Gimmick Some Lovin': "Little Blue Pills" on a Pole match

Don't worry, Shane; it happens to lots of wrestlers

Nobody ever gets to complain about Stephanie McMahon putting herself on television too much when this is a thing that has happened.

Whenever the name Vince Russo gets mentioned, two things always come to mind.

The first is his Attitude Era reputation for ensuring that every performer on the show had a storyline; if someone were employed by the company, he or she would always be involved in some type of program which would get some form of focus on weekly television, albeit very intermittently at times.

The other thing that comes to mind is poles from which Russo, throughout his tenure as the head writer in two different wrestling companies, would hang any number of objects — the retrieval of which would either result in victory for one competitor, a strategic advantage in the match, or, in one notorious instance, a grab bag of possibilities ranging from memorabilia to weapons to, yes, what was formerly the most prestigious championship in all of wrestling.

This Pole contest represents the worst intersection of these two aspects of Russo's writing. The fact that Russo is also famously less concerned with in-ring action than he is with writing shocking television is fully on display here, as a meeting between the first ECW Champion and a former WCW Cruiserweight and Tag Team Champion had the potential to let the match tell the story.

In 2000, of course, WCW was so far behind in the Monday Night Wars that the World Wrestling Federation assuredly considered them as much a threat as they do Impact Wrestling today.

Interestingly, what swung those cable battles in WCW's favor early on was their ability to deliver a fresh, varied, realistic, and creative in-ring product that clashed sharply with the WWF's stock of cartoon characters in broad and silly matches, but by 2000, the WWF was producing some of the best bell-to-bell action in its history while WCW had reduced itself to a cartoon (or, at least, a pale and tone-deaf imitation of cartoons like Family Guy which were gaining popularity then).