99.
WCW & WWF Tag Team Championships
Steel Cage Match
Diamond Dallas Page & Kanyon (c) vs. Kane & The Undertaker (c)
WWE Summerslam 2001
Ah the Invasion storyline, you beautiful mess. Enough words have been said about the angle to last a lifetime, but it can’t be understated how much WWE fumbled the bag when it came to what should have been the easiest, money printing storyline ever. Despite this, 2001 is not a bad year for WWE at all in terms of in-ring quality, and there’s only a handful of matches on this list from 2001. Due to contractual disputes, WWE did not have a lot of bankable WCW stars available to it in 2001, so a lot of the focus remained on WWE guys, with a sprinkling of the high potential talent like Booker T and Rob Van Dam.
Diamond Dallas Page, however, was a different story. DDP was one of the most organically popular babyfaces in WCW in the late 90s. By all rights, he should have been easily fit in as one of the more prominent stars within the Invasion storyline. Him and Booker were two of the only high profile guys to not sit out their guaranteed contract in order to show up in WWE. Given how popular they were, it seemed like a no brainer to use them as the focus of the Invasion, along with RVD.
Even when revealed as Sara’s stalker, he got arguably the biggest pop of any wrestler to make the jump across. It was immediately obvious that this was a miscasting. If you ever want to hear something cringeworthy, check out Bruce Pritchard’s comments on the DDP angle on the Invasion episode of Something to Wrestle With podcast. In short, Pritchard was adamant that bringing in DDP as Undertaker’s stalker was a good idea because “nobody knew who he was”. His justification for not using DDP as WCW had was because “that character didn’t work - if it did then WCW would still be around”. Yes, that’s the sort of nuanced argument you get from the guy in charge of booking at the time. I’ve seen more common sense in Twitter comments.
A lot has been made about why DDP got buried so decisively by the Undertaker. The common story is that Undertaker didn’t like that DDP didn’t know how to work. It’s speculated that could mean anything from just the WCW style of bumping, to DDP usually scripting his matches in advance. DDP has repeatedly denied there was any heat between him and Undertaker outside of them not having much in-ring chemistry.
On to the match, Kanyon and DDP look nervous and apprehensive as they come to the ring. Undertaker and Kane, meanwhile - with Sara on the outside - are here to beat the living shit out of them. If you’ve seen a match featuring Undertaker against a WCW guy, you get the idea what’s going to happen. He’s going to beat the piss out of the opponent, and you’ll be lucky if he sells at all. I’ve always been hit or miss with Undertaker across his career, but 2001 is by far the least favourite year of his career for me.
You can make an interesting story out of a heel overmatched and stuck in a cage against a monster babyface. Undertaker vs Shawn Michaels from Badd Blood 1997 is a ridiculously one-sided match when you watch back on it, and remains one of the best matches in WWE history. That worked because the fans were interested in seeing Michaels get destroyed, and complemented by interesting, exciting work by both, with just enough heel offence to keep the match flowing. The problem is that the DDP stalker angle killed any momentum and overness that DDP had. He had been essentially squashed at King of the Ring.. His tag team partner, Kanyon, while coming into this match as a double champion (also the WCW United States Champion), also wasn’t enthusiastically pushed by the Fed outside of his ironic “Alliance MVP” gimmick (one of the few fun gimmicks of WCW stars). Despite Undertaker and Kane being an extremely popular tag team, the lack of legitimacy to the heels made this a heatless affair, and that in turn eliminates any potential the match had.
The match itself is utterly boring. Undertaker and Kane just slowly, methodically, beating the hell out of Kanyon and Page with only a handful of offensive moves from the heels. Any brief moments of offence were quickly shrugged off by Undertaker and Kane. The babyface offence isn’t interesting or brutal, it’s just a meandering of slow power moves and punching, without ever being made to feel special. For example, Undertaker gets a visual pin of a basic sidewalk slam. It’s ironic because JR mentioned the Hell in a Cell matches with Mankind, HBK, and pushing Rikishi off the Cell - so you’re planting in the audience’s mind that he might murder his opponent in this environment. But he doesn’t do anything particularly violent at all. At about ⅔ of the way through, Undertaker tells Kane to let Kanyon escape. However, as both competitors needed to escape to win the match, that just left DDP alone with the Brothers of Destruction, while Kanyon sheepishly left.
They have a bit of fun with DDP, beating the hell out of him for a minute (one spot sees Kane literally just sitting on the top turnbuckle chilling for a good 30 seconds and watching it all go on). Eventually Undertaker tells DDP he can leave as long as he never looks at his wife again. Kane, naturally, tells Undertaker this is a very stupid idea considering there were two sets of titles on the line. Undertaker then grabs DDP, hits the Last Ride, and basically ends any hope of DDP having a substantial WWE career.
The match itself is mostly just a boring slog, but it earns a place on this list for what it represents. A miscast WCW star squashed by established WWE stars. It’s sad to see because Page was a favourite of mine in WCW. The following night, DDP would lose in a match to Undertaker’s wife, Sara. After that, DDP would go on to have 0 matches for the next three months, 0 wins in the rest of 2001, and then recast as a lower midcard babyface briefly in 2002. Kanyon stuck around in the background of the Alliance storyline for a little bit but never made another PPV appearance in WWE until the APA Bar Room Brawl at Vengeance 2003.
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