Jim Ross Recalls Sting’s Clash of Champions X Injury Derailing WCW Storylines, Lex Luger Replacing Sting Against Ric Flair

On the latest Grilling JR, Jim Ross recalled Sting’s knee injury suffered at Clash of Champions X derailing their plans for Sting’s feud with Flair. Sting suffered the legit injury when he interfered in the steel cage match main event due to the Horsemen having kicked him out.

The injury put Sting on the shelf for a few months and forced WCW to find a new opponent for Flair for WrestleWar, which turned out to be Lex Luger. Luger wasn’t ready for the position and the feud suffered as a result. Highlights and the full audio are below:

On how much Sting’s injury hurt WCW’s storylines at the time: “Well, everything is built, Conrad, for the crescendo. And it was already promoted … it was his time. Everything had been built, positioned. Guys put in front of him, doing all these things to make it more challenging and daunting. To put the championship that Flair embraced so much in jeopardy. But then it all went to hell in that one hop up the cage where his patella went to hell. So it was a bad, bad break. We had to basically start back over with him, tell another story, get him rehabbed. And we could have probably done a better job of weekly rehab videos, better produced, well-produced, to show how hard he’s working to get back to you fans, so to speak. ‘The Little Stingers are waiting,’ blah blah blah.”

On replacing Sting with Lex Luger: “Luger wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready skill set-wise, he wasn’t ready being over-wise. We were force-feeding Lex Luger, it was so obvious that there became a backlash. And it was not an organic push to create a babyface persona that everybody could rally around. And there were better options, I would think, had we thought it through. But Luger was the guy who was standing there. ‘We gotta go with Luger.’ Why do we have to go with Luger? Why can’t we all sit down and brainstorm this catastrophe, this cluster, and come up with another plan. So at the end of the day we want to get Flair stronger than ever, beating people. And when Sting comes back in July, people will be salivating because Flair will be red-hot and Sting will be returning. That was the storyline. But we didn’t — we took a lot of Flair’s success for granted I think, too. And then overbook him and overexpose him. I don’t know, it was just a cluster of errors from a creative standpoint.”

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