh because the Dudley Boyz were “ECW.”
And made worse was that when the Invasion was officially over, WWF, shortly afterwards renamed WWE, brought in almost all of the big name WCW wrestlers. Ric Flair was brought in after Survivor Series 2001 as the co-owner of the WWF: Shane and Stephanie had sold their stock in WWF to finance the Invasion (in storyline) and Flair was the consortium that purchased their shares. In February 2002, the original nWo was brought in. Despite Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash being well-known WWF stars, they were arguably more famous in WCW as members of the New World Order. They even gave us a dream match of Hulk Hogan vs. The Rock in March at WrestleMania X-8. Later in 2002, Scott Steiner was brought into the company. In 2003, WCW’s biggest stars of the late 90’s, Goldberg, was brought in. But by the time these guys finally got to WWE they were old and broken down, and most of the bigger name WWF stars from the 90’s were either retired or had left the business.
So why was July 22, 2001 such an important date for all of this? It was the day that I realized that the shit adults pump to you as a kid is all false. Adults, and Disney movies to an extent, always tell you that your dreams will come true if you just believe. Well one of my childhood dreams was to witness a WCW vs. WWF war. But the biggest, most un-screwuppable storyline in wrestling history was screwed up by mismanagement, greed and frugality. InVasion drew a 1.6 pay-per-view buyrate and over a million dollars in ticket sales and merchandise sales from the show. That equaled a profit of several million dollars for the WWF, from ONE SHOW. That could have more than paid off some of the salaries the larger WCW stars wanted to perform.
On July 22, 2001 I sat in my game room watching the show via the magic of ScrambleVision (remember that?) and was just stunned by what I was hearing. It sank in to my 12-year-old brain that you don’t always get what you want, that life sucks and there’s nothing you can do about it. I was never going to get that Steve Austin vs. Goldberg match that I had wanted to see for three years, and I never will. Like the wacky “dream” I described at the beginning of this story, watching the actual Invasion play out was the equivalent of getting to have sexual intercourse with a really hot chick and then having her rip your unit off before anything good actually happens.
So thanks, InVasion, for creating the cynical asshole that I am today.
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