6. Split-Screen Shocker
WWE's war with WCW became increasingly one-sided as the 1990s drew to a close. In 2000, WCW tried a number of desperate tactics to simply stay afloat, but the result was record money loss. The company was put up for sale and, in March of 2001, WWE purchased WCW, officially ending the era of the "Big Two" in American wrestling. The March 26, 2001 episodes of Monday Night Raw and Monday Nitro both aired a live segment where Vince McMahon came out to a WWE ring and bragged about putting his competitors out of business. He vowed WCW would be dismantled, but just then, Shane McMahon came out to the ring on Nitro. As a split-screen showed both the WWE and WCW venues on TV, Shane revealed to a stunned Vince that he had sneakily bought WCW, and it would once again compete with WWE. Though it was a storyline, it still looked like WCW had some sort of future. The WCW invasion that followed, however, was arguably the biggest disappointment in wrestling history. WCW's most popular stars didn't take part in the feud, and even worse, the WCW wrestlers that were there were constantly made to look inferior to WWE's competitors. A long-awaited "World Series" of wrestling, where dream matches like Austin versus Goldberg and The Rock versus Sting would answer questions long thought unanswerable, never came to pass. In the end, the split-screen shows a moment that nobody ever thought would happen, but it also represents the most colossally wasted opportunity in the history of the sport.