The Invasion (professional wrestling)
To bolster the ranks of WCW (in lieu of big WCW names), some WWF wrestlers (such as Stone Cold Steve Austin) defected and joined the Alliance. Although both WWF and WCW featured talents who had worked for both companies, wrestlers such as Stone Cold had their greatest success in WWF and were seen by fans as WWF wrestlers. Kurt Angle had never wrestled a match for either WCW or ECW, but was a main player for the Alliance towards the end of the storyline. In fact, despite both being viewed as prominent WWF wrestlers, they ended up not only being main players of the Alliance, with Stone Cold being the leader that carried championship gold, but also playing a bigger role than the WCW and ECW stars during the Invasion. For example, the final two Alliance members were Stone Cold and Angle at Survivor Series 2001—Booker T and Rob Van Dam were eliminated only after Shane McMahon.