10 Fascinating WWE Survivor Series 2001 Facts
RIP Invasion - we decreasingly cared about ye.
Spend more than two minutes thinking about the lost opportunities of the 2001 WCW invasion, and you'll just get irritated all over again. What should have been a slam dunk, a paradigm-shifting presentation of WWE vs. WCW in toe-to-toe fights for supremacy, ended up a colossal disappointment. From the time Shane McMahon announced that he'd swooped in and bought the remnants of WCW, to Vince McMahon standing tall at the end of Survivor Series 2001, eight months hadn't even passed. Given how poorly the entire angle was executed, maybe it should've been put out of its misery sooner.
It's not that the 2001 Survivor Series was a bad show; in fact, it was pretty enjoyable, making 2001 probably the only year in WWE history where each Big Five pay-per-view was at least "good". It's just that for a night waged over high stakes, the event didn't quite live up to those lofty standards. In fairness, that's because the show was compromised by just how fetid the Invasion was prior to 18 November.
Perhaps that's the biggest reason why Survivor Series 2001 is buried in the dustbin of history: solid as the show was, it's marked with the scarlet letter of WWE's biggest fumble.
Here are ten facts about Survivor Series 2001 you may not have known.
10. Tickets Were Still Available Two Days Before The Show
You'd think that if the Invasion were handled better, as the ultimate in wrestling civil wars, tickets would've been as coveted as gold. Two and a half years before Survivor Series, WWE held their 1999 King of the Ring inside the same building - The Coliseum in Greensboro, NC. That event brought in just a shade under 20,000 fans (19,761 to be exact) at a time when WWE could do no wrong.
Fast forward to the end of the now-sterile WWE/WCW war, and Survivor Series 2001 could only bring in 10,142 fans to the same venue. To make matters worse, Figure Four Weekly reported that only 8,030 of those fans paid, meaning more than 2,000 fans got in for free. F4W also reported that $300 tickets were still available as of the Friday afternoon before the pay-per-view. Clearly, the boom was long over.