Gimmick Some (Wrestlemania) Lovin': Sting is Back

My Rating

Let's go ahead and forget about the debuting legend and make this about the off-and-on retirees with checkered pasts who had made several trips through WWE's revolving door.

It's easy, on a surface level, to get caught up in the "gaga" of this match and have fun with the nostalgia pops, as long as you don't think too hard about what you're seeing. In an era of Stranger Things and Everything Sucks the "Hey, remember this?" booking and rehash of the glory years of wrestling's popularity seemed fine when I watched this live.

Each successive rewatch, though, lessens the match, and this week's re-watch hammered home why for me (pun absolutely intended): for being Sting's debut match, this match is not about Sting, and is only barely a match.

Sting made a valiant effort to make the match a personal conflict between himself and Triple H with those worked-shoot promos, but Sting was fighting a losing battle there. Sting was WCW, as far as WWE creative was concerned, and the match was never going to be about anything more than revisiting Monday nights in the late 1990s.

Sting does little in this match, and the Wrestlemania crowd is very gracious with their applause for even the most basic of manoeuvres. It's clear that they are just happy to see the Stinger on the WWE's grandest stage alongside some of the biggest stars of his era, and the interfering factions soaked up the unearned adulation.

To borrow a line from The Miz's theme song, Sting came to play, and works with a decent level of intensity, which presents its own set of problems. Sting has a great look in promos and during his entrance. His stoicism, gaudy coat, and facepaint are a timeless sports entertainment look, and, standing still, Stinger could have stepped out of a time machine.

Getting shallow for a moment, as the match heated up, Sting went from looking like the stoic vigilante to looking like someone's great uncle dressing as a scary clown on Halloween. Perhaps some consideration should have been given to Borden's thinning hair, as the frizzy (and patchy mane) shatters the mystique quickly, as does each subsequent flash of a growing bald patch.

All that's to say that this was much better in concept than in execution; seeing it any time after March 29, 2015, creates too many headaches from working out the aforementioned plot inconsistencies, and that's to say nothing of the out-of-nowhere finish (which has been lambasted enough online that we don't need to go into detail, but it didn't feel like enough to put down someone of Sting's stature after only 16 minutes, most of which was low-impact brawling and Hall of Famers' entrances).

Growing up a WWF kid, and never getting into WCW product until the NWO angle began, the first time I saw a Sting match was the main event of Starrcade 1997, which made it very difficult for me to understand his popularity. That match squandered 18 months of build with a confusingly-booked and sloppily-worked match, which gets a lot of coverage in WWE retrospectives.

This match commits similar crimes, but, thanks to the nature of WWE's programming calendar, with a much shorter build. Neither man seemed to be in agreement as to the reason for the contest to happen, and Sting seemed to be the only one who hadn't been told the match wasn't about Sting.

Had Borden's unfortunate injury not happened that fall (no, Bret, it wasn't Rollins's fault), it would have been interesting to see Stinger get a shot at redemption in Dallas (with the added benefit of a mysterious entrance in the dark).

Unfortunately, though, we have the one Sting Wrestlemania moment, whose appeal diminishes with each rewatch. This rewatch, my enjoyment has dipped to a measly 4/10.

Meltzer Says:

Meltzer goes **1/2 on this match.