SummerSlam (2003)

The 2003 SummerSlam was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). It was the 16th annual SummerSlam, and took place on August 24, 2003, at the America West Arena in Phoenix, Arizona, United States, held for wrestlers from the promotion's Raw and SmackDown! brand divisions. Seven professional wrestling matches were set on the event's supercard, a scheduling of multiple high-level matches. The first main event, which was for Raw, was an Elimination Chamber match in which Triple H defeated Chris Jericho, Goldberg, Kevin Nash, Randy Orton, and Shawn Michaels to retain the World Heavyweight Championship. In the other main event, which was for SmackDown!, Kurt Angle, the defending WWE Champion, defeated Brock Lesnar in a standard wrestling match. The undercard included a bout from Raw in which Kane defeated Rob Van Dam in a No Holds Barred match, and Eddie Guerrero retained SmackDown!'s United States Championship against Chris Benoit, Rhyno, and Tajiri. There was also a match that occurred on the Sunday Night Heat pre-show. The event marked the second time the Elimination Chamber format was used by WWE; the first was at Survivor Series 2002. SummerSlam grossed over US$715,000 ticket sales from an attendance of 16,113, and received about 415,000 pay-per-view buys, more than the following year's event. This event helped WWE increase its pay-per-view revenue by $6.2 million from the previous year.