Yuh, dude. An uncontested layup if I've ever seen one in my life. Even as a 13-year-old kid I was like "My god. This is it. Sting is going to crush Hogan. You can feel it. The entire universe demands it." And then Hogan was just like "Nah, brah."
To make matters worse I remember trying to be excited... but it just wasn't happening. I remember watching him celebrate and saying something in Spanish maybe?! Still, I just couldn't shake that "man, he doesn't deserve this... he lost... Sting... lost..."
It seriously kind of makes me sad and pissed off to this day. I'm not even joking. I'm pathetic. Haha...
I got to order Starrcade 1997. I, with 2 of my cousins, watched that match and were like wtf. I would have been 9 and distinctly remember thinking this isn't at all how this match should go. At 9 I realized how bad the booking of that match was. I was SO HYPED after Sting's entrance. Then the match happened and I was like...Sting looks like a punk. Why is Hulk dominating him? Sting has been able to beat up the whole nWo like 15 times in the last year. It was a real bummer.
But then when you go back and look at any Hollywood Hogan match, he always dominated his opponent. Didn't matter who it was. Sting, Warrior, Piper, Macho, Flair. He even had too much offense against Goldberg at the height of his streak. Hogan was a real cunt in WCW. Even as a face he dominated and made dudes look like shit. In his prime, he sold like DEATH for even the lamest of challengers. Hulk in WCW was a real piece of shit. He seemed to go out of his way to make his opponents look bad and was only worried about protecting his spot, at the expense of all of his colleges and the company.
I have a secret.
I really liked Sting as a kid, but I think he's as bland as it gets as an adult. Like he only knew how to work one gimmick his entire career up to TNA, his face gimmick was annoying as hell, he was a competent wrestler but WCW was full of competent wrestlers in the mid 90s.
Thank god Scott Hall got him that gimmick because I don't know how it would have panned out if it wasn't for The Crow doing well.
I feel like of all the super faces, Sting was the best in the ring. He was never a guy who could carry dudes worse than him to a great match, but he was a guy who could have good matches with good guys, and great matches with great guys. He was better than Hogan and Warrior in the ring. He wasn't as good as them at promos, but I felt he was always pretty adequate, much in the same way I always thought Bret was a fine promo guy. Sting was the super face who was better in the ring, had no ego and put dudes over, let dudes like Vader BODY him as long as it helped WCW. Even as a kid not really aware of the politics, it seemed like Sting was more of a do anything for WCW guy than Hogan or Warrior were for WWF. He's the most unselfish top guy ever. I also think he did most of his best promo work in TNA. He actually put on a lot of pretty good matches in TNA. He put WAY more effort into TNA than any guy at his level did. I'd even argue he put more effort into shit than Jeff Jarrett did, and Jeff ran the company.