Gimmick Some Lovin': The Elimination Chamber

2002 was WEIRD

Before explaining the program that leads to this match, it's important to establish one really important thing: 2002 is one of the weirdest years in the history of WWE, if not the sport itself.

Immediately after the Wrestlemania X8 match we covered last week, Ric Flair and Vince McMahon split the company in twain, each man drafting his own roster to be specific to the Monday Night Raw or SmackDown (not live) shows, respectively.

Competition having pushed WWE to some of its most daring (but also some of its stupidest) creative ventures prior to their 2001 purchase of rival WCW, the brand split was to be a recreation of those Monday Night Wars between Vince and his southern counterparts. Despite lacking direct head-to-head competition, as well as narrative sense at times, the first draft placed a firm wedge between the halves of the roster, with champions floating between the two.

The ownership arrangement lasted all of two months, as McMahon defeated Flair to gain sole ownership of both television programs, largely due to interference on McMahon's behalf by a rookie Brock Lesnar (who made his Raw debut on the same Wrestlemania X8 fallout show which saw the brand split announcement).

Add a terrible tattoo and subtract a few hundred leg days, and he'll look like today's Beast Incarnate.

That summer, Lesnar would win the WWE Undisputed Championship from The Rock at SummerSlam, and would establish himself as the sole property of SmackDown, leaving Raw without world championship representation.

Enter the other weirdest part about 2002 wrestling.

Upon gaining sole proprietorship of both shows, the power-strutting chairman of WWE needed to delegate the day-to-day operations of his two brands to a general manager; for SmackDown, he shocked the world did the thing he almost always does in these situations, which is to give a prominent television role to his daughter, Stephanie (I wonder what the head of creative at the time had to say about that).

To fill the role on Raw, however, VKM made a move that few, if any, in the era before social media could have seen coming by hiring the man who was once nearly responsible for his children and grandchildren losing their inheritances, former WCW president Eric Bischoff.

Call it either a shrewd business move hiring a man who would immediately grab eyeballs and headlines, or call it McMahon rubbing his rivals' nose in WWE's survival, but Bischoff thrived in this role, making the competition between the two brands feel like a genuine rivalry at times.

Upon Lesnar's decision to keep the Undisputed Championship strictly on the blue brand, Bischoff (in storyline) created the World Heavyweight Championship with a piece of hardware familiar to him and anyone who had followed his career: the old Big Gold Belt from WCW, but with a WWE logo at the top.

The championship was awarded to the winner of a gruelling 16-man tournament in Rio de Janeiro Triple H, by virtue of Trips looking good in a suit and having lost a street fight at SummerSlam to a man with a broken back who hadn't wrestled in four and a half years.

Thus began the sometimes-confusing "two world champions" era of WWE, which has persisted, more or less, minus a few gaps, for the past 15 years, introduced by and with the most notable remnants of a dead wrestling promotion.