RATINGS CLOSED FOR RTM 92
(BIG Rate the Moment - 93)
Shane McMahon appears on WCW Monday Nitro while still airing on a Ted Turner-owned network.
In early 2001, WCW was purchased by the WWF in a landmark deal that unified the tops of professional wrestling in the United States. The Ted Turner-owned WCW organization was nearly out of time, since in the post-Time/Warner merger days WCW had fallen on hard times, and TNT, the network that ran WCW's flagship program Monday Nitro, had refused to renew Nitro. So, with only one final live show remaining on their television agreement, Vince McMahon purchased WCW, so when longtime WCW fans tuned into the final edition of WCW Monday Nitro, they got a big surprise: Vince McMahon sitting there with a cat-eating grin on his face, delivering a message about how he had just filed paperwork to purchase WCW. The best analogy for the surreality of the moment that I can think of is this: imagine the CBS Evening News opening with Tom Brokaw sitting there with a big smile on his face, announcing that he was now running CBS News. But the weirdness wasn't over. Nitro, WCW's flagship program, and Raw, the WWF's flagship program, ran head-to-head on Monday nights, so Vince McMahon was appearing on the two primary competing wrestling programs live at the same time. At the end of the program, the two shows, which had bitterly competed for so long, actually began to air the same exact footage, in which Vince McMahon strolled into a WWF ring and announced to the world that WCW was his. Not so fast! Vince's son Shane McMahon strolls out at the end of the final WCW Monday Nitro, stating that he had flown out to Nitro, stopped his father's purchase from going through... and purchased the organization himself! And thus closed one of the greatest wrestling programs in history, for good. Of course, this high point was followed by a badly botched "WCW invasion" angle, in which lesser names like Hugh Morrus were expected to be seen as big threats to the WWF, but the angle kicked off with perhaps the most surreal moment of all time.