10 Reasons 1997 Was The Weirdest Year In Wrestling History

This was, without hyperbole, the most botched main event in pro wrestling history.

WCW had built to Starrcade 1997 for a year and a half. For that year and a half, they had dominated the WWF in ratings and sparked a new boom period for wrestling. A record-setting audience bought the show on pay-per-view to finally see WCW get their revenge on the nWo. Specifically, they were anxiously awaiting Sting to finally bring his comeuppance to Hollywood Hulk Hogan and bring home the WCW title. This was everything Eric Bischoff had been building toward, and it was a moment handed to them on a silver platter.

But then Hulk Hogan happened. Apparently not wanting to put an out-of-shape Sting over clean, Hogan exercised his creative control clause and changed the finish so that he would initially win via fast count, and the match would be restarted with Sting coming out victorious. However, when the time came for said fast count, referee Nick Patrick made a standard three count, making it appear as though Hogan won cleanly. So when Bret Hart came out and forcibly restarted the match, it didn’t look as though he was righting an injustice, but rather screwing poor, maligned Hulk Hogan.

Whether Hogan told Nick Patrick to do a slow count or Patrick just accidentally did one is, frankly, irrelevant. The fact that the main event was booked in such a fashion is a testament to how corrupt WCW was in its heyday. When it mattered most, the powers that be (Hogan and Bischoff) wouldn’t do what was right for business and put Sting over clean. On a night when it should have been WCW’s revenge against the Order, it was just business as usual, as evidenced by Randy Savage changing the finish of a six-man tag earlier in the show so that the NWO would win, and Kevin Nash just outright no-showing the event to avoid losing to The Giant. And were any of these men punished for their mad power trips? Of course not. They sat atop the card throughout 1998 and 1999 until the company was in utter shambles.

1997 and 1998 were the best business years in WCW history, with the former especially showing off how dominant they were over their competition. WCW crushed the WWF in ratings, and late in the year, it acquired one of their few legitimate draws in Bret Hart to add to their own stacked roster. Ted Turner should have annihilated Vince McMahon, but shows like Starrcade 1997 proved that even with all their talent and resources, they were systematically broken. This would be evident as, throughout ‘98 and ‘99, they fell further and further behind the WWF until they were on life support, before eventually dying in 2001.

It speaks to the absurdity of 1997 when you can point to WCW’s most successful show ever as when everything began to fall apart.