Social media continues to and will always be a dumpster fire. Everyone has a right to their opinion, but that doesn’t automatically give every opinion value, and social media gives society a platform to have an opinion, regardless of if it’s based on knowledge or nonsense. Of course, professional wrestling social media is as much of a cesspool as anything else online, but on a very rather occasion, there are certain notions that everyone will agree with.
One of the very few redeeming qualities of social media is the ability for classic footage to resurface on its anniversary, allowing fans to celebrate the moments of the past. Ironically, as I just watched the Invasion pay-per-view again a few days ago for an upcoming retro review, there was a clip online of Diamond Dallas Page’s WWF debut that happened 24 years ago last week.
Diamond Dallas Page, one of the most popular performers on the WCW roster for the vast majority of its existence of its ownership under the Turner banner, was revealed to be “the stalker” of The Undertaker’s then-wife, Sarah in the months after Vince McMahon bought his competition.
Anyone that watched it happen in real time, and probably anyone that watches for the first time in the modern era will agree that it was a horrendously bad angle that ruined Dallas Page before he ever had a chance to truly introduce himself to the WWF audience.
It was one of the first, but definitely not the last indication that despite the victory, Vince McMahon was still fighting the Monday Night War. You might wonder why, especially because he already bought the company a few months before and was the undisputed king of sports entertainment so all of the revenue that was made with the former WCW talent in his organization still went in his pocket. It’s easy to see why Vince was still putting the boots to World Championship Wrestling just a few years after the company was ahead in the ratings competition when you consider that McMahon was still fighting the battle 15 years later when Triple H had to pin Sting at Wrestlemania.
Very similar to how becoming a billionaire with the ability to use his massive wealth to cover his tracks eventually led to his downfall with the sexual misconduct scandal that saw him exiled from his own organization in disgrace in recent years, the money was just a number on the page in 2001. Ted Turner and the WCW brand were the only combination that ever put Vince in any serious jeopardy, albeit for a relatively short time, but the point is, that it was the only time that Vince was on the ropes as a promoter. Sure, Uncle Sam did the job to McMahon in federal court, but that’s because the government’s case in 1994 was as flimsy as The Brooklyn Brawler’s chances to win the Royal Rumble. (All due respect to Steve Lombardi) Roughly four years before McMahon was able to purchase WCW for literally pennies on the dollar, the WWF offices infamously took the water coolers out of the hallways of Titan Towers since free H2O cut into the budget.
With a virtual monopoly so that even the guys that took the initial WWF offer had very little leverage despite the fact that they joined the team, Vince simply wasn’t going to let any of the guys that drove the ratings up for TNT shine on his show. While DDP is just one example of a numerous amount of performers that got buried before they ever had the chance to prove themselves as commodities for the WWF, Page is such a microcosm of how Vince sacrificed what should’ve been the biggest angle in sports entertainment history with the super bowl of wrestling just to give himself an ego boost. But hey, the victor writes the history books, and there’s an entire library of documentaries with the WWE spin to tell that narrative.
Obviously, to cast Dallas Page as a stalker was a way to chop him down before he started since it was the compete opposite of any type of character that he used in WCW that got him over as one of the most popular stars on Nitro. That notion is underscored when you take into account that the feud of the WWF vs. WCW that was the entire premise of the previously mentioned Invasion pay-per-view was selling the WCW brand as a threat to the Titan corporation. How was presenting DDP as something that he never represented in the Turner organization going to sell the WCW rivalry?
Furthermore, specifically with his baby face turn in 1997 and how he built his run as one of the WCW stalwarts opposite the New World Order, Diamond Dallas Page was associated as a type of “people’s champion,” particularly with how he organically got over with the audience and made some memorable entrances or exits through the crowd. The story of “people’s champion vs. people’s champion” almost writes itself, but Vince wasn’t going to allow DDP anywhere near the level of The Rock, even in 2001. Don’t get me wrong, The Rock was a bigger star at the time, but with the selling point of a super bowl of wrestling, The Rock vs. Page was a very unique match-up that fans wouldn’t have been able to see without McMahon’s acquisition of Turner.
At 45, Dallas Page wasn’t going to be seen as a priority anyway, especially because of the WWF youth movement a few years earlier that propelled the company ahead of WCW. It’s ironic that 58-year-old Bill Goldberg will challenge for the heavyweight title in a few weeks, but the business simply didn’t embrace nostalgia in 2001. In another case of irony, not only did the company start to market nostalgia a few years later through a series of DVD releases and the original WWE 24/7 channel, but it became a bigger part of the organization’s overall draw when the more modern generation wasn’t viewed as big of stars of those from a prior era when the business started to decline at various points before the current upswing of the brand.
Unfortunately, Page suffered an injury the following year that led to his departure from the company. The bottom line is, he was ruined by the way he was portrayed when he arrived and wasn’t given the opportunity or had long enough of a run to try to recapture any of his previous popularity. His cup of coffee in TNA in 2004 before he retired from full-time competition might suggest that WWF brass made the right call when they didn’t invest in him three years earlier, but that’s rather coincidental more than anything else. If DDP was given any time of a chance, which he wasn’t going to be when he was a WCW and with the amount of talent that flooded the roster, he could’ve had a solid main event run in the WWF. That’s not to say that he would’ve been a top guy, but given the depth of the roster at the time, he would’ve had a lot of solid opponents to work with so it probably isn’t unreasonable to guess he could’ve had a six month tenure as a part of the title picture.
As an example of how the business has changed and the evolution of the dynamics based on the mistakes of the past, when a former AEW talent has made their debut in the WWE, management brings out the red carpet for them so to speak to be able to present them in the best manner possible, which makes sense because if they are under contract, they have the potential to draw money for the organization.
What do you think? Share your thoughts, opinions, feedback, and anything else that was raised on Twitter @PWMania and Facebook.com/PWMania.
Until next week
-Jim LaMotta
Email [email protected] | You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, & Threads @jimlamotta89
