Shining a Spotlight 6.16.11: The Invasion Part I

I’m not the first to note how it’s been ten years since the fall of WCW and WWF becoming the only major game in town. Sadly, this also means having to cite the anniversary of something most fans might want to forget. Ten years since what has to count as the single greatest missed opportunity in wrestling history, something that fans couldn’t believe could be blown as badly as it was, especially after so long a wait.

The Invasion.

I’ve always been a bit down on the entire “fantasy booking” mentality as I feel these bookers make the mistake of assuming everything they’ve done will work perfectly and be accepted by the entire fanbase. As RD Reynolds nicely put it, wrestling is funny in that so often the angles and characters that work great on paper flop while the ones that sound totally stupid go on to draw huge money. That’s not to mention how these fantasy guys can let their own personal biases and attitudes affect decisions. Reynolds, for example, is pretty much the only guy I’ve ever seen who claims that Zach Gowen was a “can’t miss prospect WWE blew.” But one thing we can agree on is that even the most naive fantasy booker probably could have done a better job with the Invasion than WWF did. I truly believe Vince McMahon is a genius but I also acknowledge his greatest enemy is his own ego and inability to accept anything on equal terms with himself. Adding that together was a recipe for disaster and in 2001, we got that served to us in spades.

Beginnings

Maybe it was always doomed to fail. Promotional cooperation has never had a good track record in wrestling. The NWA was less an alliance than a bunch of guys who didn’t trust one another working as loosely as they could to make money. When the AWA, WCCW and CWA began to work together in 1988, it seemed a good move to build up their various shows but it fell apart when their much-balloyed SuperClash III PPV was a disaster. As Vince McMahon put it on the AWA DVD, the guys in charge couldn’t agree on ordering a cup of coffee, let alone working a show. It was the same reason the NWA-AWA partnership had failed, the two promoters couldn’t make it all work over the desire to push their own wrestlers as better (not to mention how, right in the middle of one mutual card, David Crockett was trying to sign away AWA guys).

Then there’s the case of the UWF and how it shows the way history repeats. Bill Watts’ Mid-South region was one of the hottest wrestling territories around, giving a push to tons of young stars who would become famous. In 1986, Watts decided to follow the lead of Crockett and McMahon and take a bigger stage in wrestling. With the aid of partner Jim Ross, he got himself a great syndicated deal in various markets and then did a talent raid Vince would appreciate, stealing away WCCW’s booker Ken Mantell and lots of their talent like the Freebirds, Chris Adams, Iceman Parsons and more, crippling WCCW. Watts was able to mix great wrestlers, older ones and young rising stars like Rick Steiner and a then unknown by the name of Sting. Watts did have problems with things like traveling, filling out arenas outside his usual Oklahoma base and top stars Ted DiBiase and Jim Dugan both refused title runs so jumping to WWF. However, the Cowboy had a great drive that might have made it all work.

But in 1987, OPEC stepped up their oil production and the economies of oil-producing states of the South were hit hard. Oklahoma’s economy collapsed almost overnight and Watts suddenly found himself struggling for a regular audience and meeting payroll. He was forced to suck up his pride and sold the UWF to Crockett. This was a bad move on Crockett’s part as had he waited, he could have gotten it for a song but he believed Vince would jump for it instead and so took on all of Watts’ debts. Watts believed the UWF would continue to exist, maybe used as a “farm system” for Crockett. Instead, Crockett pretty much buried the entire promotion, doing a TV title unification match with NWA champ Nikita Kolloff beating UWF champ Terry Taylor but otherwise, the rest of the champions were set aside, never given any attention. With the exception of Sting, pretty much all the UWF guys would end up lost in the NWA shuffle. I saw a shoot interview where Dusty Rhodes actually admits he made a huge mistake there as he was so focused on WWF he ignored the potential the UWF had. One would think Ross would carry the reminder of that but yet again, it’s proven that if anyone ever knew what he was talking about it was Santayana when he said that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

It just goes to show that it’s hard to make an interpromotional rivalry of some sort work out right (a rare exception being the 2006 ROH-CZW war). Anyone who thinks the Invasion would have worked had WCW won the Monday Night War is fooling themselves (indeed, considering the company’s amazing track record for blowing surefire things, it might have been even worse). And that’s without considering the mentality of one Vince McMahon. His greatest failing (and I’ve seen this mentioned by people on various WWE DVD’s) is that Vince has a hard time acknowledging the good in anything he didn’t have a hand in. Sting gets short shrift from WWE DVDs as he’s the one major star of his era who never worked for Vince and crossing him means getting ignored in a lot of stuff as well. The man is smart and I would go so far as to call him a genius, but like all promoters, has a major ego and the refusal to accept he can’t come up with all genius stuff.

What you also have to remember is how Vince felt when the War finally ended in 2001. It’s no secret how Vince pretty much hated Bischoff’s guts and wasn’t overly fond of Turner either. This truly had been a war for him, a battle for survival and eventual dominance and you can’t blame him for being over-emotional when it ended. After so long and so much struggle, Vince had beaten the man who had made it his mission to put WWF out of business. Not only that, he now owned his competition, name, trademarks, talent and 30 years worth of programming. I doubt anyone could resist going over the top after a win like that and not let it go to their heads. And with a head like Vince’s, that can be a dangerous thing.

But right off the bat, on that final episode of Nitro, Vince made the first of what would be many, many mistakes to come in the next several months. As he was asking fans who should and shouldn’t keep their jobs from WCW, Shane McMahon showed up at Nitro‘s Florida site to announce that he had bought WCW out from under his father. The final shot of the long-running series was not any WCW star but the two McMahons reacting to the continuation of a long feud. Suddenly, WCW fans were being asked to accept a McMahon in charge of things taking it to another McMahon. Not a good start but few realized how much worse it would get.

First Strikes

Some have used the 20/20 of hindsight to argue that Vince waited too long to try something with WCW. You could excuse him for being rather busy in the post-Wrestlemania period. Some will forget how it really was rather exciting in the couple months after Mania as the newly heel Steve Austin went on a tear, teaming with HHH as the Two-Man Power Trip, which really did get fans riled up. There’s been reports that HHH was supposed to be turned face but didn’t want to be seen as weaker than Austin, forcing them to be put together. The two began a feud with Chris Jericho and Chris Benoit, some great tag matches and it seemed that a rotation of the four at the top would be a prime push for WWE throughout 2001.

But as too often happens in wrestling, the best-laid plans were sent awry by some bad moves. In the space of only weeks, both HHH and Benoit were hit by massive injuries that would put them on the shelf for the rest of the year. I’m not going so far as to say that HHH’s presence would have hugely improved the Invasion but losing a man who’d been a huge main event for the past two years at such a time was a blow as was the loss of the then-dependable Benoit. It didn’t help that the formerly monstrous Austin was then turned into a comedy figure trying to please Vince with goofy songs and such. Meanwhile, despite being the “owner” of WCW, Shane was put to the sidelines in a feud with Kurt Angle of all people, including a brutal battle at King of the Ring where Shane was dropped on his head on concrete twice before being sent through a glass door. So with things getting rough, Vince decided it was finally time to give WCW a push.

Supposedly (and it’s hard judging as various stories abound), the plan was to use WCW as a separate company, balance out their shows with WWF’s. It’s not that crazy an idea given how it mirrors the farm system of OVW and FCW. However, Vince ran into an interesting irony in that the WCW had been so devalued that, even with McMahon backing it, no TV station wanted to run a WCW-only show. It didn’t help that Vince’s own power with networks had been devalued in the wake of the XFL debacle. So Vince decided he’d just run WCW as their own brand under Raw and SmackDown. It started off on May 28th when Lance Storm made a run-in during a match on RAW. The choice of Storm was odd as the man was a great in-ring worker but already being mocked for his overly serious and humorless manner and he wasn’t exactly the big name guy you’d need for this. The following week, Hugh Morris entered by attacking Edge and was even less over than Storm.

The fact was that the majority of major stars associated with WCW just weren’t coming. Hogan, Hall, Nash, Scott Steiner, Goldberg and Flair were all content to just sit at home and let the contracts they’d signed before the company went under continue to pay them. Lex Luger had been on Vince’s shit list ever since he’d bolted WWF without notice for the first Nitro in 1995 and Jarrett wasn’t much better off while Sting decided to get out of the wrestling game altogether for several years. Yes, Vince could have gone and paid more for all of them, offer enough cash to sway them and make WCW seem, you know, important. But Vince is one of those multi-millionaires with the odd mentality that despite having more money than most of us will ever see, they hate spending if they don’t have to. Call it the Walter O’Malley syndrome after the infamously cheap owner of the Brooklyn/LA Dodgers, a man who actually built a stadium with as few water fountains as possible so fans would buy more drinks. After all, if Vince had just donated a few million to the World Wildlife Fund, the company would still be called WWF today. As far as Vince was concerned, if he couldn’t bring these guys with an initial offer, no need to pay them more when he felt they weren’t really needed.

So the brutal truth was that all Vince had with WCW were a bunch of guys most fans saw as already inferior to WWF which wasn’t a good way to start things off. One exception was the outcome of an angle where the Undertaker’s wife, Sara, was seen being videotaped by a masked man. It would mark pretty much the only time WWF would make the Undertaker look like a normal guy as he was in his “American Bad-Ass” character. The masked man showed up on the June 18th RAW and unmasked to reveal himself as Diamond Dallas Page. DDP had been a huge guy with WCW, multiple world champion so had more star power. However, his years of “hanging and banging” made him look older than he was and it wasn’t helped by his rough match style as the man insisted on pre-planning and choreographing everything in advance. That may have worked wonders with guys like Savage but left DDP a bit lost in looser fights. It also made no sense for him to be stalking Sara as, with all respect to the woman, she was nowhere near the knockout of Page’s real-life wife, Kimberly.

At the King of the Ring, they did introduce a major star of WCW when Booker T, both World and U.S. Champion, interfered in the Triple Threat match between Austin, Benoit and Jericho (during which Benoit suffered the injury that would put him on the shelf). Booker hit Austin with a scissors kick and slammed him through the Spanish announcers table, nearly costing him the title but Austin managed to win. Booker and Shane would escape through the crowd as the WWF guys ran them off. It happened again on RAW from Madison Square Garden as Vince’s big speech on pride was interrupted by an attack by Booker, he and Shane once more running away. This showed another problem with the entire Invasion, that it seemed at first that Shane was placed as a face against his father but suddenly, WCW were to be the heels invading the “noble WWF” through cowardly means. This confusion would continue for some time and mar a lot of things.

On that same June 25th RAW, a Hardcore title match between Rhyno and Test. After Rhyno gored Test to win the belt, he was attacked by Awesome with a pipe, who then powerbombed Rhyno into a ladder and pinning him for the belt. It was made out to be a big deal of the Invaders striking first to win gold but Awesome’s once, well, awesome rep had taken a hit in WCW due to his comedy antics and the Hardcore belt was hardly considered a seriously worthy title. But that paled next to the epic disaster that was to come. The July 2nd RAW from Tacoma, a date that would live in wrestling infamy.

The final Nitro may be called the most surreal night in wrestling history but the last twenty minutes of this night’s RAW are a strong second. The old WCW theme began to play as laser lights formed the logo and the screens shifted to “Nitro” signs. Arn Anderson and Scott Hudson came out to do announcing as for the first time ever, a WCW match was to presented on WWF programming. It was a huge moment to be sure and who knows, had they chosen a different match, maybe what happened next would have been altered. Instead, fans were “treated” to Booker T defending the WCW title against Buff Bagwell. That Bagwell was hired by WWF was a huge surprise to fans as the man was never any great shakes in the ring and his backstage attitude as a preening prima donna rubbed everyone the wrong way. But teenage girls liked him so Vince decided to bring him along and no doubt regretted it big-time.

It’s irony O’Henry could appreciate: The one time Vince wanted fans to cheer WCW on, they wouldn’t. The match was horrible to be sure but the fans never even gave it a chance, booing both guys badly and they clearly couldn’t handle it. After so many years being told by Vince that WCW sucked, fans were willing to keep going with that mentality. Poor Booker and Bagwell never had a chance as after several minutes of dull fighting, they were attacked by Austin and Angle, who beat them down and literally kicked them out of the arena. It was sold by the announcers as WWF fighting back against these guys and standing up for themselves but on screen, all fans saw was two stars of the opposing promotion shown to be totally weak and easily beaten.

Saying the fan reaction to the show was poor is sort of like saying Enron had some financial problems. Fans online ripped it to shreds and made it clear WCW was more of a joke than ever. The supposed plan was that Vince and Linda would do an angle of divorcing with Linda “getting” WCW in the “settlement” and setting it up as a separate brand with matches on RAW and SmackDown. But that Tacoma show changed everything. Vince saw the reaction, saw fans weren’t going to put up with this weak WCW as a serious contender and he basically panicked.

And when Vince McMahon panics, he makes decisions that almost never end well…

Next week, I spotlight the Alliance, the Invasion PPV and how things got worse. For now, the spotlight is off…