Sting: Halloween Havoc

Sting’s woeful Halloween Havoc history can be put largely put down to poor booking. To cover just some, we will only mention the significant failures. 

The very first HH event in 1989 had a brilliant on-paper main event as Sting and Ric Flair battled Terry Funk and The Great Muta, with guest referee Bruno Sammartino. Unfortunately, the Thunderdome cage flopped. Although promised to be electrified, it was not, a prime example of over promising and underdelivering. 

The main event next year saw Sting beat Sid after a confusing twist. Sid pinned ‘Sting’, who turned out to be Barry Windham dressed up as the face-painted surfer, why? Doesn’t matter. Maybe Sid should have questioned the few feet “The Stinger” had suddenly put on.  

1991’s Havoc’s opening saw Sting – as well as many other talents such as The Diamond Studd (Scott Hall), Cactus Jack, Vader, and others – compete in the one and only Chamber Of Horrors match. You had to try to electrify someone to win the match, no further detail is needed. 

1992 saw Sting face the newly-debuted Jake “The Snake” Roberts in his only WCW PPV match. In an apparently unrigged ‘’Spin The Wheel, Make The Deal’ roulette to decide the match stipulation, it was decided the duo would face off in a Coal Miner’s Glove match. They pulled something together from a mysterious match stipulation but it was not good, as Eric Bischoff commented: “I felt the same way in 1992 that you did about a Coal Miner’s Glove Match…..what the fuck is that? What makes it so interesting? No story, no buildup – just a gimmick match for the sake of a gimmick match.” 

1998 saw a potential dream match between Sting and Bret Hart marred a ton of shenanigans after a referee bump, taking away from what could have been much better. 

1999 saw Sting face Goldberg in a main event billed not as a world title match. Goldberg won and despite it being non-title, Goldberg won the belt. Sting’s title was regifted but this regifting was annulled as Sting had attacked a referee. 

2000 too featured a Jeff Jarrett match completely shambolic as the biggest part of the bout was a series of faux Sting ‘lookalike’ dressed up in different iterations of the character. Classic shambolic Russo BS booking here. 

As Brian Zane of Wrestling With Wregret once highlighted, Sting had to put up with a lot of crap in WCW and it didn’t get much better in TNA, and it didn’t get much better in WWE. 

Taz at ECW’s CyberSlam

Taz’s record at Cyberslam is not terrible but it does not stand up to scrutiny as well as Taz’s other PPV records. 

Taz’s best match was an ECW title match against Chris Candido. Held under hardcore rules at the 1999 installment, the end was questionable with a kayfabe neck injury being conducted with extreme seriousness by Joey Styles. The result was never really in question and as Peter Kent of 411Mania commented: “If this match was clipped it would have been entertaining, but then, so would almost any match.”  

The 2000 iteration of the PPV saw Taz’s second-best match, a short match when the then-WWE-hired Taz lost his ECW title to Tommy Dreamer in five minutes. It was feel good for Dreamer but even this is lost when you find out “The Innovator Of Violence” never wanted to win the ECW belt. He lost it to Credible minutes later, making Taz little more than a side character in his departing moment. 

Taz’s first three CyberSlam matches all were too short to really produce anything of note. In these he beat Joel Hartgood, Little Guido on night one and Tracy Smother on night two, and Brakkus – all of which were under five minutes. These at least fitted Taz’s modus operandi of short squash matches. None of these PPV bouts were bad per se but you can only get so much out of the same match pattern: brief and dominant.