Bret Hart vs Sting (WCW, 10-25-1998)

WCW Halloween Havoc, Las Vegas, NV

This show is most famous, or infamous, for two things: the atrocious Hogan-Warrior rematch, and the Goldberg-DDP world title match that got cut off when the pay-per-view window closed and they went off the air, forcing WCW to replay the entire match on Nitro the next night. But there was also a U.S. title match between Hart and Sting, among other things!

Bret’s got new music. Sting’s terrible goatee has fully grown in. “Little darker look with the addition of the goatee.” Hart leaves the ring before the match. Sting follows him out, still wearing his Marilyn Manson trench coat. Hart back in, then back out. Hart wanders into the entrance aisle, Sting eventually follows, Hart backs down and the refeee gets between them. Hart looks to put the Repo Man sneak on Sting but it doesn’t happen.

Bret enters the ring, the bell sounds, and then Bret goes outside again to argue with a lady and some other people. Sting letting Bret get back in without conflict, giving him room. But Hart leaves the ring again, turns his back, and Sting’s finally had enough, going out and retrieving his opponent, sending him back in, and finally starting the match.

Sting mounts for a 10-punch, six land, and then he hits a clothesline. Sting with a right hand. Ram into the turnbuckle. Corner-to-corner whip and Hart hits hard, back-first. Sting goes “woo” but not like Ric Flair. Inverted atomic drop from Sting, cover gets two.

Right hand Sting, Hart into the corner and he kicks to the gut, then lands a couple rights and a couple headbutts. Rake across the top rope. Right hand to the gut. DDT from Hart gets two. Back up, another right hand takes Sting down. Hart with a choke in the corner, another right to the gut.

Hart with an inverted atomic drop as Schiavone rambles about the state of wrestling before the turn of the millennium. Headbutt to the stomach, Sting holding down toward his crotchpad. Legdrop from Hart, cover gets two and Hart is incensed at Billy Silverman.

Headbutts to the lower back from Hart, then another right to the ribs. Choke in the corner again. Right hand, Sting down. Elbowdrop, cover gets two. Hart with a chinlock, Sting up and elbows out, but Bret catches him with a knee to the stomach and then chokes him over the second rope.

Hart with a running bulldog out of the corner. Sting counters a suplex with an inside cradle for two. But Bret’s right back on the attack, Russian legsweep hits. Up to the second rope, Sting up, Hart goes for a dropkick, but Sting steps back and catches him for the scorpion deathlock. Hart gets the bottom rope, and this time, unlike the previous Monday, Sting breaks the hold.

Sting with some stomps. He grabs the foot and yanks Hart back out to the center of the ring, then slowly circles and goes down for a cover, gets two. Sting mounts and lands five right hands. A man in the background walks with his sign upside down. Someone tells him and he turns it right side up.

Sting off the ropes, Hart leapfrogs and goes down, clutching his knee. Sting, all-time good guy idiot, isn’t buying it for once. Hart, with the referee distracted, pulls out the KNUX. Hart reverses a whip to the corner, but Sting springs out and clotheslines him down.

Sting puts the knux on now, but Billy Silverman prevents Sting from actually punching Hart with the foreign object. So Bret hits Sting in the nuts.

Hart kicks Sting in the stomach, Heenan thought it was a sharpshooter attempt. Hart with a backbreaker. Now to the second rope again, this time for the elbow with Sting down. Elbow hits. Cover again, another two count. Hart dumps Sting out to the floor, then follows.

Right hand from Hart. Everything in the in-between in this match is really slow. It’s like they got told they had 15 and wanted to stretch out as little as possible for that long. Sting picked up and dropped on the guardrail. Hart back into the ring to taunt the crowd while the camera stays on Sting in the aisle.

Sting coming back, Hart forearms him on the apron, SHEAMUS-STYLE. Then he does it again. Silverman gets Bret out of there, then grabs at Sting, who elbows Silverman in the face, not knowing it was the referee. Then Bret legdrops Silverman. I laughed. Bret’s just full on dickhead goon at this point.

Sting coming back now, with the ref down and out. Sting with a clothesline. Mount in the corner, one punch, to the other side, Bret gets a boot up. They both had to jump over Silverman’s corpse to get there. Hart with right hands, goes up top, and Sting cuts him off, crotching him on the top turnbuckle. Superplex from Sting and Hart’s legs smash into Silverman’s. This is a mess.

Hart gets up face toward the corner in the corner, and Sting splashes him there, Stinger style, but cracks his own head on the ringpost. Hart gets Sting’s bat and just lays into him repeatedly with Sting draped over the top rope.

Back into the ring, and Hart still has the bat. Bret rolls him over, goes to the second rope, and hits a FLYING BAT SHOT. Hart revives the referee. Hart puts the sharpshooter on in the middle of the ring. Sting’s out so it’s already basically over. Silverman checks the arm, drops thrice, and the match is over. Then they play the wrong music.

Rating: 1.5/5. Meltzer gave this *1/2 back in the day. I hadn’t seen it in years so I was hoping it’d be one of those things where Big Dave and I greatly disagreed, but it’s really not. It’s not a very good match at all. There’s no energy, the pace is really slow, Sting phones it way the fuck in, and Bret frankly isn’t far behind him. This was the first BIG Hart-Sting televised match, and again, they’d done a bunch of house show matches so surely they had a good match worked out, or maybe they just lazed it up on those shows, too. This match taken alone gives you the impression they had no chemistry at all, but it’s really an effort thing, I think. If there’s a turning point where Hart starts to lose interest in even his own matches, this might be it. We’ll see.