One MIND-BLOWING Secret From Every Year Of WCW History
5. 1997 | The Clean Hulk Hogan Loss You Didn’t Know About
Infamously, Hulk Hogan did not do a clean job for Sting at Starrcade 1997.
In a carny-cries-wolf scenario of sorts, this is taken as incontrovertible proof that Hogan was an egomaniac who was prepared to kill WCW and everything it had built for a full year, purely to protect his spot and his ego. The story is less damning than that. Possibly. Did Hogan really instruct referee Nick Patrick to do the fast count slow, so that he would score a visual pin and make a nonsense of the restart? And if he did, was Sting’s genuinely poor conditioning and lack of effort and preparedness truly a justification for this level of sabotage and backstage politics?
Hogan did a very famous and actually clean job for Lex Luger on August 4, and while he regained the World title within days, the switch was a very savvy idea; it sparked hope that Sting would eventually get the job done, and the timing was inspired, with WWF Raw rapidly generating critical acclaim. It was not Hogan’s first clean job of 1997; incredibly, while Hogan didn’t do the honours properly for Sting, he did do it for the Mountie in Montreal in April. The Mountie!
This, on the surface, is one of the most strange match results ever recorded. In the states, Jacques Rougeau was doing tag jobs alongside Carl Ouellet on WCW Saturday Night, and was a year away from not being good enough for the 1998 midcard on WWF Raw, which was just one level above Heroes Of Wrestling on the in-ring pyramid of sh*t. And yet, on April 11, Rougeau beat Hogan 1-2-3, the first man to do so in that fashion since the Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania 6.
This however masks three important contextual notes: 1) the Rougeau name was royalty in Quebec, so much so that it was thought Jacques would be heavily cheered with a mega-star reaction on the night; 2) the show wasn’t televised and, pre-mainstream internet, you were never meant to know of its existence; 3) Rougeau himself promoted the show to very successful effect, drawing in excess of 9,000 people to the Molson Centre.
Adding to the weirdness, the very next time Rougeau was in a WCW ring (April 28), the Amazing French-Canadians lost to Lex Luger and Sting in three minutes.