Worth checking out....

Going through my DVD collection again tonight for wrestling events I haven't seen in a while, and I was pleasantly surprised by.... No Mercy 2001.

This was towards the end of the infamous InVasion storyline, and I guess I had convinced myself that pretty much everything from that time was crap. Not so! If you can get past the numerous set of titles and the overall failure of the story, it's actually a recent decent PPV.

This starts off with a well-above average tag team match involving The Hardyz and Hurricane and Lance Storm. Even Jeff is doing a decent job, so you can tell the footage is dated.

Next -- and this may be the most shocking of them all -- Test and Kane have a very good match with the entire crowd into it.

The Torrie Wilson-Stacy Keibler "lingerie match" was nothing you haven't seen a zillion times before, but at least it had an actual storyline to it (eg something that wasn't just slapped together at the last second).

The Edge-Christian ladder match wasn't an all-time classic, but it had said great moments. Very hard to get used to Christian with the long stringy hair and Bohemian Rhapsody-style theme music, even though it was less than four years ago.

Next was The Dudleyz versus Big Show and Tajiri.... okay, I guess not all of them were going to be good bouts. But the footage of Spike Dudley getting drunk in WWF New York more than made up for this.

The Undertaker squashed Booker T next. The scary thing is that absolutely nothing has changed for either guys in the past four years....

Then you have the classic Rock vs. Chris Jericho match for the WCW title. If you don't remember the backstory to this one is where Jericho "couldn't win the big one" and he actually does here, thanks to an extremely generous Rock. I could watch this match over and over again, it's that good.

The main event was Steve Austin (representing The Alliance) vs. Kurt Angle (representing the WWF) vs. RVD (Alliance but possibly aligned with Vince McMahon). While it doesn't come close to the previous match, its an excellent example of what all three of these guys were capable of when motivated.

Again -- definitely worth checking out if you've never seen it before (or, in my case, if you'd forgotten how good a show it was).