10 Things You May Not Know About Sting
The Icon turns 63 soon!
4. Lucrative Revenge
For more than 15 months, Sting did not wrestle a match, and very, very rarely, if ever, verbalized his thoughts or motivations. He stalked WCW events, keeping a watchful eye on the New World Order, waiting for the right time to unleash his fury.
That time would come at Starrcade 1997, when he challenged Hollywood Hogan for the World title in what sadly turned out to be a counterproductive cluster-frig of a match, with Sting winning the gold.
The angle was built masterfully, and certainly found an audience. Per research done by Wrestling Observer statistician Chris Harrington, Starrcade 1997 did 700,000 pay-per-view buys, far and away the highest buy-rate in company history.
Not only did it obliterate the prior WCW record (405,000 for that year's Halloween Havoc), but at the time, only one WWE pay-per-view had ever done a higher amount of buys: WrestleMania 5 in 1989, which did 767,000 buys. Point being, many, many people wanted Sting to knock off the tyrannical champion Hogan, and were willing to pay to see it.
Written by Justin Henry
In addition to writing lists and commentaries for Cultaholic, Justin is also a features writer and interviewer for Fighting Spirit Magazine, and is co-author of the WWE-related book Titan Screwed: Lost Smiles, Stunners, and Screwjobs.