20 Times The WWE Crowd Reaction Was INSANE

19. Booker T vs Buff Bagwell (Raw, July 2 2001)

The first ever ‘WCW match’ on Monday Night Raw ended up being the last.

At one stage during the botched invasion angle, WWF officials planned to rebrand the Monday night flagship show as WCW Raw or WCW Nitro, with SmackDown becoming the main show for the WWF brand. That went over like a fart in church with TNN officials, who rejected the plan out of hand.

Nevertheless, the WWF pressed on with its plans of presenting WCW as its own unique force, delivering a taster match in the main event of Raw from Tacoma between Booker T and Buff Bagwell.

The match was bad. Not worst match ever bad, but bad nevertheless, and the WWF fans – trained for years to despise anything and everything about WCW – loudly rejected it. When heels Steve Austin and Kurt Angle ran in to cause a DQ, fans loudly cheered them.

By then Vince McMahon and co. had already made the decision: the WCW relaunch was not to be.

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