5 Worst Wrestling Matches Of 2001

Wrestling in 2001 was more or less defined by one single event: the end of the Monday Night Wars. WWE purchased WCW, complete with their tape library, intellectual property, and most of their wrestlers. With this, WWE became the unquestioned king of wrestling in North America once again.

Now as you can expect, with WWE’s roster almost doubling in size, the logical expectation would be that WWE would now be able to do their own version of the Monday Night Wars but under their own banner and unified creative direction. A logical person would expect that WWE would take all the biggest WCW stars and put them into feuds with WWE’s biggest stars, with all rivalries culminated at a WrestleMania filled with dream matches.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. What we got instead was an eight-month-long storyline that consisted of lower-card WCW and ECW wrestlers being destroyed by WWE wrestlers. WWE didn’t even hire the biggest WCW stars for the Invasion storyline; the biggest stars to come to WWE were arguably Rob Van Dam and Booker T. the rest of the WCW wrestlers were lower-card wrestlers that were chewed up and spat out by WWE without having even the slightest chance at winning. It even took a few WWE wrestlers ‘defecting’ to the WCW/ECW alliance to make it interesting, along with an overemphasis on the McMahon family drama.

This one-sided and uncompetitive approach led to some truly abysmal wrestling matches. A lot of them were unintended squash matches, while others were intentional one-sided squashes that simply went on for too long. Ultimately, what can be concluded is that in both WWE and in WCW during the latter’s final days, things were actually quite bad from the match quality perspective if you weren’t an absolute workhorse already…

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5. Booker T vs Rick Steiner – WCW Greed 2001

WCW was on its last legs in 2001, and the few PPVs they showcased didn’t really have any outstanding matches. A lot of them felt bland and unexciting, likely due to the wrestlers feeling unmotivated due to the approaching unease of WCW going out of business.

This match was a prime example of that, as poor Booker T was stuck trying to pull a great match out of a 2001 Rick Steiner. Rick, the less-famous of the two wrestling brothers, and was very much past his prime.

He was no longer the athletic and well-conditioned athlete that dominated WWE, WCW and NJPW in the 1990s. He was slow, uninspired, and hit very few moves. Booker couldn’t do much because Rick was the one carrying the match as the defending U.S. Champion.

The only real moment of relative surprise was outside interference from someone else that helped Booker T win the title. Then again, this was WCW, so outside interference was as expected as the show being all about the New World Order.

4. Brothers of Destruction vs DDP & Kanyon - SummerSlam 2001

This is the match that made some fans think that the Undertaker legitimately did his best to ‘bury’ WCW wrestlers DDP and Kanyon. Now, the word ‘bury’ in wrestling parlance is thrown around a lot by more jaded wrestling fans and is used to describe a situation where one wrestler is decimated so badly that they cannot hope to recover.

Given how DDP and Kanyon were so utterly demolished by the Brothers of Destruction, such a term might actually make sense. In one of the most one-sided matches in SummerSlam history, Undertaker & Kane decimated these two WCW wrestlers so decisively that nothing they could ever to afterwards could ever make them into legitimate threats ever again.

Neither DDP nor Kanyon got much offence in, so the slaughter by the Brothers of Destruction felt like it went on for an eternity. It was almost like they were trying to send a message to the WCW wrestlers, particularly Page. Rumours at the time suggested DDP tried to tell Undertaker what to do in their match, which the Deadman allegedly took the wrong way.

Though such rumours were never proven, the ensuing one-sided destruction (pun intended) does indeed give them credibility.

3. Chyna vs Ivory – WrestleMania X-Seven

This is the only blemish on an otherwise perfect wrestling show, but boy does it ever stick out like a sore thumb. While every other match managed to have at least some degree of competitiveness to it, this match was the exact opposite. This match had a great build and was supposed to be treated as Chyna’s big return match.

However, it simply sucked, there’s no other way to describe it. Chyna hit one move and ended the match, winning the WWE Women’s Championship in the process. In doing so, Chyna had effectively killed the entire women’s division in the process. Ivory was built up for months as a credible athlete, and Chyna destroyed her without breaking a sweat.

Just like that the competitiveness of the women’s division all but vanished and the women had no one around whom their division could be built. Chyna left the company under adverse circumstances less than two months later, and it would take Trish Stratus and Lita at least a full year of incredible pain and sacrifice before the women’s division had even a shred of credibility back in it.

2. Scott Steiner vs Road Warrior Animal vs Sid vs Jeff Jarrett – WCW Sin

It takes a very strong stomach to watch this match...

Some matches are bad because the in-ring quality or the story is so bad fans want to forget what they saw. This match was bad because one wrestler suffered an injury so gruesome it overshadowed everything else.

Going into this match, the WCW bookers wanted Sid, a super heavyweight, to do a move off the top rope. Sid was reluctant to do so because he was so damn big and a diving moves were too risky for him. But somehow they won the argument, which led to Sid hitting a diving big boot. In other words, he dove off the top rope and all of his weight was supposed to land on one leg.

What happened instead (which was also expected) was that Sid’s left ankle snapped completely due to the force of 300 pounds of weight landing on it. The camera caught a shot of Sid’s left ankle bent almost 90 degrees to the left, in a disgusting, unnatural position.

It was one of the worst wrestling injuries in history required Sid to have major surgery afterwards. Yet while that surgery did fix Sid’s leg to some degree, not even the greatest of surgeons could save WCW by this point in time.

1. The Brothers of Destruction vs Kronik – WWE Unforgiven 2001

While 2001 was one of the best years in WWE history, it was one of the worst of the Undertaker’s career. He was far less athletic compared to previous years, and with few exceptions, his matches weren’t that exciting. The way he executed moves looked more sluggish, especially in this awful tag team match.

Much of the action was slow and plodding, and at one point one of the Bryans in this match sold Undertaker’s offence so badly you could see an enormous gap between his stomach and Undertaker’s raised knee. But the sluggish action could’ve been salvageable if there was a decent story being told, which there wasn’t.

The Brother of Destruction slaughtered KroniK so badly that it didn’t even feel like there was any desire to make this into a competitive match. The fact that this was built up as an important match and was supposed to be some of the best WWE had to offer is what makes this a truly unforgivable match.