If WrestleMania 17 is the series finale to the “Attitude Era,” Survivor Series 2001 is the finale to the spin-off show every successful TV show eventually gets. It was the conclusion to the Invasion storyline that is widely regarded as one of the biggest missed opportunities in wresting history, and while some things were out of the hands of WWE like Time Warner contracts paying wrestlers to stay at home, the company could have at least done a better job with the highly anticipated WCW/ECW invasion. It might have worked in the late 1990s and the year 2000, but not every major storyline needed a McMahon in every corner.
By the tail end of 2001, Vince McMahon had grown as tired as the fans were of The Alliance trying to take down WWE and decided to put everything on the line in a traditional Survivor Series tag team match. Two teams of five, elimination rules, winner take all, whoever gets the decisive victory would stay in business, and the losers would vanish into the night. Given that WWE had already mapped out their schedule all the way up to WrestleMania 18 at this point, most people knew what was going to happen in the main event, but that didn’t stop it from being any less entertaining.
On one side, you had Team WWE made up of The Rock, Chris Jericho, The Undertaker, Kane, and The Big Show, while The Alliance were represented by Stone Cold Steve Austin, Kurt Angle, Booker T, Rob Van Dam, and the WCW owner at the time Shane McMahon. In the early going, Shane is actually the early MVP by using common sense and consistently diving in to break up pinfalls, but that makes his eventual elimination even sweeter. The eliminations do come thick and fast as RVD eliminates Kane with a kick off the top, RVD gets eliminated by Jericho via his version of a Stroke, and it takes all of The Alliance’s finishers to get rid of The Big Show.
When all is said and done, this match is really just another way to get a Rock/Austin encore from WrestleMania 17, which no one was arguing against because the two have amazing chemistry. Austin now firmly in the heel role as opposed to the Mania match where the turn happened gradually, and he’s even more unhinged here as he was in April. However, The Rock shows out in the closing stretch as he had the crowd in the palm of his hand, and even though Angle is the one to give the assist for the finish, it’s The Rock who gets his hand held high. It’s matches like this that make me miss the traditional Survivor Series matches because when done right, they are absolutely fantastic. The Alliance died in Greensboro, North Carolina, which was known as WCW territory, so Vince got to rub it in the competition’s face one more time for old times sake.
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