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THE 2001 SERIES, PART 5: WWF MONDAY NITRO AND THE FORMATION OF THE ALLIANCE

Vince knew that Booker and Bagwell had blown it and had taken all the wind out of the sails of the WCW relaunch. However, he still had a PPV to promote in a few weeks and needed to find some way to get the angle back on course, and he needed to do it quickly. Vince spent the week planning his next step, and would reveal Plan B the following Monday night...

 

Monday Night Raw: 7/9/2001 in Atlanta, Georgia

The next step in the build of the WWF vs WCW feud would take place a week after WWF Monday Nitro in WCW's own backyard of Atlanta, and the first half of the show started off innocuously enough as it focused on Kurt Angle challenging Booker T for the WCW World Title. Angle started the evening by goofing around, giving Steve Austin and Vince McMahon sheriff's badges as gifts, but Austin lost patience with Angle (telling him that they don't need no stinkin' badges) and then telling Angle that he needs to find Booker and take his WCW Title. Angle found Booker in the WCW locker room and challenged him to a title match tonight, with a dubious Booker accepting.

The match was way better than Booker vs Bagwell from the week before, and I think Booker redeemed himself in the eyes of WWF management with his performance in this match. They had a back and forth exchange with Angle getting an overhead belly-to-belly suplex with Booker responding with an ax kick, but when Booker went for another kick, Angle caught his foot and got him in the anklelock. Shane McMahon distracted the ref and he didn't see Booker tapping out, but then WCW referee Nick Patrick got bumped just as Angle hit the Angle Slam, and WWF referee Earl Hebner ran in to make the count but Patrick dragged him out of the ring, leading to a fight between the WWF and WCW referees. Booker took advantage of the confusion by hitting Angle with the title belt, and WCW referee Charles Robinson slid into the ring and fast counted Angle, giving the match to Booker.

With Angle still reeling from his loss, we now turn to the other angle that began at the beginning of the show when Shane McMahon was scheduled to face Diamond Dallas Page in a streetfight (based off DDP knocking Shane out on Smackdown), but Undertaker came out and took Shane's spot because he wanted to get his hands on DDP. It turned out to be a setup, and Shane and DDP beat Undertaker down 2-on-1, and Sara tried to help by going after Shane with a kendo stick, but DDP laid her out with the Diamond Cutter and then went to the back where he stole Undertaker's bike as Sara was being loaded into an ambulance.

Undertaker was scheduled to face Lance Storm & Mike Awesome in a handicap match later in the show, but he had gone to the hospital with Sara, so Kane took his place and teamed with Jericho against Storm and Awesome. Everything progressed pretty routinely until Tommy Dreamer and Rob Van Dam ran out of the crowd and it turned into a 4-on-1 beatdown on Kane and Jericho. A slew of WWF wrestlers ran out of the back to confront the invaders, but as they stood face to face, we realized that all the WWF wrestlers who ran out (Tazz, the Dudleyz, Rhyno, Raven, and Justin Credible) were former ECW wrestlers, and they turned their attention to Kane and Jericho and beat them down 10-on-1. After they finished the beatdown, Paul Heyman stood up from the announce table and took a mic and said that he has been stuck at the announce table like a corporate pig and talking about WWF vs WCW while everyone forgot about ECW. These men were too extreme for the WWF and WCW, and they have all now joined ECW. Heyman said that anytime Vince or Shane want revenge, they're not hard to find and they'll take on anyone because the InVasion just got taken to the Extreme.

Suddenly, any interest in the InVasion that had been lost had been renewed in a big way with the completely unexpected return of ECW, and now the WWF and WCW were put into the position of having to put their hatred for each other aside to deal with the new ECW threat. Things got even more interesting a moment later when Vince and Shane met up backstage and Shane said that they need to put their differences aside because neither of them can afford Heyman walking in here and taking their guys. Shane says that Vince will get his at InVasion, but for tonight he suggests taking five WCW guys and five WWF guys and putting them in a match to take on the ten ECW guys. Vince says that's fine, they'll do it for this one match, but it doesn't change anything because he's still going to destroy WCW at InVasion.

After a short break in the ECW situation to watch X-Pac retain the Light Heavyweight Title against Scotty 2 Hotty, we went backstage where Vince McMahon gave the combined WWF/WCW team a pep talk saying they had to put an end to the ECW threat before it got out of hand. Vince and Shane bickered over which side would take the lead in the match before again laying out their warnings about what would happen at InVasion. The WWF crew of the APA, Big Show, Billy Gunn, and Hardcore Holly came out first, and were then joined by Chris Kanyon, Chuck Palumbo, Sean O'Haire, Mark Jindrak, and Shawn Stasiak of WCW. The two sides got into a shoving match that soon led to an all out WWF vs WCW brawl with the WWF guys clearing out the WCW group.

The ECW music hit and the ECW team, led by Paul Heyman, came out through the crowd and went after the WWF wrestlers while the WCW crew took a powder on the outside. The numbers were too much for the WWF crew, and the ECW outlaws beat the WWF guys down one by one and tossed them out of the ring, then stood with their arms raised while daring the WCW crew to get in the ring. The WCW guys finally took action and rushed the ring...and then it all went to hell.

Instead of fighting each other, the WCW and ECW guys high fived and hugged each other before going out to the floor and tossing the WWF wrestlers in the ring to lay a further beatdown on them as Shane and Heyman shared a hug. Vince came out and asked what the hell was going on, and was forced to watch his wrestlers take several more high impact finishers from the WCW/ECW group. Shane told Vince that he couldn't compete with his checkbook, but he could outsmart him and that's what he did here tonight because he's personally responsible for WCW and ECW being here tonight, as well as the merger of WCW and ECW to form the Alliance. At InVasion, the new combined WCW/ECW team would kick the WWF's ass, and he wrapped it up by introducing the new owner of ECW, the Hardcore Princess herself, Stephanie McMahon-Helmsley. A shocked Vince McMahon stood staring as his daughter strolled past him in her ultra-hardcore neon pink dress and stood arrogantly next to her brother as Raw went off the air.

* * *

Even looking back on it all ten years later, it still amazes me how the WWF managed to kill not one, but two can't miss invasion angles with the WCW and ECW revivals in two weeks flat. As I said, the WWF really did make an effort to relaunch WCW on its own, but once that plan was shelved and the whole thing was turned into a WWF storyline instead, you could have probably predicted how it would turn out in your sleep. Any doubts about the level of respect that WCW and ECW would be treated with during the InVasion angle were put to rest the moment the two groups merged, and when Stephanie walked out as the "new owner" of ECW, you might as well have killed the whole thing right then and there.

WCW may have crashed and burned the week before, but if they had found another way to rebuild them and then kept all three factions separate and warring with one another, what was already a can't miss storyline could have become the greatest angle of all time. They could have ran with that angle for years and made it full of tenuous alliances, dramatic doublecrosses, and people jumping ship in shocking fashion...just like during the real Monday Night Wars. If you had let all three sides remain as they were instead of homogenizing them as the WWF had always done, you might have kept some of those Monday Night Wars fans around to root for "their team" in much the same way you see in football or baseball. The myriad of possibilities that could have come out of such a feud, especially if both WCW and ECW were kept strong, were endless.

But instead, it all got flushed down the drain in just two episodes of Raw, and even if you forget the respect part, the fact that they apparently didn't expect the fans to turn on Stephanie as the owner of ECW speaks volumes as to what the WWF even knew about ECW to begin with. ECW was a company of renegades who were there to provide what the big companies would not, they were the underground where you could do stuff you could never get away with doing in the big time, and in fact they routinely mocked the dumber things to make it to TV in the WWF and WCW and frequently called out their main eventers by name to come down to Philadelphia for a real fight, and above all else they rejected anything and everything corporate.

Now, they had done what they never would have done in the "real" ECW by selling out to Shane McMahon's money, and their kayfabe owner was a girl who looked like she spent four nights a week shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch. Even their leader, motivator, and mad genius Paul Heyman was relegated to playing a secondary stooge to Shane and Stephanie in what came off as a desperate attempt to stay relevant. After the July 9th Raw, it ceased being about WCW, ECW, or even the WWF, and it was now the McMahon Show 24 hours a day on every channel.

We'll pick this back up next time with Part 6, as the WWF and the Alliance battled for supremacy at the InVasion PPV!

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