Did you know that the Intercontinental Championship was once unified with the World Heavyweight Championship? Or that the WCW Tag Team Championship and WWE World Tag Team Championship were unified on two separate occasions three months apart? Following WWE's acquisition of WCW in 2001, there was an influx of championships from the Atlanta-based organization. Over the following two years, WWE's title scene went through more changes than it ever had in the company's history. In total, seven championships were retired, two were reinstated and two were created completely from scratch. If you were a WWE fan during this "Era of Unification," you might recall some of the convoluted events that brought these titles together and then tore them apart. Still, WWE spent weeks attempting to untangle the complex history of this landmark period. By the time we were done with our research, our heads were spinning and our eyes were glazed over from pouring through Titan Towers' record books. Thankfully, we think we finally have this highly complicated age in sports-entertainment history figured out. The unification of the WWE Light Heavyweight Championship and WCW Cruiserweight Championship-The first attempt to condense the number of titles in WWE did not go quite as easily as planned. On the July 30, 2001, edition of Raw, X-Pac, the WWE Light Heavyweight Champion, defeated Billy Kidman, the WCW Cruiserweight Champion, to unify the two titles. X-Pac lost the Light Heavyweight Championship to Tajiri on the very next edition of Raw, but unified the titles once again by defeating The Japanese Buzzsaw at SummerSlam. The championships were united for nearly two months until Billy Kidman regained the Cruiserweight Title and then promptly lost it to Tajiri. The intense grappler from the Far East was set to face X-Pac to merge the titles once and for all at Survivor Series, but X-Pac went on the shelf with an injury and the bout was canceled. When WCW disbanded following Survivor Series, X-Pac's Light Heavyweight Championship was abandoned in favor of Tajiri's Cruiserweight Title -- a championship with a significantly richer lineage -- which adopted the WWE name. The unification of the WWE Intercontinental Championship and WCW United States Championship-After the Light Heavyweight/Cruiserweight debacle, the next attempt at streamlining the championship picture went far more smoothly. Survivor Series 2001 was presented as a "Winner Take All" event, and was the official ending to the Invasion that had dominated WWE throughout the summer and autumn. Two weeks before the event, Edge -- the recently crowned King of the Ring -- lost the WWE Intercontinental Championship to Test on Raw. One week later, Edge won the WCW United States Championship and then defeated Test at Survivor Series to unify the titles. With WCW's demise at the event, the 26-year-history of the United States Championship was retired in favor of WWE's Intercontinental Title. But as much of the WWE Universe knows, that was not the last time fans would see the United States Championship. The unification of the WWE World Tag Team Championship and WCW Tag Team Championship-The attempts to unify each organization's tag team championship proved to be nearly as difficult as the merging of the Light Heavyweight and Cruiserweight Championships. The Undertaker & Kane won the WCW Tag Team Championship on the Aug. 9, 2001, edition of SmackDown. On the same night, WCW competitors Diamond Dallas Page & Kanyon defeated The APA to become WWE World Tag Team Champions. The two new titleholding teams met in a Steel Cage Match at SummerSlam to rectify this bizarro universe by unifying the titles. The Brothers of Destruction emerged victorious at SummerSlam, but soon lost both sets of titles to individual teams. Over the following two months, the WWE World Tag Team Championships were briefly carried by the odd couple tandem of Chris Jericho & The Rock, and both sets of titles were held by the teams of Booker T & Test, The Hardy Boyz and The Dudley Boyz. Finally, The Dudleys defeated their longtime adversaries The Hardy Boyz in a Steel Cage Match to unify the championships at Survivor Series. Bubba and D-Von are the only tag team in history to hold the titles of the three major sports-entertainment organizations -- WWE, WCW and ECW The unification of the WWE Championship and WCW Championship The unification of the Intercontinental, European and Hardcore Championships The creation of the World Heavyweight Championship The creation of the WWE Tag Team Championship The unification of the World Heavyweight Championship and Intercontinental Championship & reinstatement of the Intercontinental Championship The reinstatement of the United States Championship The continuing evolution of WWE's championships

• published: 06 Dec 2013
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