Ethan Page Names Rock vs. Booker T His Most Underrated SummerSlam Match

Ethan Page has been talking wrestling history again, and this time he’s shining a light on a SummerSlam bout he feels doesn’t get nearly enough credit. During a recent conversation, the AEW star singled out the singles match between The Rock and Booker T at SummerSlam 2001 as one of the most underrated matches in the event’s long history.

What stuck with Page most, though, wasn’t just the quality of the match — it was the quirky overlap in finishing moves between the two legends. Both Booker T and The Rock built their finishing sequences around a spinout slam, and Page admitted the similarity used to genuinely bother him as a fan.

“I couldn’t believe that The Rock and Booker T had the same finisher,” Page said. “It used to drive me insane that Booker would drop to his knees.”

That small mechanical difference — Booker T dropping to a knee before delivering his spinout version versus The Rock’s more upright Rock Bottom — became, in Page’s eyes, a distracting quirk rather than a minor variation. It’s the kind of hyper-specific wrestling nerdery that fans and performers alike love to debate, and it speaks to how closely Page has studied the craft going back to his formative years as a viewer.

The Rock and Booker T were frequent opponents in the early 2000s, with their program spilling across pay-per-views as WWE leaned on Booker’s heel run and The Rock’s box-office drawing power. Their SummerSlam 2001 encounter came during a stretch when The Rock was juggling a packed in-ring schedule with his rapidly ascending Hollywood career, while Booker T was in the midst of establishing himself as a top-tier singles competitor following the folding of WCW into WWE’s roster earlier that year.

For a match to get labeled “underrated” more than two decades later says something about how it’s aged compared to the show’s more heavily remembered main events from that era. SummerSlam 2001 is often remembered for its stacked upper card, and it’s easy for a hard-hitting mid-card clash to get lost in the shuffle of nostalgia conversations that tend to gravitate toward the biggest names in the biggest spots.

Page’s comments are a reminder that wrestling’s current generation of performers grew up dissecting even the smallest details of the matches that shaped them — right down to whether a legend bent his knee before hitting his finisher. It’s a fun bit of insight into how a modern star like Page views the era that helped inspire his own in-ring style, and it’s the kind of granular observation that tends to resurface in wrestling nostalgia discussions for years to come.