The brooding face paint, the trench coat with the baseball bat, the descent from the rafters. The ‘Sting’ character is pro-wrestling to a tee. The sheer aura that Sting possesses is what turns regular men into larger-than-life characters. And in the end, that’s what professional wrestling is all about. 

As Sting prepares for his final match at AEW Revolution 2024, it’s important for us to remember just how important the ‘Sting’ character is to the history of the sport of professional wrestling. 

A Sign of the Times

While ‘Crow Sting’ is what most fans remember when they think of Sting, that isn’t the character that put Sting on the map. In fact, it was his ‘Surfer Sting’ persona that really caught on with the wrestling audience of the 80s. In a fitting piece of wrestling trivia, Sting actually broke into the business in a tag-team with fellow face paint enthusiast, The Ultimate Warrior. After Sting went his own way to be a singles star, he adopted bright colored face paint and trunks not too dissimilar to the ones Warrior became famous for. The late 80’s era of wrestling was full of bright colors, from the brightly colored trunks of Hulk Hogan and ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage to the fluorescent streamers of The Ultimate Warrior and the Rock and Roll Express. Sting’s rise to superstardom encapsulated that era of wrestling, as he got so over with the fans that he would go on to beat ‘The Nature Boy’ Ric Flair for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.

While many wrestling characters remained relics of the 80s era, Sting seamlessly transitioned from the brightly coloured 80s to the more grunge, hard rock 90s. He abandoned the blonde flat top and bright colors for long dark hair and black and white face paint inspired by the 1994 film, The Crow. Abandoning everything that got you over with the fans is a move not every wrestler is willing to take, but the ‘Sting’ character is all about evolution. Fans largely divide Sting’s career into the ‘Surfer Sting’ and ‘Crow Sting’ eras, with a little ‘Wolfpack Sting’ and ‘Joker Sting’ sprinkled in between.

The Sting character had in essence perfected itself with time, much like the early iterations of the Undertaker character before becoming the ‘Phenom’. It isn’t just Sting’s look that mimics the era of wrestling he’s in; it’s also his style of wrestling. In the 80s he would dropkick and kip up with an emphasis on big moves. In the 90s, he would engage in longer technical exchanges as he competed with more gifted grapplers. In the 2000s, in TNA, he would wrestle a more fast paced style to keep up with wrestlers like AJ Styles and Kurt Angle. Even in AEW, his style of matchup has adapted to the spot heavy style that modern wrestling has grown into, with dives galore.

One man against a monopoly

It’s common knowledge at this point that professional wrestling is synonymous with WWE. So much so that a good deal of fans are only aware of WWE and are unaware of the sport of pro-wrestling as an independent artform outside of WWE. Such is the company’s monopoly of the sport. Vincent Kennedy McMahon was primarily responsible for establishing this monopoly by methodically acquiring all the top wrestlers from competing wrestling promotions and driving them out of business. It was in World Championship Wrestling (WCW), McMahon’s biggest competitor, that Sting would spend the lion share of his career and became a household name. Very soon, he would become the face of the competition, engaging in an iconic rivalry with the nWo, a faction of former WWE stars. His rivalry with Hulk Hogan and the nWo led to WCW initially beating WWE in the ratings war. He was the face of the franchise and was on the first ever episode of WCW Nitro and the last ever episode, where he closed out the show. But unlike all his fellow WCW stars, Sting never signed with WWE when WCW closed its doors. Steve Borden, the man behind the character, was of the belief that WWE would undermine the ‘Sting’ character for being the face 0f WCW. A notion that would later come true.

Instead, Sting signed with Total Nonstop Action (TNA), WWE’s newest competitor, in an attempt to give competition to WWE’s growing monopoly. For 25 years of his wrestling career, he was the face of WWE’s biggest competition. Despite never wrestling for the largest wrestling company, he maintained tremendous worldwide popularity among fans. So much so that his influence was embedded in many top stars that wrestled in WWE, like John Cena, Seth Rollins, CM Punk, and more. When he finally made his debut in WWE, they played up this sentiment by having him go up against ‘The Authority’, the stable that represented the management of WWE. While many wanted to see Sting face Undertaker at WrestleMania, a dream match featuring two of the greatest wrestling characters, WWE was more interested in putting one last nail in WCW’s coffin. They booked Sting to lose to Triple H even with the aid of WCW’s most popular faction, the nWo. Many found this to be just a petty attempt at diminishing Sting’s character, as he had been a thorn in WWE’s side for several decades. Sting retired not too long after this match and was inducted into the Hall of Fame shortly after. This would’ve been the worst possible end to the Sting character, basically implying that the Stinger had to eventually succumb to the machine that was the WWE. But in his retirement speech, Sting gave fans hope with the infamous line, “The one thing that’s for sure about Sting is that nothing’s for sure.”

Then came All Elite Wrestling (AEW), a fresh new competitor to WWE. And Sting was right there to give wind to its sails. Sting debuted for the company and instantly made a star out of his protege, Darby Allin. Sting not only wrestled some of his best matches in a tag-team with Allin, he also used his superstardom to take the company to new heights. And in his farewell tour, Sting rewrote his iconic line to state, “The only thing for sure about Sting is that my retirement at Revolution 2024, is for sure.” It is fitting that Sting gets to end his career with WWE’s biggest competitor just as he began it. A four decade long career of defiance against the WWE comes to a poetic conclusion. There have been many great wrestlers that became household names without the platform of WWE, and Sting is by far the most popular of them.

The Perennial Babyface

Wrestling as a storytelling medium is built on heroes and villains, i.e., babyfaces and heels. It is incredibly challenging to write a character that spans decades and has never once turned to the dark side. Be it Superman, Captain America, or even Spiderman, even the purest of pure heroes turn evil to maintain the attention of their audience and give themselves a different story arc to pursue. Heroes in wrestling are no different; the greatest babyface characters have all turned heel at one point, be it ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, Hulk Hogan, The Rock, etc. While there do exist perennial babyfaces, like Dusty Rhodes, Rey Mysterio, and Hiroshi Tanahashi, none of them have reached Sting’s level of stardom, let alone for 4 decades. Even the ones that have amassed Sting’s level of popularity, like John Cena, have had fans clamoring for them to turn heel and been at the receiving end of plenty of boos. This has never been the case for Sting. He has almost always been cheered on as a babyface and has maintained his tremendous fan support across generations. The longevity of the Sting character is practically unmatched, which is a testament to the evolution of the character.

Read More: What Made Sting Create His Infamous Crow Character?

In a sport where we see comic book characters come to life, Steve Borden crafted a character that perfectly encapsulates everything that makes professional wrestling such a fascinating spectacle. A character that not only adapted to the times visually and thematically but also stood for the independence of pro-wrestling as a sport. ‘Sting’ will always be a real-life hero to every wrestling fan.