100 Worst WWE Matches Ever - 58 - Sting vs. Triple H
Wrestlemania 31
Addiction is a terrible thing.
People can fight it for their entire life, but the sad truth is sometimes people will relapse and fall into their old ways. Whether it’s the natural impulse to try for one more hit, or a sudden temptation put before you. Truly, tragic.
Triple H has tried to fight his addictions before. I remember first thinking he’d finally passed it. 2006, after losing to John Cena at Wrestlemania - making it his third consecutive Wrestlemania main event loss. I thought that perhaps the stench of his addiction plaguing the WWE product was gone. He stayed away from the lure for a couple of years. After tearing his quad, he returned in 2007 and with it returned to his addiction, burying talents left and right, winning way more titles than he justified. Truly, tragic.
After a soft-retirement and putting over Daniel Bryan at Wrestlemania 30, it felt like maybe his addict days were finally behind him.
But then that temptation came along. An itch that needs scratching. The yearning to fill an emptiness in his soul he’d had since 2003.
Sting.
After spending most of 2003 having really bad overbooked matches and putting himself over former WCW talent, the temptation for just one more hit was too much. Sting was the golden egg, the one that got away, his unicorn. For Triple H, and WWE, this was a chance to right the wrongs of the past and finally put down the one man that had eluded him and WWE all this time.
Before we begin, there’s only one place to start. You all know it, I know it, it’s the most important thing about this match.
Unfortunately, Sting’s entrance - while pretty cool - is hurt by the broad daylight of Santa Clara. There wasn’t a way around this. Even for the penultimate match of this show, Undertaker was still coming out during sunset hours, so there wasn’t a way for a big night-time entrance.
Triple H’s entrance, however, is iconic. It’s the most embarrassing entrance maybe in Wrestlemania history - rivalled maybe only to Triple H’s own Wrestlemania 29 entrance botch. It’s hilarious - from shaky platform raising from the ground, his little t-rex arms, the “targeting” Sting in the ring, to the goofy Schwarzenegger cameo. It’s a stunning lack of self-awareness from everyone that this managed to get green-lit, and that someone must have thought this was the coolest thing in the world. I like the implication that Triple H is the Terminator because his main event run shares a lot in common with the franchise. A brief period of undeniable excellence right at the start with a disproportionate amount of mediocrity and shit that followed for the next 20 years.
For the purposes of this list, only one other match (that is due to come far later in this process) gave me as much of a headache as this one. How far do I allow “entertaining crap” to keep me from ranking a match that irritates me to no end?
I know this match is popular. There are many people that watched this match at the time and loved the booking and the nostalgia. One look at a website like Cagematch will show the polarising nature of this match. There is certainly a part of me that agrees with the positives if you take this match in a vacuum without context. In a vacuum, this is a hilarious, over-the-top, stupid nostalgiafest. If this weren’t Sting’s debut match in WWE and if the feud beforehand hadn’t taken itself so seriously, this wouldn’t even come close to touching this list. But I don’t work out of context - this was the most hyped match on this card outside of the main event. The most TV time, the longest build, the match that was made to feel important and personal. Over 15 years of speculation and waiting for Sting’s debut led up to this one.
Instead of treating it like the monumental match it should be, it was the third match on the card. Instead of the main event standard match, we got what was not too dissimilar to a nostalgia act you’d see at a local indie fed. Only instead of Marty Jannetty vs. Justin Credible, with a run in from CW Anderson, we’ve got Triple H vs Sting with a run in from Hulk Hogan.
Ultimately this is a match that is tonally all over the place and that is the deciding factor for this placement. Sting versus Triple H, with Sting’s first WWE match to date, should be able to sell itself. There’s a place for a shameless nostalgia act in wrestling, but that is not when the premise of your feud is about building a personal rivalry and Sting trying to vanquish the evil Authority figures.
Beyond just the overbooking, what has always grated me about this match is how malicious it feels. Here we have the WWE suddenly deciding to lean heavier into the WWE versus WCW feud than they had in fifteen years, arguably going even harder than they did for the actual Invasion storyline. The problem is that Sting’s motivations in this feud were never about that, and it’s even said as such during the pre-match video package. Then why are we spending the entirety of this match billing it as such, and leaning into that very concept?
When I say the match is malicious, that’s never felt more than the commentary of the match. Michael Cole - who had long since shed his heel persona - gives the now infamous “that’s right, this is what it’s like Sting - over 70,000 at Wrestlemania” line. It’s said with a sort of bitter vindictiveness that you’d be forgiven for thinking these words were spoken by Vince McMahon himself. Again, if you can’t understand why I’ve put this match on the list, I would ask you listen to the commentary of the match again and not sense the disturbing lengths they go to bury Sting and WCW. In the past two weeks at the time of writing the aforementioned line got more attention in the build up to All In. Sting wrestled in front of an even larger crowd, a crowd that was allowed to enjoy Sting for the Sting he is, not use interference and nostalgia bait to trick the fans into thinking they were watching something good. Sting did get his Wrestlemania moment, it just came in a company that wouldn’t exist for another 4 years.
The match itself is fine for the first part of the match. They understandably work a slower pace and don’t try and over-exert themselves. Expecting a stellar match from either man at this point would be optimistic. While we have the benefit of Sting’s excellent AEW run to show what he truly had left in the tank, it’s easy to forget that in 2015 Sting was very much seen as old news. He looked old, and he wrestled old. Through this match he’s a visual eye-sore. He’s got welts on his body, he’s balding, his facepaint is all over the place. It’s one thing that turned WWE away from running Undertaker versus Sting, because Undertaker was suffering from his own health problems, and the company (and Undertaker himself) did not feel like either could carry that match. So they opted for Triple H, a safer pair of hands in theory. Wrong choice, in my opinion. The dream match was always Sting vs Undertaker, and it would have been such a spectacle that the two could have probably just stared each other down for 10 minutes and it’d be cool. It’s furthered by the fact that the commentary hype Sting vs Triple H up as some dream match that everyone wanted to see during the Monday Night Wars. But if you take just a second to think about it there was never a point in history where this was the big WCW vs WWE match people wanted to see. Their main event runs barely overlapped.
Anyway, we don’t have that, we have Sting vs Triple H. And it’s fine. But the problem is all in the second half of the match. Instead of trusting the talent in the ring to continue having a pretty solid match, they have D-Generation X (Billy Gunn, Road Dogg, X-Pac and eventually Shawn Michaels) interfere on Triple H’s behalf, while the nWo (Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall) interfere on Sting’s behalf. People will use the crowd reaction to justify the interference, but that ignores the fact that the crowd was already excited for the rest of the match. The fans wanted to see Sting, and there’s no reason you couldn’t have just had a one-on-one match with a bit of smoke and mirrors without resorting to nonsensical interference.
I know I shouldn’t try and find logic in the interference, but certain questions need to be asked. Why are the nWo, the stable that was specifically designed to attack WCW, helping the WCW guy in this match? Why are they helping the one guy that is synonymous with fighting against the nWo? Why is Hulk Hogan, by far the biggest star in this entire match, relegated to a run in where he’s beaten up by X-Pac? It’s like if there was ever a superhero crossover event, and Superman came to help Lex Luthor fight Spider-Man because at least he isn’t one of those Marvel assholes.
There’s two shining lights to this mess. The first is Kevin Nash getting knocked down and immediately selling his quad. The second is Scott Hall, after years of physical and mental troubles, taking a decent looking bump at a Wrestlemania on the floor.
To continue with the maliciousness of this match, we have two face commentators (Cole and Lawler) and one heel commentator (JBL). JBL is loud and obnoxious, but that wouldn’t be as overbearing if the faces told him to shut up every now and then. But for most of the match, Cole is agreeing with JBL - agreeing that Sting tried to put WWE out of business, agreeing that Sting was a big fish in a small pond and now he’s a minnow in an ocean. Only Jerry Lawler meekly speaks on Sting’s behalf, but he’s often drowned out by either (or both) of the other two. It’s one of the more egregious and blatant burials on commentary we’ve seen to date on the list.
After 14 years of anticipation, and waiting for Sting to have a match in WWE, they have him barely feel involved in his own match, then he loses to the fucking hammer like so many others before him. Ultimately, all the bullshit commentary, the snide comments, the bitterness - it was all true. Sting is a loser. WCW are a bunch of losers. Triple H is the best, as is WWE. A stark reminder that in a world without viable competition - this is what we had been subjected to immediately following the end of the Monday Night Wars. 2003 Triple H was back.
Just to further dig the knife in deeper, the two shake hands after the match. The overbooked match with a shit load of interference that ends with a sledgehammer to the head, but dammit they’ve earned each other’s respect.
Truly, tragic.
Up Next - A review that might be the shortest to date, but at least we get to talk about how Hulk Hogan was always a liar.
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