As the new Millennium approached the fear of Y2K took the world by storm. And in the wrestling world was still in the midst of the “Monday Night War” between the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling. The glory days of the late ‘90s that saw both companies rule the cable TV ratings and sell out arenas worldwide was already on the decline and the two companies go down on divergent paths.
WWF
In 2000 the World Wrestling Federation arguably reached some of their highest peaks creatively and in regards to depth of their talent roster. They started the year with a bang with the Royal Rumble from their home base in Madison Square Garden. The show featured a fantastic Royal Rumble match that saw The Rock emerge victorious and Rikishi emerge as a new star. But the undercard featuring a tag team tables match between The Hardy Boyz and The Dudley Boyz and violent street fight for the WWF Championship between Triple H and Mick “Cactus Jack” Foley that stole the show. Both matches made stars out of everyone involved and set the pace for the year. The opening match saw the surprise debut of Tazz into the company, beating golden boy Kurt Angle in short order.
But the week after Royal Rumble the company really put things into overdrive when the foursome of Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Perry Saturn and Dean Malenko all jumped from World Championship Wrestling to the WWF. The foursome, in a addition to the The Dudleyz, The Hardyz, Edge and Christian, Tazz, Angle and Chris Jericho, gave the company their deepest mid-card roster in years while men like Triple H, The Rock, The Big Show, Kane and Undertaker carried the top end of the cards. This allowed the company to put on fantastic top-to-bottom pay per views throughout the year, with Backlash in April and SummerSlam in August being especially noteworthy.
Young stars like those Benoit, Jericho and Angle got chances at the main event through the year and made the most of their pushes. Angle especially, having only been on WWF TV since November 1999, saw his stock rise immediately. After winning the King of Ring in June he parlayed that into a main event feud with Triple H over the affection of Stephanie McMahon and a WWF World Championship victory in October at No Mercy. This was after already holding the Intercontinental and European Championships simultaneously earlier in the year.
In the absence of Stone Cold Steve Austin (who was out with a neck injury), Triple H became the focal point of the company. Thanks to an on-air (and subsequent backstage) relationship with Stephanie McMahon, he was the top antagonist. Thanks to career making victories over Mick Foley and an even rivalry with The Rock, Triple H looked like a threat. In addition to his battles with Foley and Rock and young stars like Jericho and Angle, he defeated Chris Benoit in his first match in the company. Benoit, who was WCW World Champion up until he joined the WWF, was used to emphatically show that the WWF is the big game in town.
The WWF also took a big step business-wise as well, when they moved from their long-standing home on the USA Network and took their show to The National Network (TNN.) TNN was in the process of re-branding itself from The Nashville Network into something broader, which would in turn lead to the network that is now known as Spike TV.
Extreme Championship Wrestling
The WWF’s move to Spike TV also spelled bad things for the third-ranked ECW. The “little promotion that could” had gotten by for years on word-of-mouth, tape traders, their phenomenal live events and some under the table dealings with the WWF that certainly helped them reach pay per view in 1998. In the summer of 1999 they reached another “holy grail” when the got a weekly one-hour show Friday nights on TNN. Unfortunately the two brands (ECW and TNN) mixed like oil and water. The show got little to no promotion from the network and was used as a lead-in for TNN’s RollerJam and monster truck franchises. Paul Heyman, ECW’s head honcho, refused to give in to TNN’s demands to “improve” the show and thus the two sides stalemated. Essentially TNN used to ECW as a guinea pig to see if pro wrestling would work on the network and thus opened negotiations with WWF to bring them their network.
Even though ECW gained some exposure from the deal with TNN and they continued to produce bi-monthly and later monthly pay per views, the company was sinking fast. Taz and The Dudley Boyz had left the company in late 1999 and other top stars like Raven, Mike Awesome, Lance Storm and Raven would “abandon ship” in 2000 to show up in either the WWF or WCW.
World Championship Wrestling
Speaking of World Championship Wrestling, while the WWF was on an upswing, WCW was continuing its descent into extinction. At the start of 2000, WCW was coming off a disastrous creative booking run by Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara, transplants from the WWF. Former wrestler Kevin Sullivan took over booking duties, which caused an uproar in the WCW mid-card and caused the aforementioned Benoit, Guerrero, Saturn and Malenko to leave the company and head to the WWF. In an act created to keep the men happy and stay with WCW, Benoit was booked to win the WCW World Championship from Sid Vicious at Souled Out in January. Benoit won the match and got the belt but the next night he turned the belt back over the company and he and the others left.
Sullivan’s booking was deemed a failure as well and by April Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff were back in the company as co-creative leaders. They completely reset the company, vacated the championships and essentially started from scratch in regards to everything on-screen with a young stars (New Blood) versus established stars (Millionaires Club) over-reaching storyline. While it was a shot in the arm for the company in the short-term, the move ended up being a bust as well. The idea was great in theory, with young stars battling and “getting the rub” from main event-level established former World Champions but thanks to Russo’s rapid “crash TV” style of booking, nothing got a chance to set in with audiences and alliances and characters changed too rapidly.
In particular Mike Awesome, who showed up on WCW Nitro in April while still ECW Champion could have been a major new star to help in WCW re-growth. Instead Awesome changed characters three times in 2000, each one worse than the next and he became “just one of the guys” in no time. But his sudden debut in WCW did cause quite a stir in the wrestling world. Even though he was reigning and defending ECW Champion he refused to sign a ECW contract due to back wages owed to him by Paul Heyman. He signed a multi-million dollar contract with WCW but was not allowed to bring the ECW Title belt on television with him for fear of a lawsuit.
The solution to end the bad blood was to allow Awesome to return to ECW for one match to lose the belt to anyone of ECW’s choosing. To add fuel to the fire, ECW and the WWF (who were openly working together) chose Taz(z), the man Awesome won the Title from, to return to ECW as well in order to win the Championship once again. So for the first time in history, a WWF-contracted wrestler beat a WCW-contracted wrestler at an ECW sanctioned event to win the ECW Championship. Taz(z) himself lost the belt to ECW mainstay Tommy Dreamer days later, but not before meeting WWF World Champion Triple H in the main event of a WWF SmackDown telecast, thus allowing Triple H to defeated the WCW Champion (Chris Benoit) and the ECW Champion Tazz within months of each other.
In addition to mishandling of Awesome and the entire New Blood-Millionaires Club storyline, WCW perpetrated one of the biggest blunders in wrestling history when they booked actor David Arquette to win the WCW World Championship, in a tag match on free TV no less. Arquette, an admitted long time wrestling fan, was the star of the WCW co-produced motion picture Ready to Rumble that featured Arquette and Scott Caan as wrestling fans who interact with many WCW talents in the film. Arquette made many appearances on WCW Monday Nitro to promote the film and the cross-promotion. It was decided that in order to continue the cross-promotion that Arquette would team with Diamond Dallas Page to battle WCW World Champion Jeff Jarrett and Eric Bischoff in a tag team match.
Sure enough on the April 26 episode of Thunder, Arquette pinned Bischoff to win the WCW World Title. Arquette, as a long-time fan himself, knew the paying public would hate the move and fought against it, but management overruled him and went ahead with the ploy. To add credence to his Title win he even defeated former MMA star Tank Abbott on a live edition of Nitro days later. He mercifully lost the belt a few weeks later at the Slamboree pay per view when he battled Page and Jarrett in a triple cage match. Arquette, further to his credit, donated all of his wrestling wages to the families of deceased wrestlers including Owen Hart and Brian Pillman.
David Arquette wins the WCW World Heavyweight Championship
The Championship (and the promotion) never recovered from the stunt, even after creating new main event-level stars out of Booker T and Scott Steiner in the second half of 2000. While the WWF was putting together top of the line pay per views every month, WCW was putting their weight behind Scott Steiner as their new monster villain World Champion (not a bad move in its own right) while filling the undercard with young stars from their Power Plant training facility (again not a bad move) that were too inexperienced to resonate with viewers.
In 2001 things would continue to change for the better for WWF while ECW and WCW would seal their ultimate fates..
notable matches:
Cactus Jack versus Triple H for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship in a Street Fight, WWF Royal Rumble 2000
Cactus Jack versus Triple H, Cactus’ career versus WWF World Heavyweight Championship inside Hell in a Cell, WWF No Way Out 2000
The Dudley Boyz versus Edge & Christian versus The Hardy Boyz for the WWF Tag Team Championships in a three team Ladder match, WrestleMania 2000
Tazz versus Mike Awesome for the ECW Championship, ECW on TNN, April 13, 2000
The Rock versus Triple H for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship in a 60 minute Iron Man match, WWF Judgment Day 2000
Booker T versus Jeff Jarrett for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship, WCW Bash at the Beach 2000
Chris Jericho versus Triple H in a Last Man Standing Match, WWF Fully Loaded 2000
The Dudley Boyz versus Edge & Christian versus The Hardy Boyz for the WWF Tag Team Championships in a TLC match, WWF SummerSlam 2000
The Rock versus Triple H versus Kurt Angle for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship in a triple threat match, WWF SummerSlam 2000
Triple H versus Kurt Angle, WWF Unforgiven 2000
The Rock versus Kurt Angle for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship, WWF No Mercy 2000
Kurt Angle versus The Rock versus Stone Cold Steve Austin versus Rikishi versus Undertaker versus Triple H for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship inside Hell in a Cell, WWF Armageddon 2000
notable events:
WWF Royal Rumble
WCW Monday Nitro, April 10
WCW Spring Stampede
WWF Backlash
WWF Fully Loaded
WWF SummerSlam
WWF Monday Night RAW, September 25
WWF No Mercy
notable debuts:
Tazz debuts at the WWF Royal Rumble
Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Perry Saturn and Dean Malenko debut on WWF Monday Night RAW, January 31
Mike Awesome debuts on WCW Monday Nitro, April 17
Lance Storm debuts on WCW Monday Nitro, June 19
Sean O’Haire & Mark Jindrak debut on WCW Monday Nitro, June
O’Haire, Jindrak and fellow WCW Power Plant graduates (Mike Sanders, Chuck Palumbo, Reno & Shawn Stasiak) form the Natural Born Thrillers
notable deaths:
Gary Albright, January 7, heart attack mid-ring
Bobby Duncum, Jr., January 24, drug overdose
Tomomi “Jumbo” Tsurata, May 13, complications from a kidney transplant
Jonard Frank Labiak (Gordon Solie), July 27, throat cancer
Rodney Anoi’a, (Yokozuna) October 23, heart failure while on wrestling tour in England
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