I Can't Dig That, Sucka!!!!!

[Little Jerry Lawler]

I'm sure you die-hard WCW fans had some fond memories of the Invasion. You had that lovable Shawn Stasiak continuously trying to prove his worth and mean something. Who could ever forget the shock when Test and Christian decided to join the Alliance? A game changer that was. That's all I got.

I cried on the inside watching my beloved WCW wrestlers getting crushed. I remember fondly when DDP revealed himself to be the stalker and thought that he was going to be pushed huge. 2012 Little Jerry Lawler would have smacked him in the head because it was Undertaker we were talking about and we know what happened. RVD was really the only one who survived unscathed by the destruction, but that was because he's RVD and he's awesome. Let's focus on everybody's favorite commentator, Booker T.

In WCW, Booker T started winning tag titles, then TV titles, world titles, and starting to act suspiciously like The Rock. Don't make it so obvious, WCW. One would think that when the Invasion began, at least your top WCW guy would be strong and dominant throughout. I also thought Missouri was going to win the title (It still hurts). Booker T was made fun of, humiliated, destroyed, and any past tense word I can think of.

Let's say that the invasion started on May 28. Seven months of WCW World Heavyweight Championship glory and Booker T only held the belt for 2 1/2 months and was the only WCW guy to do so. If anyone could find a reason why Rock and Jericho had to win the title, then inform me. It would have made Jericho's win at Vengeance that more meaningful if it was his first time he won but it wasn't thanks to No Mercy.

Booker T deserved more than that. What I would have done is let him hold the title throughout the whole invasion. Who would have been hurt by it? No one. Booker T was the top WCW guy so let your top guy hold the belt. Let him beat The Rock, Jericho, and others who wanted to take him out. I would have replaced Angle with Booker T since Book and Austin had beef and you still have Rock vs. Jericho. You can figure out the rest.

So should Booker T have been booked more strongly since he was the WCW champion when the Invasion began?

How did you feel about WWE guys having the WCW title a majority of the angle?

 

[theBec2101]

I think you have to look at it through WWE's eyes. They didnt know who they were getting and keeping when that angle was finished. They didnt know Booker T was still gonna be up there and was able to take it to that extra level. You also dont want your own superstars to look weak to the others, they did just come off of a tense wwe n wcw rating showdown. I know he was champ when all was said and done but like anyother job. Just cause you put in 15yrs somewhere and ur a vet and something happens and u go to another company, ur dont always get the same spot somewhere else. But it all worked out for him anyway.

 

[brandogg]

WCW should take the blame if anything. They are the one's that made Booker T a clone of The Rock (and even had him start doing the Rock Bottom...err Book End as his finisher). Making Booker T beat the guy who he was basically an imposter of would be like WCW hiring the fake Diesel and Razor Ramon, and having them beat Kevin Nash and Scott Hall.

 

[SWANTON]

i say that really when you think about it the WWF was in control of the whole angle so its only like vince to have all of his stars have the titles

 

[HitmanRicks]

I like to look at the Invasion in 2 ways...

#1: Vince McMahon has never liked pushing wrestlers that he didn't find, create, and make famous. He did it with Ric Flair for a short time when he first joined the WWE in the early 90's, but knew he'd be losing a lot of money if Flair wasn't a main-eventer. We were even denied Flair vs Hogan at Wrestlemania VIII in favor of Savage/Flair for the WWF Title on the mid-card and Sid Justice/Hogan as the main event.

The WWF ruined the reputations of the majority of WCW talent that came over, the 3 biggest I can think of being Booker T, DDP, and Mike Awesome. Booker and DDP went from being world champions to mid-carders. Awesome, whose career was already in disrepair due to WCW's cheesy gimmicks for him, came in with a full head of steam when he won the Hardcore Title, and was reduced to nothing by the end of the angle.

They even had so little confidence in the stardom of WCW/ECW's roster that he had top WWF guys like Steve Austin, Kurt Angle, and Christian join the Alliance, to the point where by Survivor Series 2001, most feuds were WWF talent against WWF talent.

#2: The WWF had never been given such a huge amount of talent at once like that before. It was probably hell trying to determine who deserved to get on TV with such a large amount of people clamoring for a spot on the show every week. Do you push new guy The Hurricane as European Champion, or do you let someone who's established like D'Lo Brown carry the title? Being on WWE's creative staff during this period was more than likely chaotic.

Even when the Alliance angle ended, some WCW/ECW talent salvaged their careers, such as Lance Storm, The Hurricane, and Billy Kidman, who all had good runs in WWE as a whole.

So the way I see it, The WCW/ECW Alliance angle had plenty of cons and plenty of pros, and was essentially a double-edged sword.

 

[jrichardson25]

^I have to say the same (I didn't watch said angle when it happened but I know the after effect etc etc)

Booker did get the shaft... for a while. Like others have said... he was a star in WCW... If I was Vince I would have been leery too. You don't know how these guys perform. You don't know what kind of draw they would get from the WWF fans and you don't know about their longevity.

BUT! Booker proved himself. He had some great matches in WWE. He held quite a few WWE titles. He had some forgettable spots (as do most stars) but he's proven that he's an asset. He's back now and I expect that he will eventually push to get his school to be another WWE developmental territory... Do I think he's done though? Hell no. I feel like the guy has at least 3 more good years in the tank. He's chosen to take the role he has now and is doing well.

Back on topic... I think that he couldn't have avoided much of what happened because of the situation....

 

[ShinobiMusashi]

I think the massive failure of the XFL had a lot to do with how the WWF handled the Invasion angle.

In absolutely no way, shape, or form were they about to make themselves look weak, or inferior to no one.

I think they really tried to use that angle to try to heal up any negative press from the XFL debacle earlier in the year(2001), and create this strong image fo the company.

They over did it in the way they made the Alliance look like a bunch of coward heels. Here is an example of the poor booking taken from the results of an episode of Raw from that summer:

ECW RULES MATCH: Raven vs Kurt Angle.
Angle makes Raven tap to the Anklelock.
After the match, Angle puts Raven in two different submission moves to torture him.
Then Angle gets a chair and beats Raven with it.
Chris Kanyon, Shawn Stasiak & Justin Credible come down.
Kanyon gets a chairshot and Stasiak & Credible don't want to get into the ring.
Kanyon gets another brutal chairshot to the back, and then Angle chases off Credible & Stasiac.

That is just old school chicken shit villian heel booking. I don't think anybody in the Alliance ever pinned anyone from the WWF clean in the center of the ring at anytime during the angle. Look at how they overdid it with Kurt Angle burying Raven in his own world(ECW rules match), and then completely destroying the WCW guys, running them off like a bunch of pussy's in the process. Prime example of how they overdid the Invasion to try to make themselves look strong in an attempt to recover from the XFL negativity. All they did was devalue their own products(WCW/ECW), a lot of excellent talent, and the entire industry of Professional Wrestling in my opinion. ECW fans dropped out when they seen Paul Heyman aswering to Steph Mcmahon as "Boss" in an alliance with WCW. That was enough for me personally to stop watching wrestling altogether for about a decade, but I was a pretty die hard ECW fan.

Giving guys like DDP, and Booker T some decent wins, and keeping the ECW out of it would have really helped them make something of the Invasion, but with the way they used the angle to repair the company's image after the failure of the XFL they just couldn't do it.

Then there is the money they lost in the XFL. Money that could have been used to lure some of the bigger names out of their Time Warner contracts to make the Invasion something really special(perhaps with Austin vs Goldberg capping it all off at Wrestlemania X-8).

 

[Miko]

The Invasion Angle sucked because of the lack of Steiner, Goldberg, Sting and NWO, which frankly would've put WCW on a much more even playing field with WWF.

I dont think Booker was particularly shafted during this time though, he lost the WCW Title to arguably WWF's top star at the time and played second fiddle to the other guy who could've claimed to be WWF's top star at the time. No, this was a time for Booker, who didnt come in with the reputations of NWO/Goldberg to earn his WWF stripes, which in fairness he did.

He got arsefucked at WM19 though, that angle was begging for Booker T to win it, if only because of the nature of the fued, instead we got shitty Flair inteference and a big nosed, ugly cunt HHH win. If WWE really wanted to put over Evolution, they could've had Booker drop the title back to HHH due to Orton and Flair interference at any fucking time they wanted, plus Booker would've been a much more legit main player in an era devoid of anything except HHH sucking the life out of wrestling.

 

[Defekt]

So should Booker T have been booked more strongly since he was the WCW champion when the Invasion began?

Booker T was one of WCW's top stars in it's dying days, but he was nowhere near as big as The Rock, Austin, Angle, etc.

There was no way they were gonna push him to that level. It would have made WWE's top draws look weak.

If Goldberg, Nash, Sting or some other major WCW star had come over in the Invasion with the title, it probably would have been a different story.

How did you feel about WWE guys having the WCW title a majority of the angle?

It was stupid and another reason the Invasion was awful, but the WWE didn't have much choice. Besides DDP and Booker T, no one else had enough credibility to hold the WCW title.

 

[Poop Master Flex]

My thing with the Invasion angle as a whole (not just Booker T) was the invaders were all made to look weak except for RVD, he was the only one who actually looked strong throughout that whole storyline.

An Invasion angle is so hard to fuck up and somehow WWE did just that. All they had to do was to let WCW and ECW guys look strong and for the most part they didn't, most PPV's they were on the losing end, you know there is something wrong when in the final match of the invasion featured 8 WWE guys, 1 WCW guy and 1 ECW guy, yeah they sound really threatening.

It wouldn't have hurt to have WWE's top guys lose to the invaders, Rock, Austin, Angle and Jericho were all top guys by that point, a loss to someone like Booker T or RVD isn't gonna hurt them. If they were painted as true underdogs and lost to the Invasion's top guy for a few months it would have made the ultimate victory at the survivor series all that more meaningful, its just hard to believe they are threats when the final 2 guys fighting in the storyline is Austin vs. The Rock.

Now onto Booker T, i definitely would have kept him champ throughout the storyline. He was the leader, the top dog of the Invasion, make him look like the top dog, pretty simple thought process there.

 

[justtxyank]

I think you make a mistake if you think Vince actually wanted the invasion guys to come out of this looking good. He didn't want WCW to look good and he didn't want those wrestlers to look good.

The invasion established what it was supposed to establish. WWF was WAAAAAAY better and nothing WCW had to offer was worth anything in the end.

If you wanted to book the invasion to be successful, all you had to do was look at how the nWo got off the ground in WCW and you had a template.

 

[Poop Master Flex]

I think you make a mistake if you think Vince actually wanted the invasion guys to come out of this looking good. He didn't want WCW to look good and he didn't want those wrestlers to look good.

The invasion established what it was supposed to establish. WWF was WAAAAAAY better and nothing WCW had to offer was worth anything in the end.

If you wanted to book the invasion to be successful, all you had to do was look at how the nWo got off the ground in WCW and you had a template.

I think the point is that Vince let his ego get in the way of possibly the biggest storyline he was ever able to have. I'm sure you're right and that was never Vince's intention but why waste half a year of television doing this angle when you never wanted them to look strong in the first place? Why not just defeat WCW/ECW at the Invasion PPV, embarrass them and then move on? If that's what he wanted to do fine but don't waste so many hours of TV doing so. They could have proven their superiority in 3 weeks and moved on.

The thing is if you are gonna actually book an invasion storyline then you got to make the people coming over look strong. When the strongest players of the Alliance are Austin and Angle (2 WWE guys) there is an issue. Vince could have taken this golden opportunity, made Booker T a main eventer for years to come, same with RVD although I don't count him because he did look pretty damn good throughout the Invasion storyline, same with DDP another top player for WCW. Vince had a golden opportunity to make his business better throughout this storyline and threw it all away because it was more important to show his superiority. For all he has done in the wrestling business sometimes Vince comes off as a man with a little dick so he has to do stuff like this to prove his greatness.