Sting vs. Hollywood Hogan (Sep 1996 – Feb 1998)

Background

Sting entered 1996 as what a number of retrospectives have called WCW's answer to Hulk Hogan, a six-time former WCW World Champion nicknamed "The Franchise" who had made more pay-per-view appearances than anyone else on the roster.[6] The colorful "Surfer" Sting persona that had carried him since the 1980s had grown stale by the mid-1990s, a familiar face in a promotion suddenly reshaping itself around Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and the newly heel Hollywood Hogan.[21]

The story that would eventually pit Sting against Hogan actually started as a story about trust. In September 1996, the nWo introduced an impostor Sting, played by journeyman Jeff Farmer, to sow doubt about the real Sting's loyalty ahead of the Fall Brawl WarGames match.[23][24] Arn Anderson later said the angle worked precisely because it fooled the locker room as well as the fans.[24] When the real Sting insisted to Lex Luger that he hadn't attacked him, Luger didn't believe him, and Sting, cut loose by his own corner, walked out of WarGames rather than fight for either side.[22]

That betrayal, real inside the storyline if not outside it, became the hinge for Sting's transformation. Hollywood Hogan, meanwhile, was seven months into his own heel turn as the nWo's figurehead and reigning WCW World Heavyweight Champion, a title he'd taken from The Giant that August with the group's help.[3] With Nitro's ratings climbing on the strength of the invasion angle, WCW needed a credible face to eventually end it, and the promotion had just spent a year making its biggest star look untrustworthy to his own friends.[22]

By late 1996 the nWo had swallowed most of WCW's television time, adding members and expanding its reach every few weeks, and the promotion's own top babyfaces, Lex Luger, Ric Flair, The Giant, had all taken turns trying and failing to slow the group down.[22] Sting's isolation from his own locker room, real enough that even his closest friends doubted him, gave WCW a different kind of challenger: not another wrestler trying to out-muscle the nWo, but one the group itself had already tried and failed to recruit or discredit.

Build-up

Sting resurfaced on the October 21, 1996 Nitro for the first time since walking out at WarGames, and he looked like a different character. The bleached-blond hair and rainbow face paint were gone, replaced by a black-and-white design inspired by Brandon Lee's role in the film The Crow, an idea Scott Hall had pitched to Sting given how much his hair had already darkened and grown out.[21][6] He stopped speaking almost entirely and began appearing in the arena rafters, watching Nitro from above rather than wrestling on it, a choice that conveniently doubled as cover for using a body double on weeks Steve Borden wasn't actually traveling with the promotion.[21]

For months, "Crow" Sting was a rumor as much as a wrestler, glimpsed in the shadows without declaring a side. That changed at Uncensored on March 16, 1997, at the North Charleston Coliseum in Charleston, South Carolina. Moments after the nWo won the main event, Sting rappelled down from the rafters with his bat, laid out Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and Randy Savage in succession with the Scorpion Death Drop, then pointed the bat at Hollywood Hogan and dared him into the ring, attacking him as the broadcast went off the air.[7] It was the clearest statement yet of where Sting stood, and it pointed the entire angle toward a Hogan match without committing to one.

WCW kept the pattern going for the rest of 1997. On the September 29 Nitro, Sting dropped in again and cleared out another cluster of nWo members, one of a string of ambushes that let the company sell his opposition to the group on free television without ever putting him in a full match or a real promo.[29] The approach let Sting's presence carry the angle while protecting him from the risk of a match that could deflate the mystery WCW had spent a year building.

Nick Patrick, the referee eventually assigned to the Starrcade main event, was not a neutral choice. He had spent much of 1996 and 1997 as a recurring on-screen ally of the nWo, counting fast for the group and taking bumps to sell its dominance, which made him the logical pick to be the one who'd supposedly cheat Sting out of a win.[12] That history is part of why the finish was built around him in the first place: a referee the audience already distrusted turning in a fast count would read as one more example of the nWo bending the rules, not as a random officiating error.

The match itself became official on October 28, 1997, at a pre-taped press conference from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, aired during a commercial break in Hogan's TNT movie premiere: Hollywood Hogan would defend the WCW World Heavyweight Championship against Sting at Starrcade that December.[10] WCW spent the go-home weeks selling it as the payoff to the entire nWo story, the one match capable of ending eighteen months of the group's dominance in a single night.[9]

The final undercard beat arrived at World War 3 on November 23, 1997, in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Hollywood Hogan entered the 60-man battle royal to keep anyone else from earning a future title shot, but fled the ring rather than face a nWo-Sting impostor, in reality Kevin Nash in a wig and face paint, who then knocked The Giant out with a baseball bat to hand Scott Hall both the elimination and the win.[4] The stunt underlined, one more time, that even a fake Sting could rattle Hogan; the real one had never so much as locked up with him.

The Matches

Starrcade arrived on December 28, 1997, at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C., in front of 17,500 fans and on a pay-per-view buyrate of 1.90, roughly 700,000 buys, the highest in WCW's history.[1] Eighteen months of buildup came down to a single match: Hollywood Hogan defending the WCW World Heavyweight Championship against Sting, working his first real match of the entire angle.

Hogan entered first to the nWo's theme music, and Sting followed with the production the moment had been built around: lightning effects, a light show playing across his painted face, and a slow walk to the ring with the baseball bat in hand, his expression fixed the entire way.[30] Commentators Tony Schiavone, Mike Tenay, and Dusty Rhodes called the action, with Schiavone framing it on air as the culmination of eighteen months of story.[30] The match itself was slow by design, built around Hogan's usual eye rakes and stalling with only occasional flashes from Sting, and one retrospective review scored it two out of five stars for the amount of dead time before the finish.[30]

The plan, as WCW had laid it out backstage, called for referee Nick Patrick to fast-count a Hogan pinfall, making the nWo look like it had cheated its way to a win, before Bret Hart, freshly signed and making his WCW debut, would emerge to restart the match and let Sting finish Hogan clean.[11][12] Patrick received conflicting last-minute instructions from Eric Bischoff, Hogan, and Sting on how fast the count should actually be, couldn't find Bischoff again to sort it out, and settled on something in between.[11] The result read on live television as a normal three count: Hogan's leg drop, a clean pinfall, and Hogan retaining the title outright.[1]

Hart came out anyway, argued that Patrick had fast-counted Sting, and restarted the match despite the count nobody watching had actually seen sped up.[1] With the match live again, Sting locked in the Scorpion Deathlock, and Hogan tapped out, giving Sting the WCW World Heavyweight Championship and, on paper, an eighteen-month underdog story its ending.[1] The MCI Center crowd cheered the finish live; the fact that Hogan had actually been pinned clean before the restart only became a talking point once the tape was reviewed in the days that followed.[9]

Elsewhere on the card, Bret Hart's other assignment that night, as special referee for a match between Eric Bischoff and Larry Zbyszko with control of Nitro on the line, gave Zbyszko the win by disqualification after Bischoff produced a concealed steel plate.[1] It was a minor footnote next to the main event, but it meant Hart worked two roles on his first night in WCW, both of them behind a referee's shirt rather than in the ring.

Aftermath

WCW didn't let the finish sit overnight. The next night's Nitro, December 29 from Baltimore, was billed as a free rematch, Hogan against the new champion with nothing held back.[28] It never got a finish either: deep into the match, one of Sting's corner attacks took out the referee, and the broadcast cut to a Turner copyright notice mid-sequence, leaving the match unresolved on air.[28]

WCW addressed the mess directly on the January 8, 1998 debut episode of Thunder. Executive committee member J.J. Dillon told the crowd the promotion had reviewed the Starrcade and Nitro tapes, frame by frame and with stopwatches, and still couldn't certify who had actually won; he declared the WCW World Heavyweight Championship vacant on the spot and asked Sting to hand over the belt.[19] Sting threw it down instead, breaking his long on-screen silence to call Dillon gutless and tell Hogan he was a dead man.[19]

The vacancy carried into Souled Out on January 24, 1998, in Dayton, Ohio, where Lex Luger made Randy Savage submit and the nWo swarmed Luger afterward; Sting ran in for the save, putting the Scorpion Deathlock on Hogan while Luger locked Kevin Nash in the Torture Rack.[27] The rubber match finally happened at SuperBrawl VIII on February 22, 1998, in Daly City, California, where Sting beat Hollywood Hogan for the vacant title after Randy Savage, still nominally an nWo member, turned on the group mid-match and cracked Hogan with a can of spray paint; Sting used the same can to write "WCW" across Hogan's chest once the pin landed.[2] Sting held the title into the spring before Randy Savage, now fully turned face, beat him for it at Spring Stampede on April 19, 1998, moving both men into a new program and closing the book on the Hogan rivalry for good.[5]

Behind the Scenes

Eric Bischoff has said for years that the Starrcade finish came down to one thing: Hollywood Hogan didn't want to lose that night, and for the only time in his WCW tenure, used the creative control clause in his contract to change the plan. "Hulk looked at me and said, 'Not today,'" Bischoff recalled, describing hours of scrambling before the show to land on any finish at all.[16] "It was like, yeah, it's there, but it's not," Bischoff said of the clause. "Except for that night, and because Hulk wasn't feeling it, he called an audible, and it was a mad scramble."[16]

Bischoff has given a more specific, and more personal, account of why the plan changed on his 83 Weeks podcast. He's said Sting arrived at the arena looking checked out: "He was substantially smaller. He obviously had not been to the gym," and hadn't even bothered with a spray tan, which Bischoff framed as a symptom of something bigger than vanity, calling the wrestler who walked in that day "a shell of the Steve Borden that we thought we were going to see."[13] Elsewhere he's put it more bluntly: "He quit six months before this event. He quit caring. He quit taking care of himself."[20] In a separate, more measured account, Bischoff said simply that "we got to a point where both Hulk and I didn't feel like Sting's head was in the game," calling the whole decision "a judgment call. It's one I wish I wouldn't have made, I wish I had gone the other way."[17]

Sting's own account doesn't fully dispute the premise. Asked about the finish later, he said, "To be honest, I think it was a package deal," adding that "we did not follow the buildup. Hogan and I did not deliver in that match," and that even the fast-count plan wasn't locked in until the two men were about to walk through the curtain.[18] Referee Nick Patrick's version lines up with the confusion: Bischoff told him to count normally, then Hogan told him "nice and slow," then Sting told him "rapid fire," and with no one around to settle it, Patrick split the difference.[14] He later said the only person who came out of it looking bad was Bret Hart, since the count nobody sped up made Hart's restart look invented.[15]

What Bischoff and Sting have both danced around by name, Sting has since confirmed in general terms through his own public account of that period. He's said he was struggling with painkillers and alcohol and with the strain months of travel had put on his marriage, and that fame and success weren't fixing any of it.[25] The breaking point came about eight months later, in August 1998, when he broke down and confessed the full extent of it to his wife; he credits that confession, and the faith commitment that followed, with saving the marriage.[26][25] Whatever was happening backstage on December 28, 1997, Sting's own telling of that year doesn't contradict Bischoff's read that his head was somewhere else.

Bret Hart's presence added its own layer of real-world weight. He'd signed with WCW that November, and his Starrcade referee assignment was his first WCW appearance of any kind, arriving barely seven weeks after the Montreal Screwjob ended his WWF career; his WWF release carried a 60-day no-compete clause that barred him from wrestling for a rival but not from appearing on television, so a guest-referee role was the only way to use him at all that quickly.[8] The gimmick was supposed to cast him as the honest arbiter cleaning up a corrupt finish. Instead, because the count he was supposedly correcting had never actually been fast, it made his intervention look arbitrary on a night WCW badly needed him to look credible.

Legacy

Starrcade 1997 drew the highest pay-per-view buyrate in WCW's history, roughly 700,000 buys, proof that eighteen months of Sting's silence and rafter ambushes had built real appointment viewing even before anyone saw how the match actually ended.[1] That commercial peak sits uneasily next to how the finish is remembered: ESPN's own retrospective has called it a direct preview of the creative dysfunction that would eventually sink the company,[12] and other outlets have called it arguably the worst finish in wrestling history.[9]

The three-night, three-match sequence, Starrcade's non-finish, Nitro's cut-to-copyright ending, and Thunder's vacancy announcement, is frequently cited in retrospective coverage of the Monday Night Wars as an example of a promotion unable to close out its own best story even with the audience's full attention.[9][12] SuperBrawl VIII two months later gave the angle a cleaner ending, but by then the moment Starrcade had spent eighteen months building toward had already come and gone.

The irony is that WCW's business didn't collapse in the immediate aftermath. Nitro kept beating Raw in the Monday night ratings well into 1998, and the nWo storyline that began with the Hall and Nash jump chronicled in WCW's own 1996 chapter of this rivalry kept drawing money for another year even after Starrcade's finish became a punchline.[9] What retrospectives point to isn't a single night tanking the company but a pattern this match crystallized: an inability to pull the trigger on decisive finishes when it mattered most, the same instinct that let Hogan overrule eighteen months of plotting on a single afternoon.

For Sting, the run marked the height of the Crow persona's cultural footprint and led directly into the personal reckoning he's spoken about publicly in the years since. For Hogan, the finish became the one instance fans point to when discussing his WCW creative control clause, a power he'd held the entire time but used, by his own camp's account, exactly once.[16] Bret Hart's WCW tenure, meanwhile, never fully recovered the credibility this appearance was supposed to establish for him, arriving instead as a footnote to a finish it couldn't actually fix.

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Starrcade (1997) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starrcade_(1997)
2. SuperBrawl VIII — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperBrawl_VIII
3. WCW Hog Wild — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WCW_Hog_Wild
4. WCW World War 3 (1997) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WCW_World_War_3_(1997)
5. Spring Stampede (1998) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Stampede_(1998)
6. Sting (wrestler) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_(wrestler)
7. Uncensored (1997) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncensored_(1997)
8. "Top 15 Ways WCW Totally Wasted Bret Hart" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wrestling/top-15-ways-wcw-totally-wasted-bret-hart/
9. "Sting's Controversial Starrcade '97 Match With Hulk Hogan, Explained" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wcw-sting-hulk-hogan-starrcade-1997-controversial-match/
10. "10 Things WCW Fans Forget About The Build-Up To Starrcade 1997" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/facts-trivia-things-forgotten-wcw-build-to-starrcade-1997/
11. "Why The Main Event Of WCW Starrcade 1997 Was So Screwy, Explained" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/why-the-main-event-of-wcw-starrcade-1997-was-so-screwy-explained/
12. "The legacy of Starrcade and the disaster of Sting vs. Hulk Hogan in 1997" — ESPN. https://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/21539546/wwe-legacy-starrcade-how-sting-vs-hulk-hogan-1997-predated-disaster-wcw
13. "Hulk Hogan and Sting - The Mess at WCW Starrcade 1997" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/hulk-hogan-sting/
14. "Nick Patrick On The Conflicting Direction He Got For WCW Starrcade 1997 Main Event" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1316598/nick-patrick-conflicting-direction-got-wcw-starrcade-1997-main-event/
15. "Former WCW Referee Nick Patrick Talks Bret Hart's Role In The Infamous Starrcade Count" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1216538/former-wcw-referee-nick-patrick-talks-bret-harts-role-in-the-infamous-starrcade-count/
16. "Eric Bischoff Admits Hulk Hogan Exercised Creative Control At WCW Starrcade 1997" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1210362/eric-bischoff-admits-hulk-hogan-exercised-creative-control-at-wcw-starrcade-1997/
17. "Eric Bischoff Explains Reasoning Behind Controversial Finish At WCW Starrcade 1997" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1149500/eric-bischoff-explains-reasoning-behind-controversial-finish-at-wcw-starrcade-1997/
18. "Sting Addresses What Went Wrong At WCW Starrcade 1997" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/1136000/sting-addresses-what-went-wrong-at-wcw-starrcade-1997/
19. "WCW Thunder (January 8, 1998)" — Atomic Drop. https://atomicdrop.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/wcw-thunder-january-8-1998/
20. "Back Story On How Sting's Personal Issues Affected Major WCW Match" — WWF Old School. https://wwfoldschool.com/back-story-on-how-stings-personal-issues-affected-major-wcw-match/
21. "Sting – Becoming The Crow, Rescuing WCW From the nWo" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/sting-crow-wcw-nwo/
22. "The Sting Vs nWo Storyline, Explained" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wrestling/sting-vs-nwo-storyline-explained/
23. "WCW's Fake Sting Storyline, Explained" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/wcw-fake-sting-storyline-explained/
24. "Arn Anderson Reflects On Infamous nWo 'Fake Sting' Angle" — Slam Wrestling. https://slamwrestling.net/news/arn-anderson-reflects-on-infamous-nwo-fake-sting-angle/
25. "Sting: Born-Again Steve Borden Draws Fans To LifeWay Store" — Baptist Press. https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/sting-born-again-steve-borden-draws-fans-to-lifeway-store/
26. "Pro-Wrestler Sting Tells Ed Young About Faith Journey, Give God More Than 'Lip Service'" — Christian Post. https://www.christianpost.com/news/pro-wrestler-sting-ed-young-faith-journey-give-god-more-than-lip-service.html
27. "Mike Reviews – WCW Souled Out 1998 (24/01/1998)" — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2021/01/16/mike-reviews-wcw-souled-out-1998-24-01-1998/
28. "Review: WCW Monday Nitro [December 29, 1997]" — WCW Worldwide. https://wcwworldwide.com/2018/02/nitro-review-12-29-97/
29. "WWE Network: Sting takes out the NWO– WCW Monday Nitro, Sept. 29, 1997" — YouTube (WWE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLTrIv-7xqg
30. "Wrestling Recap: Hollywood Hogan vs. Sting (Starrcade '97)" — DRK Waiting Room. https://drkwaitingroom.com/2022/12/30/wrestling-recap-sting-hogan-97/

Further Listening

• 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff — Bischoff's own detailed account of the Starrcade 1997 finish and the decision to change it
• Sting: Moment of Truth (Steve Borden's autobiography) — Sting's own account of his personal struggles during his WCW peak and his 1998 faith conversion
• The Bret Hart Podcast — Bret Hart on signing with WCW weeks after the Montreal Screwjob and his brief run as a guest referee
• Sitting Ringside with Konnan and Disco Inferno — Nick Patrick's account of the conflicting count instructions he received