The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Of Hulk Hogan's Wrestling Career

3. The Fast Count That Wasn’t

During the heyday of the New World Order storyline, the WCW opposition was helmed by a man who never wrestled a match, never spoke.

Sting would descend from the rafters to plague the nWo for months until he finally earned a WCW World Heavyweight Championship match at Starrcade 1997, the company’s signature show. In theory, this was an easy decision: Sting wrestles his first match in more than a year and finally vanquishes Hulk Hogan and the nWo after the group had run roughshod over WCW for 18 months.

But, as Eric Bischoff has noted, Hogan wasn’t feeling it and called an audible, leading to a mad scramble to book a satisfactory conclusion to WCW’s biggest show of the year. For context, could you imagine Roman Reigns sitting in the locker room in Philadelphia while night 2 of WrestleMania 40 is unfolding and saying that he doesn’t feel like losing to Cody Rhodes, even if it upends a year of booking?

Hogan finally relented, but the “fast count” by referee Nick Patrick never materialized, thus rendering the entire false finish pointless and neutering Sting’s eventual victory.

It can’t be stressed enough how insane this is, that Hogan pulled a powerplay like this before WCW’s biggest show and threatened to detail the booking and the show itself because it “doesn’t work for me, brother.”