The alternate title to this entry was going to feature the tagline “…or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wrestling”. But other than being an overused trope and kind of hacky, it didn’t fit as well as I had originally hoped. Let me explain why, or alternatively you can scroll ahead to the match review itself.
In 2001-2002, I was in a weird state of limbo with pro wrestling. I was still watching every Monday and Thursday, and getting my hands on as many PPVs as I could. But there was something missing for a while. Not just the fact that the “Attitude Era”, as it would soon be called, was essentially over. But because I was out of options.
I had given up on WCW after the infamous finger poke of doom. To be clear: I had no problem with Nash winning against Goldberg at Starrcade 1998. In fact, I was more of a Nash fan than a Goldberg fan. But even at 11 years old I knew that was a bad decision. But okay, “let it play out”…and then the Fingerpoke happened.
No, I’m not going to go in some long diatribe about how my bowl cut having pre-teen ass just knew the idea of the fingerpoke itself was horrible. I didn’t care about that. Shawn and Hunter did something similar a year prior and it made me laugh. This was bad because I didn’t give a single solitary fuck about Hulk Hogan in 1999.
But then, even though I swore WCW off for the next two years, there was no longer an alternative. There was no longer a safety net to tune to on the off-chance RAW sucked. And given how boring the WWF got in the wake of WCW’s closure, I could’ve *really* used that alternative.
And of course, I had ECW! Okay, maybe not a TRUE alternative to WWF or even WCW. But it was local, on numerous public access channels here, and it was cool as hell. Taping an episode of Hardcore TV and then watching it 2-3 times the next morning was like heaven to me. Now that was gone, too.
And with that, I was stuck with WWE. There was no bustling indie scene with easy and wide accessibility yet. There was no TNA offering a cheap product for a cheaper price on weekly PPVs just yet. It was whatever was on the WWF was it, and man was that boring to me.
Then it got worse.
The Rock leaves for Hollywood? Lame. Austin turns heel? Lame. The WCW Invasion? That sucked. The ECW Invasion? Started hot, but then sucked. The nWo? Didn’t stand a chance.
It felt like I had reached the end of my time with professional wrestling. I had just entered high school, and suddenly a lot of things that had never really been that important to me, became important to me. What happened on Monday Night RAW was whatever, I didn’t care. I still watched it, but I just didn’t care anymore. Much like having a friend who used to be so fun to be around slowly developing into a completely different person, so much so that you just become numb to their subconscious rejection of you, or vice versa — I did not weigh the outcome of WWE shows in my daily life anymore as a 13-14-15 year old.
Just when things couldn’t get any worse, Steve Austin walked out of the company. The last cool thing about an exceedingly uncool hobby just “took his ball and went home”, as they’d try to force into the vernacular.
If Steve Austin, arguably their biggest star ever and "my dude" at the time, didn’t want to be there anymore, why should I?
For my birthday in June, my parents got me tickets to my very first WWE event, the Monday Night RAW emanating from Philadelphia on July 8th, 2002. Sure I was excited. But imagine if I was even half invested as I used to be? I would’ve been on a permanent high.
But it was still a chance to see live, well produced wrestling with my Dad (much different than my first actual live wrestling experience - an ECW house show in 1998 in Blackwood, NJ inside of a dirty CYO <--Click for Card) and I was determined to have fun.
Naturally, it ended up being one of the most infamously bad episodes of pro wrestling television ever.
The brand split had shrunk the rosters. The initial period during the split didn’t have enough depth to it to make every show a hit just yet, so weeks like this would suffer. Additionally, on top of Austin walking out, Rock hadn’t returned to TV yet (he did make an unannounced, un-televised appearance that night however), Triple H was hurt and with it being a week after the classic ladder match he had with Jeff Hardy, Vince McMahon announced he had given The Undertaker the week off (he did not appear in any non televised bits, either).
Lest we forget what happened on the show!
None of the first 5 matches of the night went past five minutes. Due to the shrunken roster, they ran a one night angle that involved the nWo, BookDust, Benoit, Eddie, RVD, Bubba & Spike Dudley, meaning there were multiple meaningless sub-five minute matches with them. And don’t get me started on the segments, such as Goldust - Crocodile Hunter.
In addition to that, this episode had what many to this day call one of the worst professional matches of all time, Bradshaw & Trish Stratus vs. Chris Nowinski & Jackie Gayda. A match that I would only learn upon re-watching years later (because no chance I was going to re-watch this back then) that even commentary was burying live on air, as I believe JR put it, “bowling shoe ugly”.
And of course…the moment that helped in part to spawn the phrase that created this website and its message board predecessor — Kevin Nash stepped in the ring during the main event ten man tag team match for his first in ring action in 3 months, and IMMEDIATELY busted his quad.
There was no post show chicanery. Nothing to send the people home happy. The show just ended when the main event did.
I decided on the way home that night I was probably done watching wrestling. I went from not caring, to getting myself invested enough to watch live, in person wrestling to then being fed maybe a bottom ten episode of RAW in its 31 year history.
Two weeks later, I had caught one of those bad summer colds. As would become my luck, it coincided with a weekend my parents and sister were down the shore, so while I had the house to myself, it was only me in the couch wrapped in a blanket with a 101 degree fever.
To ease the tension created via telephone with my “Worst Teen Ever - Beefy Homebody Edition” persona that I subconsciously chose to be so often in the early aughts, my parents let me order WWE Vengeance on Pay-Per-View. It was something to do, at least.
I had kept up with what the card was via WWE.com (BIG Ross Report fan), so it seemed fine. Nothing incredible or extraordinary looking. But a fine, solid card. And it delivered as expected. It wasn’t enough to wash away the stain of boredom and disinterest the product had instilled in me over the last year plus, but it was fine for a Sunday Night Head Cold Watch Along.
Then, the main event started. The Undertaker defending the WWE Undisputed Championship against The Rock and Kurt Angle in a triple threat. Figured it would be a fun, overbooked (didn’t know of that word back then but the idea was evident) mess and I could go to bed happy.
This time, instead of being served a plate of disappointing shit (as opposed to gratifying shit, I guess?) I was given a match that changed my wrestling fandom forever.
The Undertaker was on the run of his career up to that point after turning heel in November 2001 and evolving from the “somehow dated even in 2001” American Badass gimmick to the “mostly less dated but hell yeah dude” Big Evil Red Devil gimmick.
The Rock had just returned from another Hollywood hiatus, and his absences were starting to wear a bit thin with the audience, myself included.
And Kurt Angle, while certainly not a rookie anymore, came into this match as the inexperienced but über-talented phenom in the very early stages of his “wrestling machine” era.
Somehow, outside of just the normal forced WWE narratives that so often poisoned our minds as children, these three gelled together on a level I had never before experienced before this night. All three men telling their own very unique stories for the entire 20 minutes, while meeting in the middle for an overarching theme of a World Championship.
JR does a phenomenal bit early on during the entrances that clearly states what this match is about for all three men, and it’s proven further once the match starts.
The Rock, trying to shake off the inadvertent stench of Hollywood he was omitting to the fans recently, had his sights set on legitimizing his role as top guy by winning an unprecedented at the time 7th WWE Championship.
Kurt Angle was (literally) dying to make himself be mentioned in the same breath as these two, and resorted to something beyond cheap tactics to do it: legitimate, unmatched skill inside of the ring. He had won more titles than anybody in WWF/E history in that period of time, and was looking to legitimize himself as the Undisputed Champion tonight, taking down the last two remaining bastions of the Attitude Era, men he had beaten before, but never at the same time.
The Undertaker was trying to not only legitimize his career change, but legitimize the championship itself. Since its creation, the Undisputed Title had spent half its time on an ice cold upper midcarder and the other half of its time being hot potatoed around in way not seen since the waining days of Russoism in the WWF. Beating the wrestling phenom and the entertainment juggernaut checks off both of those boxes for the Undertaker.
As a result of all this coming together at the same time, these three pull off what was at the time (and still is, in my opinion) the greatest Triple Threat match ever produced by the WWF/E.
The Undertaker and Rock go nose to nose to start, completely ignoring Angle, which drives him insane. He forces his way into their staredown only to get tossed away for his troubles. As this starts, it does feel like WWE is going to rely on what was its usual formula for this type of match back then — always keep it to two men in the ring mostly. Sure, it certainly falls back on that trope a few times in this bout. But with each man selling the story that they’re writing, they rely more on selling emotions, body language and psychology than they do taking a powder while the other two throw punches in the corner.
There’s a part of this match where they trade finishers. It loses some of its luster because of how often that spot is done in modern wrestling “box office” matches, but it worked for the idea they were putting together here. “I’ve tried everything else…what if I can keep them down with their own move? What if that’s the one thing they haven’t prepared their bodies for?”
The Rock, especially, throws a surprisingly good Chokeslam on Taker, Prince of the Sandbag (second only to the Hulkster, brother.)
The pace these three start to go at each other starts to make it seem, physically, that they’ve been in there for closer 40 minutes than 20 minutes. And that’s when desperation starts to set in. Taker busts Angle open, Rock low blows Taker, and Angle breaks up a pin with a really basic idea that honestly just wasn’t being overdone at the time.
And after everything, literally everyone in the match (including Baby Earl) are laid out in a heap.
In their last gasps before total exhaustion and collapse set in, they throw whatever they’ve got left in the tank. And Kurt Angle, the Olympian, has just a liiittle bit more than the two behemoths at his feet.
He has Rock down, he gets Taker down, and he can feel this is his moment. A seasoned enough vet/mentally stable person would’ve immediately pounced on one of the fallen stars, hooked the leg for 3 and won the belt.
But Angle’s intensity acts almost like Bane taking that one extra shot of Venom, that bit that puts him just too far over the edge, and instead of pinning either man, he roars to the crowd with his arms out as if he’s already won, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. He finally turns to the downed Rock and goes to lift him, attempting to hit him with that one last move to add insult to injury…
And that’s when Batman swoops in to outsmart the ferociously brain-fried Bane.
 |
| I promise, I was only going for the "monster" analogy and not the very enticing low hanging fruit with this comparison. |
Rock immediately Rock Bottom’s Angle out of seemingly instinct alone and hooks the leg. A “barely there” Taker makes one last leap of faith over to try and break up the pin, but unlike the rest of the false finish spots in the last 20 minutes, this one was just a second too late.
The Rock is your new WWE Undisputed Champion. And on his horizon isn’t the filming of an unfortunate sequel to Get Shorty. It’s a date at Summerslam with the winner of the 2002 King of the Ring, the #1 contender, and the Next Big Thing…Brock Lesnar. The man who was supposed to take this company deep into the new millennium for many years. But…that’s a story for a different day.
In 2002, I was transfixed suddenly with the WWE again on an ill-fated Sunday Night in July. I no longer needed to just worry about what segment was entertaining, or what wrestler was the new cool thing to get behind. I finally understood, maybe later than I should’ve, maybe earlier, I could watch wrestling and appreciate the wrestling!
For years, I cited this as my favorite match of all time. I had never literally been on the edge of my seat watching a match. I had never physically reacted to moves and near-falls before. I was invested in a way I didn’t understand you could be when I was a child in the 90’s. I was finally starting to understand the psychology behind what these people did in the ring, as well as learning to develop my own unique tastes over the next 21.5 years.
This match led me to seek out other people online who enjoyed what I was suddenly realizing I loved about pro wrestling. And by finding those people, it now opened my world to parts of pro wrestling I had never even knew existed. There was a world beyond WWE, even beyond WCW and ECW, and somehow a match with three of the most “Very WWE People” ever led me to eventually watching and enjoying parts of wrestling I would’ve never gotten to enjoy if I let my rotten little teenage brain takeover in 2002.
The match itself is still very good. For the WWE style, it’s borderline great. However, I don't think I would put this match anywhere near #1 on the hypothetical list of what my favorite pro wrestling match is of all time any longer, but I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to including it in a top 25 or what have you.
But more than the contents of what happened between the ropes, the match will always be #1 in terms of getting me to finally stop worrying and love the wrestling.
Okay, maybe it DOES fit. But it made me wretch.
Go fuck yourself.
MATCH RATING: ***3/4
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