WWE Survivor Series 2002

WWE Survivor Series 2002

New York, New York - November 2002

CHAMPIONSHIP RUNDOWN: Coming into tonight's show, the WWE Championship is held by Brock Lesnar while the World Heavyweight Championship is around the waist of Triple H. The Cruiserweight Champion is Jamie Noble and the Women's Champion is Trish Stratus. The World Tag Team Champions are Edge and Rey Mysterio, while the WWE Tag Team Champions are Chris Jericho and Christian (though, that fact is never brought up). At this time, there was no Intercontinental Champion as the title had been unified with Triple H's World Heavyweight Championship.

COMMENTATORS: For RAW, we have Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler, while Smackdown's matches are called by Michael Cole and Tazz


After a lengthy, lengthy sabbatical from the WWE early aughts viewing schedule, I pick up today with Survivor Series 2002. The show begins with a video package promoting Brock Lesnar's title defense against Big Show and Paul Heyman's doubts about whether or not The Beast can defeat the largest athlete in the world. Tacked on is an explanation for tonight's historic main event - the first-ever Elimination Chamber for the World Heavyweight Championship.

The show kicks off with a 6-man Elimination Tables match pitting Bubba Ray Dudley, Spike Dudley, and Jeff Hardy against Rico and Three Minute Warning. As expected, this match is all about the table spots and while not every one is pretty (there are quite a few noticeable botches throughout the match), there are several moments that earn and deserve the "Holy Shit" chants they receive. The end of the match doesn't make much sense (where are Spike and Jeff?), but it does deliver the kind of Feel Good Moment that the WWE wisely understood the New York fans were going to go crazy over. Fun opener with some sick spots out of Jeff Hardy and "Jamal," aka Umaga, specifically. (3/5)

Ugh...Stacy Keebler welcomes the band Saliva from The World, the WWE's failed Times Square restaurant. Spliced into their performance are clips building up the rest of tonight's card, but, man, this is just some terribly awful shit. In 2001, this band sold a million records.

SmackDown's commentators takeover for the next match, a Cruiserweight Championship defense from Jamie Noble against Billy Kidman. Solid back-and-forth with the crowd appreciating the efforts of both men. Move-for-move, it is hard to dislike this match as both guys have such crisp, impressive offense, but there's something to be said for having your moveset match your character. Noble, the King of the Trailer Park, wrestles like Ultimo Dragon, while Kidman is void of any discernible personality trait at all aside from knowing every variation of a facedrop there is. Again, the moves on display are almost universally breathtaking, but that doesn't mean the match itself is particularly great. Plus, running well under 10 minutes, the finish comes off as far less significant than it really should. (2.5/5)

Silly backstage segment with the World Tag Team Champions, Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit.

In a segment I definitely don't recall, we get an "F-View" of Victoria. Was this like G-TV?

Next up is a bit of a rarity of a match - Victoria vs. Trish Stratus for Stratus' Women's Championship in a hardcore match. From the very start, Victoria goes after Stratus with a choke and then grabs a broom for a pretty decent exchange. Credit must be given to Stratus for several of the bumps she takes here, working very hard to give the match the needed realism to get the gimmick over. Victoria, meanwhile, shows why she was considered by most to be the division's ace for much of her run in the company, getting her nose busted open, taking a nasty spill to the outside at one point, and taking the driver's seat whenever the match needed things to slow down and tell a story. While the athleticism and fundamentals of today's top women put what we see here to shame (the pinfalls are almost all lazily done and there are at least a handful of outright botches from Stratus sprinkled in), this still ranks as one of the division's best ever matches, in no small part due to the unique nature of the contest. (3.5/5)

The WWE Championship is on the line next with Brock Lesnar defending his title against The Big Show. The MSG crowd is fully behind Lesnar, not dissimilar to the way the Long Island crowd had come up to support him at SummerSlam a few months prior. A confounding match if ever there was one. From the booking (and, more specifically, duration) of the match it seems obvious that the WWE had little faith in Big Show, who looks to be at one of his heaviest weights, being able to compete for more than a handful of minutes. Still, they opt to use this match to screw Lesnar and turn him face in the process, even if it means delivering one of the worst title matches I think I've ever seen. The crowd pops for what they get, but what they get doesn't add up to very much. A half-point for each time Lesnar did something insane to the 450-pounder. (1.5/5)


Edge and Rey Mysterio defend the WWE Tag Team Championships against Chris Benoit and Kurt Angle and Los Guerreros in an elimination-style triangle match. As expected, this one is quite good with lots of top-notch sequences showcasing the chemistry all six performers shared with each other. Mysterio might get the most "screen time," but its not like anyone else is half-assing it or upstaged. The eliminations may not be 100% clean, but they're not "cheap" either, the match delivering satisfying enough nearfalls that when it is time to wrap up the match, one gets the impression that the best team on this night got a deserved victory. Like Meltzer at the Wrestling Observer, I'm not going to overrate this one, but its certainly above average and, possibly, the match of the night. (3.5/5)

Harvard graduate Chris Nowitski comes out and cuts a promo on the New York crowd. He's then joined by Matt Hardy who does the same. This is all a set-up for the WWE return of Scott Steiner, who gets a massive response from the crowd. Steiner is in tremendous shape and he (wisely) keeps his comments to a bare minimum. Still, one has to wonder if it was the best idea to debut him as a babyface when Steiner's most successful singles run in WCW was as the company's brash, unapologetically un-PC villain. The first half of this segment is almost unwatchable, but seeing Steiner in a WWE ring, handing out suplexes, is fun. (+0.5)

Shawn Michaels is backstage, but his pre-match interview with Terri Runnels is interrupted by an RNN News Break. I had never seen one of these segments, so the novelty value is pretty awesome for me. Network Nugget of Novelty. (+0.5)

Main event time - the first ever Elimination Chamber match, with Triple H defending his World Heavyweight Championship against Shawn Michaels, Rob Van Dam, Kane, Booker T, and Chris Jericho. RVD and Triple H start things off, the former ECW star taking the advantage when he back body drops Triple H onto the steel floor surrounding the ring. Triple H being "game" to bumping into the steel repeatedly is admirable - almost as if, this stipulation match being his idea, he wanted to prove he wasn't "above" losing some skin first. Jericho comes in second and immediately goes after Van Dam, but the fan favorite holds his own, connecting with a springboard back kick and then, in a nifty spot, springboarding off the cage itself with a crossbody. Booker T comes in fourth to a nice pop, getting the Spinerooni in after cleaning house. Van Dam launches himself from the top of one of the cells and hits a splash on Triple H below, the match coming "full circle" with the two original entrants in the spotlight. Van Dam's big offense proves fruitless, though, when Booker T eliminates him from the match, drawing huge boos from the crowd and momentarily deflating the match. Having been the match's shining star since the first moments, it was a questionable decision to get rid of Mr. Monday Night. Kane comes in next to a respectable roar from the crowd, immediately dishing out punishment to all the other combatants. In an outstanding spot, Kane tosses Jericho through one of the plexiglass walls, splitting open his forehead. Booker T gets eliminated soon after and we're down to three left in the ring with Shawn Michaels itching to join the fray as the final entrant. Speaking of Michaels, his ring gear on this night is vomit-inducing and, unsurprisingly, a look I don't believe he'd repeat much after. Despite coming in with loads of energy, Michaels can't overcome Kane's size, the Big Red Machine staying in control and connecting with three chokeslams in a row. His attempt at a tombstone proves to be his downfall, though, as he ends up eating a superkick, a Pedigree, and a Lionsault in rapid succession. An HBK chant breaks out once the heels start ganging up on him, Jericho taking particular delight in the methodical hurting they put on the Showstopper. A bloody mess by this point, Michaels miraculously gets a flurry of offense in but can't sustain it for long. Jericho hits his Lionsault for two and the war wages on before we finally see the uneasy alliance between Helmsley and Jericho come to an end, the heels coming to blows for the first time in the match. Jericho is able to lock in the Walls of Jericho, but Triple H won't tap. Michaels hits his Sweet Chin Music, though, to knock Y2J out of the match. Minutes later, Triple H seems to have it sewn up, catapulting HBK through one of the remaining cell walls (a spot that would've probably come off even better had Kane not done something similar to Jericho earlier in the match). Triple H tries to hit his Pedigree on the steel floor, but Michaels reverses it into a catapult that sends the Game into the cage. Michaels climbs onto one of the chambers and hits his signature elbow drop and the match goes into its final sequence, which is more tedious than suspenseful. The post-match celebration fell flat to me as well, Jim Ross goes overboard selling this as a historic moment, and while it was a big deal in the career of Michaels (and Triple H), its hard to ignore the feeling that this was two buddies playing keep-away with the World Championship while arguably more over talent, namely Van Dam, were stuck in the slightly-below-main event level. Had this been built around RVD overcoming the odds from the start, I'm guessing the crowd would have cared more about the belabored closing stretch. As a spectacle, a fine match, and all participants work hard to get the structure and stipulation itself over, but not going to make my personal shortlist of all-time great matches. (3.5/5)


WWE Survivor Series 2002 currently has a remarkable score of 9.25-out-of-10 on wrestling information site Cagematch.net, touted by one reviewer as the greatest edition of the Series ever. I wouldn't go quite that far. While there are several matches bordering on great, none quite achieve classic status, the Tag Team Championship coming closest. The main event, while historically important, starts off promisingly, but then devolves into a retread of the already-bloated Triple H/Shawn Michaels match from Badd Blood a few months prior. The show offers some surprisingly entertaining moments in unexpected places (Scott Steiner's debut, the violent Womens' Championship streetfight, Randy Orton appearing in his pre-Evolution egomaniac gimmick) and the WWE deserves credit for wisely streamlining this event to only feature 6 matches, but when one of those matches is the weak, barely-there Lesnar/Big Show, its hard not to think of this as not so much the best Survivor Series that ever was but the rather the best Clash of the Champions that ever wasn't. Despite a Kwang-o-meter score of 3.08-out-of-5, I'm judging this one as a must-see for completists and fans of this specific period of the WWE timeline....

FINAL RATING - High Risk Maneuver