Ask 411 Wrestling: Did Sting Ever Consider Leaving WCW?

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Up in the rafters, it’s Ticking Time Bomb Taz!

When Hogan Hogan jumped to WCW in 1994, he became the number one babyface and Sting was dropped down the card. In fact, Sting, did not win the World Title again until 1997. Did Sting ever consider jumping to WWF at this point in time, considering he “lost his spot?”

It doesn’t seem that way.

According to Eric Bischoff on a 2020 episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, Sting never once used a potential jump to the WWF or conversations with Vince McMahon as leverage in getting a better contract with WCW. Given that many wrestlers who weren’t even all that interested in jumping would feign having an offer from a competitor in order to strengthen their position in negotiations, it seems that if Sting wasn’t saying anything about going to the WWF, he really didn’t have interest in going to the WWF.

It should be noted that Sting did give at least one interview in which he indicated he once considered going to the Fed before he ultimately did in 2014. On a 2015 episode of Ric Flair’s WOO! Nation podcast, the Stinger once felt as though he was being low-balled on money when Jim Herd was running WCW’s front office, and he was ready to leave the promotion over it if need be. However, Herd ultimately caved and gave him the pay he wanted, leading to Mr. Borden staying put.

Of course, the Jim Herd era of WCW was well before Hulk Hogan came on board, so that is not entirely responsive to the question, but I still thought it was worth putting out there as the only documented occasion that I could find in which a jump crossed the Sting’s mind.

You are correct that the Stinger did take a backseat to Hogan when he first came to the company, but, if I had to speculate, I would guess that he stuck around because he was still happy with the money he was making, which matters more to some than their spot on the card.

Stormi is being simulcast:

I was thinking about Wrestlemania II (of all things). Even without counting the “celebrities” in the NFL battle royal, would Wrestlemania II be considered the Wrestlemania with the most celebrity guests? Each of the three sites had guest announcers, timekeepers, etc. Is that accurate?

Yes, that’s completely accurate. Even ignoring the NFL participants on the show (and I don’t know why you’d do that – they qualify as celebrities as that word is usually used in conjunction with Wrestlemania), I counted eighteen celebrities on Wrestlemania II.

Most of the other shows, meanwhile, have only six or seven celebrities.

In case you’re curious, second place behind Wrestlemania II by my count is Wrestlemania XI, which I clocked as having fifteen celebrities, though admittedly that number includes counting all three members of Salt n Peppa as separate celebrities, which not all sources seem to do for whatever reason, even though they are three different people.

The main reason that Mania XI ranks so high is the main event of Bam Bam Bigelow versus Lawrence Taylor, in which Taylor was accompanied by his “All Pro Team” of seven other NFL players. In a side trivia note, that All Pro Team included Steve McMichael and Reggie White, the former of whom would later become a full-time wrestler in WCW and the latter of whom would have a one-off match against McMichael at WCW’s 1997 Slamboree pay per view.

Little Goomba from France take us back to everybody’s favorite year in wrestling . . . 2020:

A small question that may have already been asked is bothering me:

Without the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the decision resulting in splitting Wrestlemania 36 into two nights, what would be the likelihood of having a two-night Wrestlemania on April 6th and 7th this year?

I think the concept of a two-night Wrestlemania would have eventually taken hold regardless of the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2020, before there were widespread concerns about the disease outside of China, New Japan Pro Wrestling held its annual Wrestle Kingdom event as a two-night spectacular. The idea of a promotion’s biggest show spanning multiple days was already out there in the wrestling world, and it would have wound its way to WWE eventually, regardless of the infamous lockdown.

Tyler from Winnipeg was finished before he started:

How would you characterize the HBK/Stone Cold tag team championship run?

There wasn’t a “run.” They won the titles on an episode of Raw, they defended them on the episode of Raw that immediately followed, and then the whole thing came to an end because Michaels was gone the next week as a result of his altercation with Bret Hart over the “Sunny days” comment.

It’s hard to analyze something that never really got going.

James said, “I’m done with Sergio”:

Does the WWE hold a trademark on the concept of the Royal Rumble? I understand some other competitors have tried variations of it, but I’m unclear if it the match concept of the Royal Rumble is legally protected from being replicated by other promotions.

Nope. That’s not how trademarks work. A trademark is a word, phrase, or graphic design that is used in marketing a product. You can also have a service mark, which is essentially the same thing as a trademark, except that it is used in marketing a service as opposed to marketing some tangible product. WWE has certainly trademarked the name “Royal Rumble” and nobody else will be able to use it to describe a wrestling match that they are promoting without incurring the E’s legal wrath, but the actual structure of the match is not capable of being trademarked.

There are two other types of intellectual property protection, one being a copyright and the other being a patent.

However, WWE can’t secure copyright protection for the concept of the Royal Rumble, either. Copyright protects an actual fixed, creative work. Movies, songs, books, episodes of television shows – those can all be subject to copyright protection. A general concept cannot be. So, WWE owns the copyright to the footage of every Royal Rumble match that has actually happened on one of their shows, been recorded, and been broadcast. However, they can’t protect the rules and structure of the match via copyright.

As far as patents go, those are used to protect inventions of some useful product. Again, that’s not what a pro wrestling match type is, so patent protection does not apply to the Royal Rumble, either.

Basically, as long as they don’t call it a “Royal Rumble” or copy it move-for-move from prior Royal Rumbles that have actually happened in the past, any wrestling promotion should be able to hold a battle royale with staggered entrances.

And, if you think about it, they do. Impact Wrestling’s “gauntlet” match is basically a Royal Rumble except that the last two guys in the ring have a singles match that ends in pinfall or submission. Granted, there is that one difference, but the two matches are still similar enough that I suspect WWE would have put the kibosh on Impact’s version of the bout if the could. Similarly, New Japan Pro Wrestling has its “ranbo” match (though pinfall eliminations are also allowed in their version), and MLW has its very similar Battle Riot.

Uzoma is wearing the boots with the fur:

Would the late Bruiser Brody had been a perfect addition to the original ECW?

The version of ECW that most fans think of when they hear the letters “ECW” got going in 1994 when Paul Heyman purchased the company. In 1994, Bruiser Brody would have been 48 years old. Granted, there are plenty of wrestlers who go past that age, but Brody almost certainly would not have been in his prime by the mid-1990s.

In light of that fact, I have a hard time saying that he would have been a “perfect addition” to the company. There would definitely have been a role for him to play, just like there will always be a role for anybody with Brody’s level of talent in just about any promotion. Perhaps in a parallel universe where Brody lived longer, he would have been in the role Terry Funk had in ECDub. However, I have a hard time believing that he would have been viable as a years-long fixture in the main event scene. You wouldn’t want to build the promotion around him.

Kyle is climbing aboard:

This mostly happened a bit before I started watching wrestling (or I missed it because I only saw WWF Superstars and All-American Wrestling on weekend mornings), but why did so many tag teams used to have Express in their names? Cagematch lists 206 tag teams that are [something] Express. Did one team just pick it, another adopted it to feud with the first and it took off from there? Or is there something else I’m missing? What were the prime Express years?

It all starts with trains.

No, seriously.

Trains.

In rail lingo, an “express” train is a passenger train that makes few to no stops between its point of origin and its ultimate destination. That seems like the prefect thing to name a tag team after, right? Right?

Well, there are a few more steps along the way. First, we have to go to the nation of Turkey.

In the 1960s and earlier, there was a fair amount of drug smuggling that ran through Turkey. If you were a smuggler who was apprehended by Turkish authorities, one popular means of escape was hopping on a train that ran from the Turkish city of Istanbul to the Turkish city of Edirne. Because of some historic oddities involving the border between Turkey and Greece, even though this train that was part of the Turkish rail system ran between two cities within Turkey, there was part of its route that exited Turkey, entered Greece, and then reentered Turkey.

The train also ran fairly slowly, allowing people to jump off of it while it was in motion with minimal to no injuries. This meant that smugglers on the run would hop on the train in Istanbul, ride it for a while, and then jump off in Greece, when they were no longer in the jurisdiction of the country that was trying to prosecute them. Typically, they could get from Greece to whatever country they were headed to fairly easily . . . or at least more easily than it would be to get out of Turkey as a prisoner.

Because the train in question left Istanbul in the late evening and traveled its route overnight, it earned a nickname:

The Midnight Express

Sounds familiar, right? Well, we’re not quite there yet.

Because of this history, “Midnight Express” became slang for any attempt to escape from prison, and it became the title of a 1977 book written by Billy Hayes, which was about Hayes’ real-life experience as an American citizen arrested in Turkey for drug smuggling. Hayes ultimately escaped from prison and into Greece. The book was turned into a movie of the same title in 1978, with a screenplay written by film legend Oliver Stone. The movie was rather popular and won Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score.

Fast forward to 1980 and the Southeast Championship Wrestling territory, where Dennis Condrey and Randy Rose (later joined by Norvell Austin as a third man) formed a tag team that would come to be known as . . . The Midnight Express.

Condrey was quoted in Greg Oliver and Steve Johnson’s 2005 book Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Tag Teams as saying that the team wasn’t actually named after the movie but rather their proclivity for being out late at night. However, I’m hard pressed to believe that the popularity of the movie just two years earlier didn’t at least contribute to the phrase being the popular culture to the point that it would have been in consideration for the team’s name, even if the movie wasn’t the precise reason they chose it.

Once the Midnight Express became popular, the trend of including “Express” in tag team names exploded. Of course, the most noteworthy example beside the Midnights in the Rock n’ Roll Express, who formed in 1983 and would have a legendary feud with the versions of the Midnight Express comprised of Condrey and Bobby Eaton then later Eaton and Stan Lane. In 1984, the WWF got in on the act with the U.S. Express of Mike Rotunda and Barry Windham, which later turned into the American Express when Dan Spivey replaced Windham for a spell.

Other noteworthy Expresses in major North American wrestling promotions include the Orient Express in the WWF, which consisted of Akio Sato and Pat Tanaka in 1990 and then Paul Diamond and Tanaka in 1991. (Taking us back to the trains mentioned at the beginning of this answer, there was an Orient Express that traveled across Europe and in to Turkey from 1883 through 2009.) The Hart family’s Stampede Wrestling also had the Viet Cong Express from 1986 to 1987, which consisted of Japanese wrestlers Hiroshi Hase and Fumihiro Niikura pretending to be Vietnamese guys early in their careers. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention Elijah Akeem (a.k.a. “Bad” Leroy Brown) and Kareem Muhammad (a.k.a. Ray Candy) who teamed as the Zambuie Express in several U.S. territories and even one tour of New Japan between 1983 and 1984.

Then you’ve also got the Lightning Express of Tim Horner and Brad Armstrong, who used that name in both Jim Crockett Promotions and Bill Watts’ UWF in the mid and late 1980s. (They also teamed together without that name before and after the Lightning Express run.) Most recently, you’ve got the Jurassic Express of Jungle Jack Perry and Luchasaurus, with their affiliate Marko Stunt, who were a staple of the first three years of AEW and held the company’s Tag Team Titles.

Oh, and there was the Rainbow Express on Impact Wrestling’s first couple of weekly PPVs, consisting of Lenny Lane and Bruce (former WCW’s Kwee Wee/Alan Funk), though they fell apart quickly when Lane was injured. In a rare moment of giving the devil his due, I will say that Impact had a somewhat creative idea by giving the gay coded Rainbow Express one Mr. Joel Gertner as their manager, given that Gertner’s whole schtick was talking about his alleged sexual exploits with women.

Though it began in mainland North America, the Express phenomenon spread overseas as well. Perhaps the earliest example of this is the Caribbean Express in Puerto Rico’s WWC promotion, which started off as second generation wrestlers Huracan Castillo Jr. and Miguel Perez Jr., who WWF fans may remember as half of Los Boricuas. They also took this act to New Japan and rival Puerto Rican promotion IWA, and the Caribbean Express is actually one of the longer-lived tag teams on this list, having runs together on and off from 1988 through 2015.

Japan also got in on the Express act, with Doug Furnas and Phil LaFon, who had an epic multi-year run in All Japan Pro Wrestling as the Can-Am express from 1988 to 1995. Oddly, they never really used that team name when they worked together in the U.S. There is also currently a current stable in Pro Wrestling NOAH known as the Funky Express – which sounds like a train I really don’t want to buy a ticket for – consisting of Akitoshi Saito, Masao Inoue, and Muhammad Yone, all wrestlers who have been active since the 1990s. In other words, it’s a group of old guys.

The Dragon Gate promotion has also had two Express stables over the course of its history. The first was the Florida Express, a lower card comedy act with the whole joke being that they were Japanese wrestlers pretending to be Americans from Florida. Perhaps their most noteworthy matches came when puro legend Kensuke Sasaki joined them briefly, also Americanizing his persona. Following the Florida Express in DG was the Monster Express, which was a legitimate main event stable betweeen 2013 and 2016. It had many members over the years, with notable examples being current WWE performers Riochet and Akira Tozawa and former IWGP Champion Shingo Takagi.

Aaaaand we also had some Expresses in larger independent promotions, with Rhett Titus & Kenny King being the All-Night Express in ROH; Dunn & Marcos being the Ring Crew Express in even earlier ROH; Scorpio Sky & Quicksilver being the Aerial Express in PWG and other SoCal indies; and Darin Corbin & Ryan Cruz being the North Star Express in CHIKARA and midwestern indies. (I mainly mention that one because I just saw Corbin get summarily bounced on FOX’s new game show The Floor.)

I’ll also note a few Express tag teams that nobody has ever heard of but that got a chuckle out of me while I was doing some research. In 2007, European independents saw the dawn of the Midnight Rock n’ Roll South Coast Express, which was great for all the tag team naming conventions it tried to smush together. The late 2000s European indies also gave us the Smoke and Roll Express, which I think is actually the reverse order of what you want to do those two things in.

We’ll return in seven-ish days, and, as always, you can contribute your questions by emailing [email protected]. You can also leave questions in the comments below, but please note that I do not monitor the comments as closely as I do the email account, so emailing is the better way to get things answered.