The WORST Wrestling Story Every Year (1989-2025)
2001 - The Invasion
The WWF couldn’t do the Invasion properly and, more pertintently, did not want to do the Invasion properly.
The WCW stars, with the exception of Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page, elected to get paid for doing nothing. Booker T and DDP were paid less to look like utter mugs; Booker was cast as an idiot, the butt of the Rock’s jokes, whereas DDP was a stalker who attacked the Undertaker in a bid to become famous. He was already famous - but you ain’t done sh*t until you’ve done it in New York. Which delighted in making him look sh*t.
This paradox was grim.
ECW was sellotaped to the angle, which worked for a brief time; the first and only Invasion pay-per-view drew a monster 775,000 buys. A lot of people wanted to see WWF Vs. WCW action. Not Vince McMahon; he couldn’t even sell for WCW as a fictional entity under his creative control.
The idea of WWF Vs. WCW never really registered; the angle was a vehicle for yet more internal strife within the McMahon family, and the top WWF guy cosplayed, unconvincingly, as WCW’s leader. The biggest WCW star was Steve Austin: a man who was legitimately fired by the company in 1995, and who should never have turned heel. Kurt Angle was the top babyface, until he defected. This was just the swerve-happy Attitude Era barely pretending to do something else.
It was naive to think this could have worked. The ball wasn’t fumbled. Vince caught it and booted it over the fence, laughing as it, alongside his company’s market value, soared away.