This Day in Wrestling History, December 28, 1997, came when WCW was still in the lead in the Monday Night Wars as the Starrcade 97 began, and they set a record with 700,000 homes purchasing the event.
However it’s divided up, this was the most bought WCW pay-per-view in history as it was doubled the previous year’s buys at 345,000.
And all of this to see the pay off of Sting finally facing Hollywood Hogan for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship.
The event
This would mark Sting ’s first in ring action in about 15 months as his rivalry had been built beautifully with him in the rafters and confronting the nWo in the ring through his presence.
It was the match the world had been waiting for, but it was met with a couple of botches.
The original idea had been for Sting to win outright and go back to his old persona since he conquered the darkness (thanks to @awrestlinghistorian for this tidbit), but that had been changed.
The new plan involved Hogan winning by a fast count, and Bret Hart, playing off his history with the Montreal Screwjob, would restart the match.
Unfortunately, there was some miscommunication backstage and no one seemed to check with Eric Bischoff, so the referee did a normal count.
Bret restarted the match and Sting then won by forcing Hogan to submit to his Scorpion Deathlock.
Behind the scenes
As we’ve grown accustomed to over the years, the behind the scenes drama is often as or more interesting as what we usually see, and thanks to a Sting interview brought to us by @awrestlinghistorian, we get some more detail.
“Hulk was struggling with how he wanted to do it and put me over and all that. There was a lot of closed door meetings with him and Eric Bischoff all the way up until not too long before we actually walked to the ring.
“I kept talking to Eric saying ‘What’s the big deal? Does he not want to put me over? Does he want to win? Tell me just so I know.’ and Eric was trying to be reassuring.
“He would go to Hulk and he would come back to me. Can’t we talk about this altogether and do business? Let’s just come up with an answer and do it.
“I came in and I was ready even though I hadn’t been in the ring and I was a little bit rusty. And thinking ‘I hope I can pull this off.’ And I knew the build-up was so big, I was worried the match would not be able to follow. In my opinion, it didn’t.
“His knee was real bad and my personal life was all messed up so I’m taking some of the credit too for the way things went, but there was also a mess up with the count and the referee. How could that have failed? Where was the mistake there? And it makes everybody second guess like did the referee get paid off or what? I don’t believe that happened. At least, I don’t want to believe it.” – Sting The Interactive Interview September 23, 2004.
Despite the miscommunication with the referee and other changes going on, this was one of those moment This Day in Wrestling History loves.
Not everything goes to plan no matter how carefully things are laid out (they had a rematch on the following Nitro), but this was still a fun moment for us as we got to see two icon go head to head.
What’s your favorite Sting match? Let us know in the comments below.
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