Eric Bischoff on nWo Sting’s Influence on Crow Sting Storyline, How Pre-Planned Crow Sting Was

– On the latest 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff discussed the fake “nWo Sting” storyline that led in the storylines to Sting adopting his Crow-like persona. Jeff Farmer played the fake Sting, who came out and attacked Lex Luger in the lead-up to Fall Brawl 1996, which led to WCW talent questioning Sting’s loyalty. At the PPV, nWo Sting came out as the last man for Team nWo, making people think Sting had switched sides, but the real Sting came out as the last man for Team WCW. Afterward, Sting would adopt his famous “Crow” persona modeled after the 1994 film (and graphic novel it was based on).

Highlights from the discussion, and the full podcast, are below:

On when Crow Sting came about: “Once we knew we were going with the Fake Sting — the nWo Sting — we knew we wanted that Crow character. What I’m going to say in a long-winded way is, there was some pre-planning on this, and a little bit of long-term planning. We knew we were going with this story once we embraced the idea of the nWo Sting. We knew we wanted to have the real Sting be that lone — I hate to use this term because it’s been so overused for so many decades, but that one lone wolf. He was there for his friends, he tried to prove it wasn’t him that attacked Lex Luger the previous week. Lex Luger didn’t believe him, he went in there, he did the right thing but at this point he had just lost all faith in humanity because of what had happened with the nWo. Friends turning on friends, kind of a situation. And that’s when Sting was going to ascend up into the rafters and kind of be looming over, trying to find the right time to bring it all back together again and fix it.”

On the nWo Sting’s influence on the Crow Sting storyline: “That was the premise of that story, but it wasn’t as spontaneous as — and I don’t think you meant to make it sound spontaneous, but it wasn’t as spontaneous as anybody might think it was. So much of the stuff we did was; this wasn’t. This was something that was planned out, and we’d agreed earlier before this match, and before this scene and before the nWo Sting, we knew that we had something viable, and we were going to use it to catapult Sting into the rafters or to the next level, so to speak. But yeah, if we wouldn’t have — if somebody, whoever it was … if it were not for that [nWo Sting] we would not have Crow Sting. We would have had some other version of it, but it wouldn’t have been the Crow Sting we saw lurking in the shadows for almost a year, or over a year.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 83 Weeks with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.