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WWF 2000 appreciation thread.


Fatty Facesitter

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Maybe it's a serious case of nostalgia kicking in, but recently I've been watching a truck load of WWF stuff from the year 2000. In the 6 weeks or so alone, Triple H won the WWF title on the first Raw of the year and had that fucking epic match with Cactus Jack at the Royal Rumble (Which is a beast of a PPV even without that match), you had DX and the McMahon-Helmsley era playing excellent baddies, X-Pac stealing Kane's bird, the Dudleyz had started putting people through tables (including poor Terri Runnels), The Radicals made their big arrival from WCW and turned heel in just one week, The Rock was absolutely on fire and putting out some absolutely coked-up promos, Mae Young got knocked up by Sexual Chocolate, Taz debuted at MSG, Crash Holly and Viscera formed a tag team, Rikishi and Too Cool were getting seriously over, HEAD CHEESE WAS BORN, and I'm sure there's loads of stuff I've missed out on as well. And this is just the first six weeks!!

 

Here's a couple of indexs I found which gives out results on all the Raw's and Smackdown's from the year. If you take the dates and stick them onto either youTube or Dailymotion I'm pretty sure you can actually find the shows relatively easily, or at the very least a couple of matches from them.

 

Raw results index

 

Smackdown results index

 

 

I assume most on here have already seen it, but here's the link to the Royal Rumble PPV from that year in it's entirety. Taz's debut, an awesome tables match with the Hardyz & Dudleyz, Mae Young's puppies, a couple of ok midcard matches (New Age Outlaws!), THAT street fight with HHH and Cactus, and a decent Royal Rumble with added Rocky.

 

Part One-- Here

 

The rest is all there, there's about 13 parts in all I think.

 

 

I love this period because it just seems like everything Vince was doing at this point was working. Everyone on the midcard seemed to have a purpose and for the most part people were being used to the best of their ability. Steve Blackman is a prime example, because when he won the Hardcore title he could fully utilize his martial arts gimmick and as a result became seriously over with the crowd. There was also Commissioner Mick, the Rock/HHH rivalry, the Kurt/HHH/Steph love triangle, Austin's return from neck surgery, plenty of T&A (Test and Albert), smoking hot divas, fun storylines and just generally good shit throughout the year. Arguably, this is the year where they absolutely blew WCW out of the water and went a long way towards putting them out of business.

 

Share your pics, vids and memories here so we can pay homage to this awesome time period in WWF/E's history.

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I'm not going to write a lot on this at the minute because I'm supposed to be doing uni work but 2000 was my favourite all-time year for wrestling.

 

I'd watched on and off for years before but I didn't have Sky/Cable until the end of '99. My viewing up until then consisted of videos that I rented from Blockbusters or borrowed off my friends. I started watching religiously right around the beginning of 2000 which was the beginning of the Cactus-Hunter feud which consisted of the awesome street fight at the Rumble (probably my favourite year for the actual Rumble as well as well as the WWF debut of Taz) and the Hell in a Cell at No Way Out. You also had The Rock at his best (Austin was out for most of the year) feuding with Hunter which included the Iron Man match featuring the return of Undertaker which I thought was the best thing of all time.

 

Along with that there was the TLC matches with an on-fire tag-team division, Angle, Jericho, the debut of the Radicals and my favourite ever Raw main event which was a 10 man tag with DX and the Radicals vs Rock/Cactus and Too Cool. Do yourself a favour and watch it

. They don't make them like that anymore.

 

Edit: changed the link for a better quality version.

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Chris Kreski was probably the best booker they ever had (apart from George Scott of course). People give Russo credit for making small names mean something, but everyone in late 99 and 2000 seemed to have a gimmick or character. He was awesome at using a massive roster. The tag team division was filled with talent, the European title position had the likes of Al Snow, William Regal, D'Lo Brown, Eddie Guerrero and Val Venis giving it a bit of attention, the IC division had Benoit, Jericho, Angle and all sorts in it. Even the light heavyweight division was good for a little while. Malenko and Scotty II Hotty's match at Backlash being an example. It also had the 24/7 Hardcore division, which for the first few months was funny as fuck. Crash Holly's 30 title reigns or whatever it was. And the World title delivered some of the best main events they'd ever had. I know 98/99 is the thing people like to get teary eyed with for nostalgia, but was WWF ever bigger than the 2000 period? The Rock was on EVERYTHING! He had a fucking song out, he was hosting Saturday Night Live (the first wrestler to do it since 1985), he had 50 Bentley's in the West Indies, he was making films. Wrestling might never have been bigger than in 2000. Those Triple H and Cactus Jack matches, the Dudleys/Hardys/Edge and Christian feud, the Radicalz debuting, the Jericho title win swerve, Kurt Angle, Stephanie and Triple H love triangle. All were perfect television (apart from the end to the love triangle). My judgement is probably clouded because it was a great time during that period and I have great memories of it.

 

They massively hit the wall in Septemeber time though. That was the end of the creatively joyful era. They built the promotion around Steve Austin, and all the hard work establishing all those wrestlers in his absence was undone. In September and October, there didn't seem to be a match that didn't end with Austin running in and slapping someone about.

 

Fucking hell, I sounded like a bit of a "workrate perv" there. :crazy:

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They were obviously forced to come up with a ton of ideas in Austin's absence, that Royal Rumble street fight is my favourite match ever but there's some corkers in that period. It just seems that when Austin came back they went "Meh, let's just put Austin in everything, creativity-end".

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I went on a right moan a while ago about Austin totally ruining 2000 for everybody. I was watching Raw through at the time, and it was heartbreaking to watch the seeds being sewn of it all going to bits. You couldn't tell at the time because everything's shit hot and people are still over, but knowing in hindsight makes it tough to see.

 

Chris Kreski was as good as everybody says he is. His writing was so unbelievably tight for wrestling, he really, really cared about complete character and story resolution. Edge & Christian's amazing run kicking off can be credited to his creative mind I'd say, and the love triangle was as a good a soap opera drama wrestling has ever, ever done. Not just because the story itself was gripping, but it got a freakishly good performer in Angle over the top to the Main Event, and took probably the best heel around in years in HHH and set him up ready to explode as a babyface. Shame that politics or whatever killed the end of that lot stone dead.

 

You take a head writer like him and a top guy like The Rock and it's a dream combination. I can't say once in a lifetime because the business has had it's fair share of booms, but it's pretty bloody amazing when it does. I could be wrong, but wasn't Kreski from a non-wrestling/TV background too? I wonder if he was the turning point for the WWE's hiring policy people get so fucked off about.

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They massively hit the wall in Septemeber time though. That was the end of the creatively joyful era. They built the promotion around Steve Austin, and all the hard work establishing all those wrestlers in his absence was undone. In September and October, there didn't seem to be a match that didn't end with Austin running in and slapping someone about.

This is true. Its funny though, cause I can see that now as clear as day when I look back on it, but at the time, I was loving Austin coming down and ruining matches left, right and center. The Captain Hindsight in me can see how it was to the detriment of everyone else, but they were just giving people what they wanted. Austin opening cans of whoop ass. The men behind the scenes should have known better though. They were more privy to Austin's injuries, limitations and (relative) short term shelf life after such an injury. I know they got another year to 18 months out of him on top, but there was no real long term planning around what they were going to do when he got to the point of not being able to continue, and The Rock's appearances got more and more fleeting. You're right that the creativity just seemed to go out the window almost the moment he came back.

 

You're also right in that 2000 was the biggest and best year for WWF/E. Like you say, whenever people mention the Attitude Era, the majority of people immediately think 97/98, but their best year was 2000. People forget just how awesome Triple H was back then. Like, really awesome. He was the absolute perfect foil for The Rock. No one man can do it alone, and much like Hogan had the likes or Orndorff and Savage in his supporting cast, The Rock had Triple H there the whole way. Rock is clearly the bigger star, but in that period, Triple H was the ying to his yang.

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I could be wrong, but wasn't Kreski from a non-wrestling/TV background too? I wonder if he was the turning point for the WWE's hiring policy people get so fucked off about.

Yeah. He wrote for the Daily Show, Beavis and Butt-Head and ghost wrote books for the likes of William Shatner. He also storyboarded everything he did, and wrote backwards. He'd have an ending to a storyline and wrote a way to get to the destination. Stephanie McMahon replaced him in November of 2000, which is fucking mental when you think about it. As soon as he stopped having the final say on the creative end, it all went to shit.

 

Here's something Meltzer wrote about the creative team around 98-2000 that the characters from this period said:

According to Austin, Russo didn't come up with his angles. He said Vince came up with his angles and the top angles, and Russo came up with the mid-card angles that didn't deal with him.

 

For all the claiming that he was in some way responsible for their success, Austin has nothing good to say about him and a lot bad to say about him. His closest thing to a compliment is that when Vince threw out his bad ideas, he was "okay," and on his own, he was terrible.

 

Rock always praised Kreski and even Gewirtz as the guys who best understood how to write for his character. He even got Kreski to write for him when he was hosting an awards show and tried (and may have) to get Gewirtz to help write when he had a non-wrestling gig. He never asked Russo to do any of that.

 

Bret Hart never praised Russo and thought he didn't have a clue.

 

HHH & Undertaker had nothing good to say about him.

 

The only top guy from that period people are trying to claim he was so important in who will say anything good about him is Mick Foley. After Russo failed in WCW, Foley told me that he was there and worked with Russo and Russo had a ton of ideas, many of which were good and many of which were bad. He said that when he watched WCW, he saw every bad idea he had suggested in WWF that Vince turned down doing, but made it clear, and this is long before TNA, that Russo had plenty of good ideas as well.

 

Yes, Cena sucked as a worker when he started in WWE. Guess what, he totally sucked when OVW got him and was rushed to the main roster way too fast because Heyman wanted him as his hand-picked top guy because he wanted to create his own top star and Cena could talk and had charisma. He was improving the entire time he was there and has never been anything but highly praising his experience there. Even when he was a top guy and didn't have to, he'd do Six Flags show once every summer.

 

As far as romanticizing, look at the guys who came from OVW, the guys from Deep South and guys from FCW and list them all. You'll get a pretty good answer from that.

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Is it a coincidence that things started to get shit when Stephanie got the job as Head Of Creative? I don't Howard Finkle so.

 

For me, WWE never had a year as good as 2000. Everybody was super over, The Rock was the coolest man alive, Triple H was the biggest prick in the world (and was the "best in the world" in 2000) and they even managed to nearly turn him face with the perfect love triangle (until Triple H decided to sabotage Angle taking his heel spot). The addition of the Radicalz and the likes of E&C/Hardys/Dudleys/Jericho/Angle all stepping up and developing produced cracking matches all over the card.

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Wow I never knew about that Kreski guy, if he's to credit for most of the 2000 stuff then he'd definitely go down as my favourite writer by far - most of that stuff is gold. Like others have said, started going tits up when Austin came back but from January to August/September I thought it was on fire.

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As much as Austin's return was a bit crap - I thought they ended the year on a high - Rebellion is one of my fav U.K PPVs and the 6 man Hell in Cell at Armageddon was an absolute cracker of a match.

 

Its really hard to pick a favourite PPV from 2000 - there were so many good ones - Summerslam was a great card from top to bottom. I know there isn't much love for WM 16 but I really enjoyed it then and still do now. Plus you had some great in-between PPVs Judgement Day had the awesome iron man match between Rock + Triple H and Backlash was prob the best post mania show they have ever done.

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I've hailed Chris Kreski as the WWF/E's best writer many a time. That whole period was awesome. Sometimes it's just nostalgia when people wank over something, but sometimes they are right to. WWF in 2000 was just brilliant. Ever since Steph took over the reigns, the product has failed to reach those heights again.

 

Shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the most up to date, finger-on-the-pulse shows on US TV. That's exactly where Vince and Co should be looking for contributing writers. Genuinely funny and completely in touch with the culture of the day. Forget failed soap writers and wannabee hacks! Unfortunately I don't imagine many of the good ones would want to work for WWE though!

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Was a really special time, I can't ever see wrestling reaching heights like that again. Can live in hope of course.

 

I just started watching wrestling in summer 99, so 2000 was like my first full year, what a first year to have, I was the perfect age too, would of been 11. The way WWF was back then, the stories, the characters, even the colour, it's something I hadnt paid much attention too lately, but with how it's produced now it just seems so dark and dull, wheras back then everyone seemed so colourful and the arena's did etc, the amount of signs on the hard camera side as well was fantastic.

 

Think my favourite PPV was Backlash, the little 11 year old me went crazy when the glass shattered, I actually believed Austin wouldnt be there when Vince said about his travel problems, and Rock was just amazing, my favourite wrestler ever, I remember my Dad coming down to tell me off cuz id shouted too much when Austin came down and Rock won :laugh: Took a bit of convincing for him to let me watch Judgment Day the next month, thought i was fucked when Undertaker returned but he didnt wake up this time!

 

I know people have said it, but it really is incredible how over EVERYONE was back then, Too Cool get a reaction just as loud as John Cena does now, even Crash Holly is over, everything they did just seemed to work. I love watching it back and will never tire of it.

 

Special time to be a fan.

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WWE is a career killer. Mike Goldberg from the UFC turned down a massive contract because he had aspirations in the sporting world, because "WWE" on your CV is dreadful for your prospects in the mainstream. Also, whatever the money is, few on this forum would take the job, let alone someone with a reputation in the field of entertainment.

 

A former WWE writer said these are the expectations that they have of you:

-Long hours. And you're not expected to have a life outside of WWE (See: Madigan claiming Stephanie yelled at him for takingtime off after his wife had a miscarriage.)

-If you're too talented, Gerwitz and Hayes see you as a threat, and will politick like crazy to get you out of there.

-You have to always stay on Vince's good side, which is difficult because Vince is crazy.

-Never suggest anything too drastic or new and do everything you can to blend in.

-Stephanie is also a pain in the ass to deal with.

- Never claim to know anything about wrestling or they'll call you a mark. And the wrestlers will hate you for being a hollywood hack.

 

And they went through 50 writers in 5 years due to a lot of this.

 

Nobody writers who are begging for a chance end up quitting in the end. WWE would never get a hip young talent in the hot seat. There's a million reasons why its a shit job.

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