Why Triple H and D-Generation X were told by WWE to invade a WCW show in a tank

These days, it's the Wednesday Night Wars between All Elite Wrestling and NXT fans love to watch.

But the Monday Night Wars in the 90s and early noughties between WCW and WWE are legendary.

The stakes were legitimately high - it was life and death for those promotions at some stages.

In April 1998, Triple H had refreshed D-Generation X following WrestleMania. With Shawn Michaels gone, Road Dogg, Billy Gunn and X-Pac joined Chyna alongside The Game to create one of the most important stables in WWE history.

The tide had turned for WWE in the ratings leading up to WrestleMania 14 after 83 consecutive weeks of defeat and some of that turnaround could be attributed to the fantastic use of Mike Tyson.

However, WCW were able to continuously draw millions of viewers and the war was still raged.

War is the appropriate word here, as on April 27, DX drove a TANK right up to WCW's show while both we're live on air.

It's an historic moment with plenty of context. So how did it happen?

"WCW had this mentality, where they wanted to attack us, but it wasn’t about them doing well, it was about us doing bad," Triple H told WWE.com.

"If we booked Hampton, they’d be 20 minutes down the road at the Scope [in Norfolk]. Mr. McMahon was pissed. This was the fifth time it happened."

Today, WWE has an army of writers for each main roster show. Back then, there was maybe five guys overall who were involved in the writing process. [Chairman] Vince McMahon, Ed Ferrera, Bruce Prichard, Ed Koskey and Vince Russo.

"I’ll never forget it," Russo started. "I’m sitting at my desk and I’m thinking to myself, You know what, I’m just going to write down, for the hell of it, ‘DX drives a rocket launcher right up to the building.’”

As is often the case with WWE, an outlandish idea needs to tread carefully and many of DX didn't know about what they were doing that day until they did it.

"Nobody knew, just me, Mr. McMahon and Russo," Triple H explained. "[X-Pac and The New Age Outlaws] came up to me and said, 'There’s a bunch of military stuff outside, like a tank. Is that for us? What are we doing?' I said, 'I can’t tell you yet, but it’s going to be awesome. Trust me.'”

"Just to be clear, we went down there with no clue what we were doing," The Game continued.

It was a volatile situation between companies at the time and certainly a rivalry, but add live TV into the mix and it really made the whole situation very unpredictable.

"You’ve got to understand, WCW has a live show going on at the time," Russo explained. "We have no idea what’s going to happen. We don’t know if [WCW boss] Eric Bischoff is going to send 10 guys out there to beat the crap out of them.

"We don’t know if he’s going to call the cops and they’re going to get arrested. But that was the appeal of it, the unpredictability. How in God’s name can you turn that off?"

Up until that point, WWE had scarcely mentioned WCW on their television show. WCW had no problem taunting WWE.

As you can imagine, the site of WWE's hottest stable turning up to WCW's tapings drove the fans outside the building crazy.

"[The fans at Nitro] went crazy," Billy Gunn recalled. "I think they were just as shocked as we were that we would actually do that. They were chanting 'DX' and chanting for WWE, anything other than what they were there to see."

"That was the cool part," Road Dogg added. "It was the Monday Night War. Everybody who was a fan of our industry was watching both shows. It wasn’t like we were strangers pulling up. It was a really cool energy."

For WCW's part, they had no idea what was going on. They weren't in on the plan.

"I drove right by them on my way to the building. In our minds, it was just some crazy fans out there in army gear. We weren’t paying any attention to them," WCW wrestler Kevin Nash said.

"I didn’t hear about it until it actually happened," Booker T added.

As DX approached the building WCW were running Nitro in, a huge shutter came down at a rear entrance stopping them in their tracks.

"I wanted to [go to the arena door] first," X-Pac said. "I didn’t want to tip everyone off that we were there. [The producer] had different ideas."

"We should have tried to go in the building first," Triple H recalled. "They shut the door because we’d been there for a little bit. They knew we were there. If we’d gone right away, we probably would have got in, which would have been phenomenal."

Despite the rivalry, a lot of these guys were friends. In particular, Triple H was great friends with Scott Hall and Nash and they were collectively known as The Kliq with Shawn Michaels and X-Pac.

Once The Kliq realised what was going on, they wanted to let their friends in the building.

"There was this 30-foot door," Nash started. I’m trying to get this old man to open it up. Me and Scott are there and we’re thinking, 'This is going to be amazing.' We were going to go off Nitro and onto Raw.

"Nobody’s going to get in trouble, we were just going to walk out there and be their buddies for a second. But the old man wouldn’t lift the thing up."

Not everybody was sure things would be fine if DX had gotten in though...

"I actually was not hoping they would keep it open, because I didn’t know what would happen," Road Dogg said, who is also a former marine.

"I knew there were four or five of us and 100 of them. I think it’s wise they shut the door for everybody’s benefit. We planned on going all the way in there. If we had gotten in, this is a rough and tumble industry, it might have gotten physical. That’s just me being honest."

"I didn’t think they were going to get in," Booker T said in response to Road Dogg. "I think they were outnumbered. I think we could have taken those four guys if we had to. They made their point, coming to our town, our building on our night."

Road Dogg agreed, adding "But it would have been great TV, even greater than it was already."

According to Gunn and Triple H, it was WCW management that killed the idea.

"I heard some other guys talking, they thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened in wrestling," Gunn said.

Triple H believed it was sour grapes on the part of WCW's management.

"They called the police and told them they were under attack by a militia group," he said. "I’m not kidding, 100 cop cars came with riot squads."

Bischoff insists he would have let it play out if he knew about the idea.

"I would have instructed Doug Dillinger to instruct his security crew to make sure that they could make their way to the ring. Because that would have been amazingly good TV on my network.

"There’s no way I would have had ten guys — Russo’s so full of s***. That’s just again, him making himself sound more dramatic, smarter, more creative.

"We had no idea they were coming. Had I known they were coming, I would have invited them into the ring. And we would have let the cards fall where they may.

"Because nothing would have happened. These guys wouldn’t have beat the s*** out of each other. They were all friends! The boys didn’t have a dog in the hunt. They could care less.”

Back at WWE's show that night, despite the friendships in some areas of the rivalry, that didn't speak for everyone.

JBL says the WWE were prepping for a retaliation from WCW.

"We had a friendly rivalry, we did have the time when they invaded from Norfolk, we invaded in the afternoon and we didn’t know what would happen, Jerry Brisco went around telling people to be ready so we were in the parking lot, we had Ken Shamrock and that’s about all we needed really.

"We had no idea what was going to happen, we were out there until Vince was leaving."

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