If you grew up a Stinger fan, then you’ll remember all the times his character got duped and double-crossed on TV. There was the time the Horsemen turned on him in 1990. Then the time Luger turned on him. And the other time Luger turned on him. Then the time Flair turned on him again to reform the Horsemen. Being the goodhearted hero who got double-crossed anyway was part of Sting’s charm and a critical part of his gimmick, even. Because no matter what, he’d still just be a good guy and we’d never stop cheering him.
Since Sting got to WWE, the narrative has been that he’s a bitter WCW holdout who stood in the rafters during the Monday Night War, fighting for the company’s supremacy. But Sting was so much more. Sting was the ultimate good guy. His character was a kid’s superhero dream; face paint, the scream and the patented Stinger Splash made him jump off the screen. He was just as dynamic as any WWE-created character. And he couldgo. Sting was always underrated as a wrestler, but in the early ’90s, he was as good as any top-tier talent. He had classics with Flair and Rick Rude. His tag match with Luger against the Steiners from SuperBrawl 1991 is one of the great unheralded tag matches of all-time. And Sting vs. Vader is one of the most perfect and best-wrestled feuds ever.
In the ring, Sting was as powerful as Luger. He was as agile as Steamboat and could lead a babyface comeback that’d make a Von Erich jealous. He had it all as a wrestler. But Sting was in WCW, meaning he’d never be Hulk Hogan or Ultimate Warrior. But if Sting had been under Vince McMahon’s thumb in his prime, he would have eclipsed Hogan and anyone else with the company. Just think: Warrior was a worse version of Sting who couldn’t wrestle nearly as well or form relatively coherent sentences, and he still managed to be a megastar.
But Sting was our thing. If we watched him, we knew his greatness. Hogan was a Kardashian, dolled up and manufactured into greatness. Sting was all natural. He woke up like this.
The thing about Sting, though, was that his behind-the-scenes persona matched his on-screen naiveté. I don’t know if Sting either wasn’t good at being a backstage politician or he just didn’t care enough. Either way, he always fell victim to being undermined by the big WCW entity.
And nobody did more to destroy Sting than Hulk Hogan.
Hulk Hogan’s major concern when getting to WCW was that he become the top dog, which in his mind meant eliminating the most popular guys in the company: Sting and Ric Flair. Flair was easy. All Hogan had to do was beat him a few months in a row to assert his dominance. Getting rid of Sting — a fellow good guy — was trickier. Here’s how Hogan did it:
On the night Hogan debuted, Sting was made to look like an idiot in losing the belt to Ric Flair (so Flair could lose it to Hogan). On Hogan’s first pay-per-view, Bash at the Beach ’94, Sting was injured and didn’t compete. On the next pay-per-view, Vader pinned Sting after wrestling a match against The Guardian Angel (Ray Traylor). The concept of the match was a triangle elimination match where a coin toss decides who gets to rest while the other two guys have a match. Logic would indicate the babyface lose the coin toss and have to wrestle both matches. Instead, Vader wrestled two matches, beating Sting in the second match and making him look like a dope. On the next pay-per-view, Sting showed up without face paint to simply watch Hogan vs. Flair because he wanted to be a part of the moment as a fan. Because Hogan and Flair were that much bigger than he is.
Still, when Sting and Hogan faced off on Nitro on November 1995, the crowd was unequivocally behind the WCW original. Despite every attempt to cool him off, Sting still showed up to work and was as over as anyone who tried to make him look worse on camera. About a year later, Sting went to the rafters, becoming the Crow gimmick that kept people tuned into Nitro. I’ve said it before, but while the history of the Monday Night War tells the story of Bischoff buying WWF talent and creating a mega-popular NWO, the real selling point for my friends and I was the three minutes each Monday where Sting would pop down from the rafters and beat people up. Sting was the driving force behind the Monday Night War and the big-picture story that kept us tuned in. And, as we know, that story ended with a travesty: Hogan and Bischoff decided that giving fans a suitable payoff to an 18-month story wouldn’t work. Instead, they’d ruin WCW with a Starrcade main-event that killed the territory.
According to Eric Bischoff, he chose not to put the belt on Sting at Starrcade because Sting looked unmotivated, out of shape and pale. As opposed to Hulk Hogan, who looked tan, bald and incapable of wrestling.
And therein lied Sting’s problem, and the thing that we’ll remember him for as much as any great match: Sting just did what he was told. Maybe if Sting had held his ground more in meetings, he would have never teamed up with RoboCop or looked like a doofus against the Four Horsemen all the time, or let Hulk Hogan bully him around. Maybe if Sting wanted to fight more for his career, he would have gone to WWE and become the biggest star in the world. But he didn’t. And maybe that’s why we love him so much. That’s also why we just nod with acceptance when we see what’s happened to him in WWE.
Sting never went to WWE because, as he put it, he didn’t want to get buried. History tells us that Vince McMahon doesn’t respect entities he didn’t create. That’s why Dusty Rhodes wore polkadots, the NWO died after three months, and the Brain Busters never had a long run with the belts despite being the best tag team in the world. We still knew, though, in the back of our minds that whenever Sting got to WWE, he’d get treated like a loser. No matter how excited we let ourselves get, we knew he’d get eaten alive and he wouldn’t do anything about it. So, when he got overshadowed by the NWO in a match he lost to Triple H, it was disappointing, but the perfect way for him to go out. Then things got downright insulting as his feud with Seth Rollins was built on Sting wanting to prove that Rollins wasn’t as good as… Triple H. Of course, in that match, Sting lost fair and square after Seth Rollins had just had a 20-minute match with John Cena and had just gotten slammed on the floor.
It’s classic Sting. He did what he was told no matter how dumb his character looked in the process. He shows up to work, follows the script and clocks out. It’s what he does. For better or worse. That’s Sting’s legacy: The guy who was always great, but he could have been the best. Either he didn’t care, or he just didn’t know how. Wrestling and wrestling politics were out of his purview. But he was great nonetheless. What more can you ask for from the good guy who never needed to finish first?
The Once And Future Sting: The Good Guy Who Never Finished First
Since Sting got to WWE, the narrative has been that he’s a bitter WCW holdout who stood in the rafters during the Monday Night War, fighting for the company’s supremacy. But Sting was so much more. Sting was the ultimate good guy. His character was a kid’s superhero dream; face paint, the scream and the patented Stinger Splash made him jump off the screen. He was just as dynamic as any WWE-created character. And he couldgo. Sting was always underrated as a wrestler, but in the early ’90s, he was as good as any top-tier talent. He had classics with Flair and Rick Rude. His tag match with Luger against the Steiners from SuperBrawl 1991 is one of the great unheralded tag matches of all-time. And Sting vs. Vader is one of the most perfect and best-wrestled feuds ever.
In the ring, Sting was as powerful as Luger. He was as agile as Steamboat and could lead a babyface comeback that’d make a Von Erich jealous. He had it all as a wrestler. But Sting was in WCW, meaning he’d never be Hulk Hogan or Ultimate Warrior. But if Sting had been under Vince McMahon’s thumb in his prime, he would have eclipsed Hogan and anyone else with the company. Just think: Warrior was a worse version of Sting who couldn’t wrestle nearly as well or form relatively coherent sentences, and he still managed to be a megastar.
But Sting was our thing. If we watched him, we knew his greatness. Hogan was a Kardashian, dolled up and manufactured into greatness. Sting was all natural. He woke up like this.
The thing about Sting, though, was that his behind-the-scenes persona matched his on-screen naiveté. I don’t know if Sting either wasn’t good at being a backstage politician or he just didn’t care enough. Either way, he always fell victim to being undermined by the big WCW entity.
And nobody did more to destroy Sting than Hulk Hogan.
Hulk Hogan’s major concern when getting to WCW was that he become the top dog, which in his mind meant eliminating the most popular guys in the company: Sting and Ric Flair. Flair was easy. All Hogan had to do was beat him a few months in a row to assert his dominance. Getting rid of Sting — a fellow good guy — was trickier. Here’s how Hogan did it:
On the night Hogan debuted, Sting was made to look like an idiot in losing the belt to Ric Flair (so Flair could lose it to Hogan). On Hogan’s first pay-per-view, Bash at the Beach ’94, Sting was injured and didn’t compete. On the next pay-per-view, Vader pinned Sting after wrestling a match against The Guardian Angel (Ray Traylor). The concept of the match was a triangle elimination match where a coin toss decides who gets to rest while the other two guys have a match. Logic would indicate the babyface lose the coin toss and have to wrestle both matches. Instead, Vader wrestled two matches, beating Sting in the second match and making him look like a dope. On the next pay-per-view, Sting showed up without face paint to simply watch Hogan vs. Flair because he wanted to be a part of the moment as a fan. Because Hogan and Flair were that much bigger than he is.
Still, when Sting and Hogan faced off on Nitro on November 1995, the crowd was unequivocally behind the WCW original. Despite every attempt to cool him off, Sting still showed up to work and was as over as anyone who tried to make him look worse on camera. About a year later, Sting went to the rafters, becoming the Crow gimmick that kept people tuned into Nitro. I’ve said it before, but while the history of the Monday Night War tells the story of Bischoff buying WWF talent and creating a mega-popular NWO, the real selling point for my friends and I was the three minutes each Monday where Sting would pop down from the rafters and beat people up. Sting was the driving force behind the Monday Night War and the big-picture story that kept us tuned in. And, as we know, that story ended with a travesty: Hogan and Bischoff decided that giving fans a suitable payoff to an 18-month story wouldn’t work. Instead, they’d ruin WCW with a Starrcade main-event that killed the territory.
According to Eric Bischoff, he chose not to put the belt on Sting at Starrcade because Sting looked unmotivated, out of shape and pale. As opposed to Hulk Hogan, who looked tan, bald and incapable of wrestling.
And therein lied Sting’s problem, and the thing that we’ll remember him for as much as any great match: Sting just did what he was told. Maybe if Sting had held his ground more in meetings, he would have never teamed up with RoboCop or looked like a doofus against the Four Horsemen all the time, or let Hulk Hogan bully him around. Maybe if Sting wanted to fight more for his career, he would have gone to WWE and become the biggest star in the world. But he didn’t. And maybe that’s why we love him so much. That’s also why we just nod with acceptance when we see what’s happened to him in WWE.
Sting never went to WWE because, as he put it, he didn’t want to get buried. History tells us that Vince McMahon doesn’t respect entities he didn’t create. That’s why Dusty Rhodes wore polkadots, the NWO died after three months, and the Brain Busters never had a long run with the belts despite being the best tag team in the world. We still knew, though, in the back of our minds that whenever Sting got to WWE, he’d get treated like a loser. No matter how excited we let ourselves get, we knew he’d get eaten alive and he wouldn’t do anything about it. So, when he got overshadowed by the NWO in a match he lost to Triple H, it was disappointing, but the perfect way for him to go out. Then things got downright insulting as his feud with Seth Rollins was built on Sting wanting to prove that Rollins wasn’t as good as… Triple H. Of course, in that match, Sting lost fair and square after Seth Rollins had just had a 20-minute match with John Cena and had just gotten slammed on the floor.
It’s classic Sting. He did what he was told no matter how dumb his character looked in the process. He shows up to work, follows the script and clocks out. It’s what he does. For better or worse. That’s Sting’s legacy: The guy who was always great, but he could have been the best. Either he didn’t care, or he just didn’t know how. Wrestling and wrestling politics were out of his purview. But he was great nonetheless. What more can you ask for from the good guy who never needed to finish first?
The Once And Future Sting: The Good Guy Who Never Finished First
even though the Starrcade fiasco seems a bit weird. At the same time he did do the job for others before and after, I do think that was just a lot of people overthinking it to make a compelling 90s style match and Sting should have just went 
"Lets keep this simple and to the point, NWO wants to get over, we do that once this story/chapter is closed and we head into the new year" 
and even if you want to use that strict bases, how does that qualify Edge over him?
