A WrestleMania X-Seven Retrospective From Inside The Astrodome

The Spoils Of War

The outcome of the famous Monday Night Wars between WWF and WCW had long since ceased to be in doubt, with Raw having beaten Nitro’s ratings every week since October 1998 and the gap widening substantially during that time. WCW’s parent company Time Warner had merged with AOL in 2000, meaning that the promotion had new corporate masters to satisfy and could no longer rely on tycoon Ted Turner to keep it afloat if it was loss-making – which it was, having run a deficit of $62 million that year. The decision was made to put WCW up for sale and in early 2001 its future was in some doubt, with the most likely buyers being a group of investors led by Eric Bischoff. Still, no-one expected things to develop as dramatically as they did in March when an executive called Jamie Kellner was put in charge of the channels on which WCW’s weekly TV shows ran and quickly decided to axe them. With no other networks interested in signing a TV deal the company’s value was shot and almost every potential purchaser withdrew their interest – all except one. On 23rd March 2001 – nine days before Wrestlemania – WCW was sold to the WWF for about $3 million, less than a year after Turner had turned down an offer from a different suitor for $500 million. It was an unbelievable story.

Three days later Vince McMahon appeared via satellite on the final episode of Nitro to celebrate his victory, nominally in character as a gloating heel but the line between reality and fiction had rarely felt so blurred. The whimper with which WCW was vanquished seems sad in hindsight, but at the time it was a moment brimming with possibilities for most wrestling fans: might we now see Goldberg face Austin or The Rock? Would Sting make the jump? Ric Flair? The NWO? As Shane McMahon appeared at the end of Nitro that night to announce he had (in storyline) bought the company from under his father’s nose, fans sensed the beginning of an inter promotional feud that had long been the stuff of their dreams. Most immediately, what might this mean for Wrestlemania, where Vince and Shane’s scheduled father-son match had just taken on a whole new level of intrigue? It genuinely was an electric moment to be a wrestling fan.

It was against this backdrop that I landed in Houston on Thursday 29th March with my best friend, barely able to believe our luck at having won tickets to what now seemed destined to be among the most consequential events in pro wrestling history. Still, there was plenty of time to explore the city before the big show on Sunday night – a Wrestlemania weekend in 2001 did not resemble the week-long wrestling festival that accompanies the show nowadays. There was no Hall of Fame ceremony the night before (that only became a tradition in 2004); there was no invasion of indie promotions hoping to capitalise on the influx of fans by hosting shows at venues across the city; in fact, there was scarcely any of the mass migration of international fans that I saw in Miami when I next attended a Wrestlemania eleven years later. Fans from the UK and the rest of the world were still the exception rather than the rule that week in Houston, where the crowd had a distinctly Texan feel.

We spent our spare three days riding roller coasters at the now-demolished Six Flags Astroworld theme park across the parking lot from the Dome, and hanging out at the famous Galleria shopping mall where we saw Steve Blackman and Albert (Matt Bloom) trying to look inconspicuous despite their hulking frames as they shopped for sandals. The only major wrestling-related activity prior to ‘Mania itself was the Axxess fan festival, hosted at the Astrohall convention centre adjacent to the stadium. First taking place seven years earlier at Wrestlemania X, Axxess had become an impressive celebration of all things WWF: in the shadow of 40-foot inflatable figures depicting Stone Cold and the Rock fans could queue up for autographs from their favourite stars, look at props from famous moments in company history, try their hand at commentating a match, and – ideally – spend a small fortune on merchandise before they left. There was even a mini-arena surrounded by a few rows of bleachers where we saw a live in-ring interview with Mick Foley and short matches from wrestlers who weren’t booked on the main show: Essa Rios, Jerry Lynn and a few others. It was all pretty awesome – at one point I realised we were walking directly behind Earthquake and Typhoon, who had strolled out for a look around; a few minutes later we were saying hello to Howard Finkel as he walked past us. We were in a wrestling fan’s paradise.

Of course, the excitement really peaked on Sunday evening as we joined the crowds approaching the Astrodome itself, passing by the half-constructed Reliant Stadium next door that would be the site of the unforgettable Undertaker-Michaels match eight years later at Wrestlemania 25. Inside the Dome the view was unforgettable, even from the back row of the rafters where we had got two of the last remaining tickets – we were just two English kids among 68,000 screaming fans who had arrived to watch wrestling history unfold. The auditorium itself was cavernous and quite beautiful with its distinctive roof, the light from outside carved into a sea of rectangular chunks by the steel mesh holding it all up. The entrance-way looked spectacular too, an enormous Titan Tron flanked by two giant vertical columns bearing the words “Wrestlemania” and “X-Seven”, with a long metal ramp leading down from there to the ring. Soon enough that ring would see action – a forgettable dark match in which Justin Credible and X-Pac beat Grand Master Sexay and the sandal-loving Steve Blackman. Even at this early stage the crowd was pumped, and the anticipation for the main show just kept building.

As the minutes ticked down to the start of the pay-per-view broadcast the announce team was brought out: Jim Ross was on play-by-play as always, but the identity of his partner was yet another sign of the McMahon empire’s near-absolute victory over its competition. In late February Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler had walked out on his WWF color commentary role in solidarity with his then-wife Stacy Carter who was released by the company, reportedly for having a negative attitude. Meanwhile, just as WCW was going belly-up, ECW was also in deep financial peril having lost its weekly slot on cable network TNN the previous autumn to WWF. When Paul Heyman – the mastermind behind ECW’s rise throughout the’90s – showed up as Lawler’s replacement on the 5th March episode of Raw, many onlookers saw it as akin to a captain abandoning his sinking ship. Years later it emerged that one person who felt particularly aggrieved was Tommy Dreamer, the ECW mainstay who assumed Heyman’s duties behind the scenes after he left. Depressed by the imminent demise of a promotion into which he had poured everything and feeling betrayed by Heyman, Dreamer admitted on his podcast in 2019 that he almost committed an unthinkable act with a firearm live on television during Wrestlemania. “I was gonna hop the rail and I was gonna whack Paul E. (Heyman) in the back of the head right at the announce table,” Dreamer explained. “Then I was gonna whack myself. The ultimate martyr, I was gonna hit my pose crack, boom, pull the trigger.” Thankfully a phone call from Ross promising that the WWF had plans to use him helped to pull Dreamer out of this dark place and a tragedy of historic proportions was averted.

2 years ago by Connel Rumsey

@connel1405

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