In the late 90's to early 2000's, WWE's international shows were very different. They were pretty much exclusive to that market. At this time WWE would produce two pay per view events in England every year that were exclusively aired on Sky Sports in the UK. While these events were essentially televised house shows as rarely did anything consequential happen, occasionally you'd see something actually interesting, like at Rebellion 2001, where the main event was Stone Cold Steve Austin vs The Rock, or at the same event in 2002, where Brock Lesnar defended the WWE title against a Edge, who at the time was a few years away from being a main eventer, in a match that no right to be as good as it was.
Earlier in 2002 WWE had held a similarly local event to this on August 10th in Melbourne Australia, where they would pack over fifty six thousand fans into Colonial Stadium. For some context, That would be a higher attendance than the following years Wrestlemania 19 from Seattle, and three times higher than Summerslam 2002 which took place in the same month.
Before I get to the show itself let's go back to where it began. The event was first announced by WWE in December 2001, where the company laid out all of its international tours for 2002, also including two European tours and one through Japan, Singapore and Malaysia. Before this WWE had only ever gone to Australia twice, touring in 1985 and again in '86. Back in those days WWE would tour an A-team and a B-team depending on the market they were running, and given that the Junkyard Dog was the main name advertised, you can tell which was heading to Oz. If this '86 card that I found is anything to go by, the fans in Australia weren't exactly getting the A team on the second tour either. This tour shirt I found on a Facebook post gives a better idea of the wrestlers involved in the 86 tour. I also found an advertisement for a 1987 tour that was cancelled for reasons I couldn't find.
In the March 4th 2002 Wrestling Observer Dave Meltzer reported that WWE had at one point been planning to expand their pay per view schedule to twenty four events a year, but were now stripping that back to sixteen. He noted that the first month to have two events was planned to be August, with one being Summerslam and the other being the Melbourne show. In early April Jim Ross in his Ross Report column referred to the event as a pay per view so this must have still been the plan then, but this is never mentioned again in any future Observer issues, so I don't know why it wasn't a pay per view in the end. Ross also strongly suggested that it would be a Smackdown branded event, which was very important in 2002, as this was during the time of the first brand split, when the two products actually felt different from each other. Raw was often the edgy brand where ill advised necrophilia angles could happen while Smackdown often focused on it's wrestling.
On April 11th, WWE held a press conference in Melbourne featuring Vince McMahon along with Mark Henry and Stacy Keibler to hype up the event. At this time there hadn't been any specific roster announcements, but Vince heavily implied that the biggest stars of the show would the The Rock, Triple H and Hulk Hogan. It was here that Vince announced that the show wouldn't be on pay per view, but he did say that it might be shown on television in Australia, and later released on home video which it later was. To this day I've never seen a concrete reason for why Global Warning was never on pay per view, but Observer newsletters later in the year have reports about WWE failing to secure broadcasting deals in Australia, so maybe they just couldn't find a provider in the country to carry it? Thats just my guess though.
Everything seemed to go seamless right up until the week of the event, when the Aussie version of the August 5th Raw broadcast included Jim Ross informing them that Hulk Hogan would not be attending, despite him being part of the advertising for the event. This caused a lot of fans to be upset, even going to the point of wanting refunds. Remember it was a different time where Hogan had recently stolen Wrestlemania X8 with the Rock. The reason JR gave was that Hogan had been injured by Brock Lesnar who would replace him on the tour, but in reality he had been battling long standing knee and back problems. He was even asked if he would go to Australia and not wrestle, but Hogan declined fearing how much pain the long flights would put him through. Of the three biggest stars that had been advertised, only The Rock was still good to go, as Triple H was nursing an elbow injury and he was unlikely to make it back in time. Despite this the main event ended up being a bit of an anomaly for a few reasons that I'll get to. In the same newsletter Dave Meltzer noted that ringside seats had sold for seven hundred and fifty dollars. They also held a fan fest for eight thousand attendees, and a black-tie charity event. During the home video release we would get to see highlights from both of these.
Hulk Hogan would eventually make it to Australia in 2009 as the main attraction of the Hulkamania: Let the Battle Begin tour. This consisted of four atrocious looking cards that were main evented each night by Hulk Hogan defeating Ric Flair, who was wrestling his first matches since his Wrestlemania 24 retirement the year before. The shows were mostly filled with ex-WWE talents, and also included the last matches of Umaga, who would sadly pass away a week after the tour.
For many years the only way to watch Global Warning was on the VHS and DVD releases, until 2018 when a two hour version was added to the WWE Network. Upon watching the show you can immediately tell it's a Smackdown branded show, as while Stephanie McMahon welcomes us to the show all I could focus on was the same piped in crowd pops you used to hear on Smackdown back in the day when it was taped on Tuesdays. If you heard an example there it means I got it past the YouTube police.
From a match stand point the show is bookended with bloodline members, as the first match is Rikishi versus Rico in a 'kiss my ass' match. It did make me laugh thinking about the parents who brought kids to the show and heard that for the first time. It likely won't shock you to hear that Rikishi won this fairly quickly, and post match would dance with two of the most 2002 looking kids. That's not a diss by the way, I was one too.
Throughout the show we see video packages of the wrestlers in Australia, starting with Jamie Noble and Nidia learning to surf. Some of these are really fun with the best involving Kurt Angle, Christian and Lance Storm visiting the zoo, with Kurt acting like he was looking at aliens especially when he saw a giraffe. Kurt Angle catching attention for looking bemused? No. It only dawned on me afterwards that it was slightly kayfabe breaking to see your American hero hanging out with Storm and Christian, who were teaming as the Un-Americans at the time, though to be fair Angle did berate them all the way through. Speaking of kayfabe breaking at one point Kurt calls Christian "Jay" and that slipped through the edit.
Another highlight of this show is Edge versus Chris Jericho. As I mentioned earlier, in 2002 Edge was quite a long way from becoming the Rated R Superstar, but he was definitely impressing as a singles star. He would miss most of 2003 due to being sidelined with a neck injury, but before that he was part of the famous Smackdown six who were the ones to watch on the blue brand. As Edge making his entrance with a camcorder filming the crowd, I realised this must have been the third largest crowd Edge had ever performed in front of at this point in his career, behind Wrestlemania 17 and 18.
One match that didn't make it onto any release as best I can tell is Reverend D-Von teaming with Deacon Batista against Mark Henry and a very young in his career Randy Orton, who made his debut in April 2002. Even though only the live crowd saw this match, it's interesting that one of his early WWE matches was in front of over fifty thousand people. Orton and Henry would even defeat D-Von, and his future Evolution team mate.
I mentioned earlier that the main event was a bit of an anomaly, and that's because it was a match of many firsts. Fans who weren't aware of this card might have thought that Brock Lesnar's first shot at the WWE title, and his first and only match with the Rock was at Summerslam 2002. They might also think that his first match with Triple H came a decade later at Summerslam 2012. All of these are incorrect, as the Rock would defend the Undisputed WWE title in a triple threat match against Triple H and Brock Lesnar. Post match after the Rock retained his title, Triple H and Rock would eject Brock from the ring, and would both hit the peoples elbow on Paul Heyman to end the night. Again it's rather weird to see Triple H being a good guy while at this time he was in a bitter and violent feud with Shawn Michaels. Once Triple H left, The Rock would thank the fans for attending, and end the night on the mic.
On August 17th 2002, WWE Confidential would air highlights of their tour of Australia. Apart from B-roll shots of the wrestlers mid travelling, there isn't really anything that wasn't on the network version of the event. For many fans this would be the only footage they would see until the network upload sixteen years later.
Ever since Global Warning, WWE has held at least one event in Australia every single year until 2020, for reasons you might be able to work out. *** You might have noticed an outlier in these listings, that being the 2016 NXT tour. Around this time the black and gold version NXT as a brand was strong enough to have it's own international tours, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan and a few tours of the UK, some linked to the long running music festival Download. NXT even aired a match from the Melbourne event on their weekly WWE network show, where Shinsuke Nakamura retained his NXT title against Samoa Joe in a steel cage match. I know this might divide opinion, but I'm just pointing out that it's been a fair few years since NXT was popular enough to do this, and that's coming from someone who travelled down the country hell bent on attending one of NXT's first UK shows.***
The upcoming PLE will be their first time back in Australia since their 2019 three show tour. According to an article I found from Australian Fox News in December 2017, it seems that there were talks to bring Global Warning back in the following October, only this time to the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This event that they are referring to would eventually be known as Super Showdown, a show main evented by Triple H with Shawn Michaels versus the Undertaker with Kane. This random sounding match was on the way to their much more infamous tag team match at Crown Jewell in the following month. Sorry for reminding you about that one...
Following Super Showdown, WWE announced an attendance of seventy thousand fans, but this was disputed by the Wrestling Observer which claimed a more accurate figure would be sixty two thousand. Whichever number is correct they still toppled Global Warning. Optus stadium in Perth where Elimination Chamber is set to be held has a capacity between sixty and seventy thousand depending on the event, so it'll be interesting to see how many fans are present, but also what the giant cage looks like inside a venue that big.
Sources:
Global Warning: https://network.wwe.com/video/83259
85 TV ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnw189E6GL8
86 TV ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4XFXccM-6w
86 TV ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpS86c6F44w
86 tour FB post: https://www.facebook.com/waprowrestling/posts/2617308168342979/?paipv=0&eav=AfZSFpnVyyHmzY7bVXTineU4XrQc_SFd-Xj0A-FSHtFLK35yrgmzoulZP4NQpca7B2g&_rdr
86 House show https://prowrestling.fandom.com/wiki/WWF_House_Show_(Sep_5,_86%27_no.2)
WWE Press release April 11th 2002 https://corporate.wwe.com/news/company-news/2002/04-11-2002
Potential 2018 PPV https://www.foxsports.com.au/wwe/wwe-holding-discussions-over-wrestling-global-warning-tour-ppv-event-at-mcg-in-2018-report/news-story/507a197a0df2953421e7c6381945fed5
Observer Dec 31st 01 - Show announcement - https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/december-31-2001-observer-newsletter-2001-retrospective-more-97426
Observer March 4th 02 PPC plans - https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/march-4-2002-observer-newsletter-pride-goes-head-head-wwa-97455
Observer April 8th 02 PPV mention - https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/april-8-2002-observer-newsletter-wwf-business-year-review-more-97470
Observer April 22nd 02 - Press conference https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/april-22-2002-observer-newsletter-relationship-between-wrestling-and
Observer Aug 12th 02 - Hogan out https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/august-12-2002-observer-newsletter-messiah-victim-home-invasion-attack
Observer August 26th 02 Show report - https://members.f4wonline.com/wrestling-observer-newsletter/august-26-2002-observer-newsletter-hall-fame-preview-tons-news-97528
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