WWE’s treatment of Sting during his brief time in the company has been widely criticized by fans and wrestlers alike in recent years. “The Icon” made his long-awaited arrival in WWE a the 2014 Survivor Series pay-per-view, kicking off a feud with Triple H and The Authority that would run up to WrestleMania 31. At that show he took on “The Game” in a match that devolved into a brawl between the New World Order and D-Generation X, and ended with Hunter getting the pin after nailing Sting with a sledgehammer.
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Arn Anderson, who was working as a backstage agent for WWE at the time, confirmed what many feared during a recent episode of the ARN podcast — Vince McMahon fed lines to the commentary team during the match in order to bury Sting for being a WCW star.
“… I saw a tackle, dropdown and hiptoss and those type of spots to try to reset the audience, all it did was give the announcers — and I know this was fed to them, they just buried Sting,” Anderson said. “A minnow in a big pond, just total condescending ‘guy’s out of his element, this is WrestleMania now, you’re just a small minnow in a huge lake.’ Whatever all the commentary was exactly, it was meant to basically beat you over the head with ‘we won the war, we’re WWE we won the war. here’s your big star? Well, he ain’t a big star here tonight.’ [Everything] other than continuing to put the guy over and put some mystery of the match.”
“The reality is this, it was the last nail that Vince could nail into the coffin and say ‘okay, it’s done, we’re the superior company, they said they were gonna put us out of business, they led for all those weeks but in the end, here’s your last remaining guy and he was your biggest star and we just crushed him before your very eyes at the biggest event of the year,” he later added. “It is now officially done.’ It’s like WCW never existed, that is what would have been going through [Vince’s] mind…”
Sting would go on to wrestle three more matches in WWE, culminating in a bout with Seth Rollins for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship at that year’s Night of Champions. Unfortunately he suffered an injury during the match that would force him to retire.
