10 Fascinating WWE SummerSlam 2000 Facts

What was the best pay-per-view of 2000? Was it Judgment Day, with an excellent Iron Man match headlining a stellar card? What about the Royal Rumble, which combined top-notch violence with a star-studded Rumble match? Some have cited Backlash 2000 as the greatest non-Big Four pay-per-view in WWE history, and for good reason, given its excellent matches, and a heart-stopping climax where Steve Austin exploded onto the scene in order to take down the Corporation.

In the year 2K, SummerSlam rated right up there with the aforementioned events, a sign of a banner year. When you have the original TLC match, a two-out-of-three falls battle between Chris Jericho and Chris Benoit, and a heated WWE Championship triple threat with multiple storylines in play, you're witnessing greatness in real time.

By this time, WCW was a wound-riddled corpse, gurgling blood after two years of mostly self-inflicted damage. WWE had completely lapped Time Warner's Little Cadaver That Could Once, But Now Can't, and was finding it comfortably lonely at the top. But as long as WCW existed on the airwaves, WWE was going to keep pushing the pedal to the floor and delivering events like SummerSlam 2000. Winners: the audience.

Here are ten facts about SummerSlam 2000 you may not have known.

When the Monday Night Wars had firmly swung in WWE's favor, the roster experienced a bit of a sweeping turnover as the new millennium dawned. Wrestlers in WCW and ECW saw the prosperous WWE as the place to be, and poaching the best stars from other places is what made WWE programming so damn good in 2000.

Of the 31 wrestlers that took part in a match at the 2000 SummerSlam, 15 of them were doing so at a SummerSlam for the first time. That group included WCW dissidents like Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, and Eddie Guerrero, as well as ECW mercenaries like Tazz and The Dudley Boyz.

Kurt Angle is also on that list, as well as tenured WWE performers in the midst of their best career runs, like Chyna and Too Cool.