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THE 2001 SERIES, PART 11: LOOKING AT SOME OF THE REASONS THE INVASION ANGLE FAILED

As you saw in the first ten parts of this series, 2001 was a year that completely remade the wrestling business. When it started, all three companies (WWF, WCW and ECW) were still in business and most casual observers never expected the WWF to be the only game in town by the end of the year, much less by the end of March. But that's exactly what happened, and despite buying out WCW and bringing the fans the WWF vs WCW interpromotional war we had always envisioned but never thought we'd see, the entire angle was blown through in six months and completely failed to live up to expectations, with WCW and ECW being completely buried and made to look like third rate jokes who paled in comparison to the WWF roster.

There's no doubt that most longtime fans were sorely disappointed with the way the WWF vs WCW/ECW feud played out, and it was bad enough to drive many of them away and never return, with more and more following over the ensuing years. But what went wrong? How did the surefire, biggest money making angle in history fall into the lap of the WWF, only to see them completely squader it and send the entire business into a downward slalom that it has yet to recover from a full decade later?

There are many reasons, but here's a look at what I consider the most glaring and damaging.

-Vince McMahon hated WCW and was determined to bury it as badly as possible.

I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I were to say that Vince McMahon hated WCW. He had a personal ax to grind with Ted Turner, but it went way beyond that because not only was WCW the WWF's only real competition and the one thing standing between them and total control of the industry, but at one point WCW got so hot that it put the WWF in danger of going under. Eric Bischoff openly admitted that he wanted to put the WWF out of business, and went about doing so in every way he could think of, whether it be signing the WWF's top stars away, running head to head with Raw on Monday nights, giving away Raw results on Nitro, signing the WWF Women's Champion and having her throw the belt in the garbage on TV, and so on. Eric Bischoff had taken a business rivalry and turned it very personal.

By the time the Monday Night Wars ended, so many things had been said and done on both sides that Vince couldn't wait to put an axe through WCW's proverbial skull. He undoubtedly considered the day he purchased WCW the greatest victory of his life, and he made sure to let us know about it with a 15 minute victory speech on the Raw/Nitro Simulcast. And then we saw the victory party continue at Wrestlemania 17. And then the WWF squashed the Alliance for six months. And then he spent the next night's Raw humiliating all the leaders of the Alliance in symbolic fashion. Then he took the "WCW" out of the WCW World Title and buried Rob Van Dam for daring to get too over.

I think most people would be lying if they said that they didn't have that one grudge in their life that, even if justice prevailed in the end, they were never able to completely let go of. That's how Vince McMahon felt about WCW and, even in the decade since the company closed, signs of that anger have manifested themselves in the way he's presented former WCW stars like Scott Steiner and Bill Goldberg, his refusal to allow even successful aspects of WCW like Wargames to resurface in WWE, and even releasing an entire DVD set, the Rise And Fall Of WCW, which was completely dedicated to burying everything possible about the company.

While such an obsession could be considered unhealthy, sometimes hatred can drive you to accomplish some pretty amazing things, and in his case it helped push him to victory in the Monday Night Wars. Of course, he was left with a lot of residual anger coming out of the conflict, and some of that heat even carried over to the WCW wrestlers. While some of the WCW roster happily took contract buyouts to go pursue their dreams in the WWF, I'm sure that others like Lex Luger, Sting, and Jeff Jarrett knew how they were almost certain to be treated if they followed their now former coworkers to Stamford, which leads us to the next problem...

-Not enough former WCW stars made the jump to WWE.

To a certain extent, you can understand the reluctance of Vince McMahon to put the WCW wrestlers on the same level as his WWF stars because most of them weren't even the top guys in WCW when the company folded. Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page made the jump, but most of the rest of the guys to come over weren't quite at the level where they'd be believably competitive with top WWF stars like Steve Austin, the Rock, the Undertaker, or Kurt Angle. It might have been different if they had gotten ahold of Ric Flair, Scott Steiner, or Bill Goldberg before the InVasion started, but none of them were willing to accept buyouts on their existing Time Warner contracts and make the jump, so the WWF was left to work with what they had.

It'd be like if WWE bought TNA out today but didn't get AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Pope, Abyss, or Beer Money, and ended up doing an invasion angle where the main guys were Ken Anderson and Matt Morgan, and the rest of the crew was filled out with people like Amazing Red, Generation Me, Jesse Neal, and Robbie E. No knock on any of those guys, but you understand the analogy, and it might have been a different story if WCW had ever made an effort to elevate younger stars instead of relying on the old guys all those years. But that was one of the main criticisms of WCW when it was alive, and it led to a mass exodus of folks like Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, Eddy Guerrero, Dean Malenko, and others who knew they'd never get a chance to break through in WCW and wanted to go somewhere they'd at least have an opportunity to move up the card.

When you look at it like that, you realize that the WWF already had most of the guys who would have been top WCW stars in a perfect world, but by that point they had shed the WCW label and become full-fledged WWF stars.

-Vince McMahon felt that the Alliance wouldn't work without WWF personalities dominating the faction.

To follow up on that last one, Vince was left with what amounted to a skeleton crew of WCW wrestlers and had two options before him: try and elevate the WCW talent that did make the jump and at least attempt to put them on the same level as the WWF main eventers, or compensate by sending WWF wrestlers to the WCW side to fill the perceived star power hole. Guess which one Vince chose?

From the moment Steve Austin turned on the WWF and joined the Alliance at the InVasion PPV, it was obvious that Vince had given up on the WCW and ECW wrestlers and had no confidence in them to carry their side of the feud. You can sit back and watch the progression of the gradual burial of the WCW wrestlers as they went from winning the InVasion PPV, to dropping all their titles at Summerslam, to having Austin intimidate and beat up his own Alliance teammates, including treating Booker T like his flunky. Over this time, the WCW and ECW wrestlers were being pushed further and further to the back while Austin, the Dudleyz, and William Regal became the faces of the Alliance. By the time we got to the Survivor Series, there were only three true WCW/ECW wrestlers (Booker T, Rob Van Dam, and Jazz) on the entire show with the exception of the Immunity Battle Royal, which itself was really just a showcase for Test to tear through everyone. The Winner Take All match to decide the fates of both sides came down to Steve Austin and Kurt Angle against Rock and Chris Jericho, with both Booker and RVD having been blown away early on.

Vince McMahon has always had a superiority complex where his product was concerned and, with very few exceptions, made a point of embarrassing every outside talent to jump to his company and make them look second rate so he could tear them down and remake them in his own image. Never was that more obvious than during the InVasion, though I doubt that rebuilding the WCW/ECW talent was ever a consideration, and that he was more interested in proving that WCW sucked so badly that they needed to inject WWF talent into the group just to keep it going. But it didn't stop at just wrestlers, because this was the early 2000s and there was one more element that pervaded every corner of WWF programming...

-The McMahons made themselves the stars.

What started out as a straightforward WWF vs WCW/ECW interpromotional war quickly turned into Vince fighting Shane & Stephanie in yet another chapter of the seemingly endless McMahon Family Feud. While on one level it was probably a natural progression for them since they had become so ubiquitous to the WWF product in general by that time, the real motivation probably had something to do with the fact that they not only didn't think the WCW wrestlers were comparable to the WWF stars in terms of talent and drawing ability, but also felt they needed someone talking for them because they couldn't even do that themselves. So the Alliance was further "WWF-ized" by making Shane and Stephanie the ringleaders of the whole outfit.

For whatever reason they did it, it completely flew in the face of the entire point of the feud, because it should have been about the two biggest wrestling companies ever, who had been at each other's throats for years now, finally getting the chance to battle it out. After all the jabs taken at each other, all the talents who had jumped ship in dramatic fashion, the back and forth ratings battle, the two sides would finally get the chance to go head to head and prove that they were better than their rivals. It should have been the biggest feud of all time just based on the years of bad blood and interpromotional hatred.

Instead, it became about Shane wanting to teach his dad a lesson for being an evil dictator and prove that he could beat Vince at his own game. We had Stephanie parading around in an ECW beret, telling Vince that she wanted Linda and him to die, and then ultimately freaking out at the prospect of losing the war and having to become a regular person who had to get a real job and do her own laundry. Vince and Linda miraculously reunited after being estranged for months over Vince's infidelity and Linda confronted Stephanie, only to be slapped in the face by her daughter. The InVasion became 100% about the McMahons and their neverending family drama, and everything else fell by the wayside.

In the meantime, Paul Heyman was reduced to playing Shane and Stephanie's yes man and, despite getting to cut some really awesome promos on Vince McMahon and the WWF, was never truly put forth as the cult leader figure that he was seen as during the ECW days and was instead treated like another subservient flunky who didn't deserve to be put on the same level as the WWF folks, which once again just drove home the point that...

-The WWF didn't understand the spirit and meaning of ECW.

As best as I can tell, Vince McMahon's understanding of ECW boiled down to the following: it was run by Paul Heyman, they did a lot of hardcore stuff with tables and blood, and it was a place he could send guys he wasn't using on TV. Other than that, I don't think it registered with him as anything more than just a small time wrestling company with a vocal following. He didn't understand how emotionally invested a lot of the fans were in ECW and how much they cared about the trials and tribulations of the wrestlers, and how personally they took it when they left for the money deals in Stamford and Atlanta. He never understood how fans lived and died by ECW to the point that they thought of Barely Legal as a victory not just for the company but for the fanbase as well, that they considered it their haven from all the goofy crap that was going on in the WWF and WCW, and how its death meant the end of a lot of them having any interest in the business, period. He didn't get how integral Paul Heyman was to leading the charge, motivating the troops, rallying the fans, and making people care about people like the Sandman, Public Enemy, Taz, Tommy Dreamer, and wrestlers like them who the other companies never truly got behind. He didn't understand that while he was selling action figures and Bret Hart sunglasses to nine year olds, ECW was on the cutting edge of catering to the angry, disillusioned 90s fanbase and appealed to the everyman, not just the kids who ran and begged mommy and daddy to take them to a meaningless, paint-by-numbers house show where nothing important ever happened.

All Vince saw was chairs, tables, blood, barbed wire, and swearing, and while certain superficial elements of that were incorporated into the WWF Hardcore Title, which in itself eventually deteriorated into a poorly booked joke with the 24x7 rule and strippers winning the title, none of it was faithful to the spirit of ECW. He never understood that the underground, counterculture nature of ECW meant that by definition, it could never work under the WWF's auspices, and that's why he didn't get that having Stephanie come strutting out in her neon pink dress to become the new owner of ECW would kill the ECW revival all of an hour after it started.

But when you look at the big picture, Vince McMahon's broader problem was that for all his claims of being a marketing genius and the king of Sports Entertainment, one of his biggest problems with retaining the Monday Night Wars audience was that...

-Vince McMahon didn't respect the fans of WCW or ECW.

Every time Vince McMahon opened his mouth to talk about either company, his disdain for both fanbases came across loud and clear. He was usually more straightforward about WCW, but Vince's words (both out of his own mouth and through his employees) spoke volumes about his feelings for the ECW fans as well.

We're all familiar with his description of WCW fans as redneck southern 'rasslin fans and how he mocked WCW for running their last Nitro broadcast from a beer hall in Panama City, but if he was really such a marketing genius, he'd realize that it's bad business to run down the fans of a company you just bought and, at least initially, planned to relaunch. If I'm a WCW fan and I have Vince McMahon telling me that I'm a stupid redneck, bragging about destroying my favorite wrestling company, mocking the company's top stars, and rubbing salt in the wound by running a commercial for Wrestlemania at the very end of the last Nitro, and then he turns around and tells me that he's now going to relaunch WCW and run it his way, how enthusiastic am I going to be to tune in and watch him take another dump on WCW's legacy?

It wasn't quite as in your face where ECW was concerned, but they got their licks in on them, too. They were constantly ridiculed for running in a bingo hall, being fans who only showed up to watch people bleed, and having a roster of guys who would never make it in the big time because all they could do was the hardcore stuff. Even if you flash forward four years to the first One Night Stand PPV, the closest any ECW revival ever came to the original company, you had an entire troop of WWE wrestlers sitting up in the balcony of the Hammerstein Ballroom for the sole purpose of running ECW down and busting on the fans.

Fans of both companies knew that there was no way that either WCW or ECW was ever going to be presented as they originally were, or even fairly. Given the way the WWF perceived the fans of both promotions, their well-known tendency to book contrary to what certain segments of fans wanted just to spite them, and just the fact that the booking in the WWF itself had gotten so bad over the course of 2001, it's no small wonder that so many former fans found something else to do with their time and never came back.

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Now that we've looked at the reasons why the InVasion angle failed, there's one final piece of the puzzle, and that's to look at how the fallout of this period changed the business in the last decade. I'll cover that when I finally wrap this series up on Friday in Part 12!

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