Let’s look at a Sting match from semi-recent memory as he takes on former WCW nemesis Mick Foley in TNA’s Six Sides of Steel cage match. The match took place on April 19, 2009, at TNA Lockdown 2009.
This will be a short one because the match didn’t really have too much heading into it. Sting had become one of the pillars of Total Non-Stop Action’s main event and now Mick Foley was in the company. Originally, Foley was presented as an on-air personality in late 2008 but was already involved as a wrestler before the year ended.
Hostilities between him and TNA World Champion Sting resulted in the Stinger challenging Foley at Lockdown with his own World title on the line. He really wanted to kick Foley’s ass folks because there was no actual reason to put his belt on the line besides enticing Foley into the match.
Would the gambit pay off?
Six-Sides of Steel Cage Match for the TNA World Heavyweight Title: Sting [c] vs. Mick Foley
Dubbed “17 Years Later”, the match was promoted as a revival of the Sting-Cactus Jack feud in WCW during the early 1990s. It’s amazing how much these two had put their bodies through in almost two decades because the wear and tear were really showing here.
Remember, these two were pretty much in retirement or semi-retirement not too long before this match. Sting had just turned 50 while Foley was 43 going on 44 in just a few months. Today, those ages look and move differently for wrestlers with advances in fitness and surgery but for wrestlers who went through the Monday Night Wars where topping the opposition was important, they put their bodies through some business.
That’s especially true for Foley who was taking bumps onto concrete, through tables, off aprons, onto ramps, and off cages during his prime years. Now here he was in 2009 moving around much, much gingerly with a bad back, bad knees, and back hip.
He wasn’t going to be turning on the gas for this bout and neither was Sting who had turned down the gas on his high energy, exciting style a bit before his transition into “Crow” Sting in the late 90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJPKq8tSMrI
What I’m getting at with all of that is that this match was slow-moving and didn’t have the thrills or spills that we got close to 20 years earlier. Sure, Foley took some bumps and hits with the barbed wire bat but he was missing several steps here. Again, Sting had checked out on putting the motor on max years prior.
He could still muster a good match—especially in team settings—but that wasn’t the case here. It’s to be expected as even though these two had incredible chemistry, time catches up to us all. Overall, the match had a few moments but all-rounder surfer-era Sting will also turn it up better than Crow Sting when it comes to in-ring excitement, and Foley at this point was better utilized in team matches if he had to be in the ring.
Stinger Scale Rating
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