The BEST Wrestling Moment Every Year (1989 - 2026)
25. 2002 | The Bell Pop
When people fantasy booked the Invasion before it was even a remote possibility, they obviously went big. It’s a fantasy, a dream, an exercise in making up the best matches possible. Steve Austin Vs. Goldberg was everybody’s WrestleMania x Starrcade main event. The two biggest stars that had bald heads and goatee beards. Makes sense. The Undertaker Vs. Sting was such a fascinating meeting between two spooky-ish guys with incredible presence that people tried to manifest it for around a decade and a half before Triple H had to win lol. The Rock Vs. Ric Flair, what a promo battle that would have been.
None of those matches happened, at least on a major stage. You got Kanyon, Hugh Morrus & Shawn Stasiak Vs. Albert, Billy Gunn and the Big Show.
The Invasion angle didn’t work because most of the top WCW guys naturally opted to stay at home; it was between that and earning money for doing nothing. By the time you got the real thing, WCW was dead - but at WrestleMania 18, Hulk Hogan and the Rock delivered everything you ever wanted from a WCW Vs. WWF invasion in two electrifying minutes.
It was more a clash of generations than true hostile inter-promotional warfare, true, but it was still the sort of dreamy euphoria that felt literally impossibly great.
The bell pop as Hogan and Rock polled the crowd and built them up was probably the loudest noise ever recorded in a ring to that point, and the occasion was so high-stakes that the Rock, the coolest guy ever, pretty much, was shaken by Hogan’s shoot immortality. That should be an oxymoron.
It wasn’t: Hogan’s timeless magic generated such a pop that the Rock’s eye twitched involuntarily, he was so stressed.