They say you always remember your first. While I don’t remember the exact moment I first saw professional wrestling, I will always remember the first person that truly captivated me, and got me hooked on something I’m still obsessed with decades later, Sting.

Wrestling was always around when I was very young, due to my dad being a fan. He grew up, like I did, in the coastal South Carolina region meaning that he had spent much of the 70s and 80s seeing some of the greats come through our area. While by 1986 the territory system that had once governed wrestling was rapidly fading, Jim Crockett Promotions out of Charlotte had become the last great challenger to McMahon’s expanding WWF machine. Many people still argue that 1986 Crockett was one of the best creative years any promotion has ever had—which is to say, it was a hell of a time to be a fan. At 6:05 every Saturday night, the TV came on at my dad’s house. I can’t pinpoint the moment when those memories crystallized (probably the summer of 1990), but the who is carved in stone:

He does this, he does that, he’s big as a bull and quick as a cat… he’s a man called Sting.

Sting wasn’t just cool—he was everything I wanted heroes to be. He had the blonde flat-top, the neon face paint that looked like it had been splashed on by some god of Saturday morning cartoons, and a presence that felt larger than anything in my small world. He was fearless and colorful and earnest in a way that made sense to a kid who wanted desperately to believe in good guys. He was also, unfortunately, the reason I had a rat-tail haircut at age five. Some prices are worth paying.

Sting was one of the best babyfaces in wrestling during this period, and honestly, throughout most of his career. During his struggles with the Horsemen he was the perfect combination of noble and gullible that endeared him the hearts of tons of little Stingers across the world.

It can be hard to get sympathy for a cool guy that’s in great shape, and every tango takes two (or in wrestling, usually many more.) Sting was set up perfectly by his best foils in this era, Ric Flair, and Vader. Flair was the consummate foil for Sting. The long-established top star of the promotion, Flair and his cronies in the Horsemen would employ every dirty trick in the book in order to get one up on our intrepid hero. Their tactics (later carried on by the almost as good Dangerous Alliance) caused us to not only feel sympathy for him, but to understand the idea of fighting fair, and fighting honorably. Vader was perhaps the greatest “Monster” of all time. So much that calling him a monster feels reductive, but what else do you call the giant man who destroys everything in his path? Vader’s matches with Sting made us feel like he may never walk again, let alone wrestle, thanks to Vader’s rough and believable style and Stings ability to sell a beating.

Of Course, Sting was also the top pushed babyface in the company I was introduced into wrestling through so of course he was my favorite from age 3-9. When wrestling exploded in popularity again, suddenly half my class was watching thanks to the NWO angle and Hogan’s turn. Sting changed too. Gone were the colors. The hair grew long and dark. He haunted the rafters in black and white, dropping in with a baseball bat like a goth sheriff. By then I was ten years old and already the kind of insufferable little smark who thought he’d cracked the business open like a code. I drifted away from Sting for a while, cruiserweights and ECW felt cooler, edgier, more “my” thing. Even then, I circled Starrcade ‘97 on the mental calendar. After a year and a half of running roughshod over WCW, Sting would beat Hogan, and WCW would pull ahead once and for all. I knew what should happen. Everyone did.

WCW blew it.

It didn’t feel like Sting had been cheated. It felt like I had been. It was the first time I realized that something I loved—something that felt like part of my identity—could be mishandled by people who didn’t understand it the way I, a fifth grader, did. That feeling would revisit me many times as a wrestling fan, but the first hurt always leaves the deepest mark. That’s a lesson most wrestling fans learn eventually. If you’re lucky, the fallout only screws over one wrestler, not the entire promotion.

I kept up with WCW til the bitter end, and Sting had plenty of bright spots still, even as the light within the organization grew dimmer and dimmer. When it was finally over I drifted away from wrestling for a bit, as did Sting. By the mid-2000s, we were both back. TNA felt like the southern wrestling revival we were both hoping for. There were bright moments, and Sting produced some great ones (including a killer match with Samoa Joe) but he also got trapped in the eternal boondoggle of TNA booking.

Then came WWE in 2014: the Triple H match at WrestleMania, the injury, the retirement we assumed was final.

Thankfully, it wasn’t.

He returned at Winter is Coming 2020 for AEW. Old man Sting in AEW was booked about as perfectly as you could hope for someone befitting his stature. He immediately allied with Darby Allin, this strange, fearless kid who felt like he’d grown up reading Sting’s shadow. Sting didn’t just tag with Darby; he adopted him. Wrestling dad. They would have excting matches built around Darby’s recklessness, often building to Sting doing things that men half his age wouldn’t dare, like diving off a balcony. This all came to a conclusion in March of 2024 when Sting finally called it quits in what may have been the best retirement of all time. A moment that I am forever grateful to have experienced live.

Sting deciding to retire in Greensboro, North Carolina wasn’t just poetic—it was perfect. That was the city of his legendary 45-minute draw with Ric Flair in ‘88, the match that made him. Once that 45 minutes was over he had gone from young kid with potential, to a future champion. Greensboro is interesting because it was a massive venue in the Crockett era despite it not being that large of a city in comparison to the rest of the Carolinas and Virginia. This place had history coming out of it’s walls, Including pilgrimages to it from my dad, and many more from my Step-dad who was also a fan and grew up a stones throw away in Winston-Salem. The cheers of generations who watched Sting grow up in front of them, and now those of us who grew up with Sting, returned to send him off.

I was lucky enough to be there, not with any kind of father figure, but with three guys I’d be proud to call brothers, and are some of my best friends. Guys that never turned heel on me, and never swerved me. Sitting beside them, feeling the echoes of the people who had cheered before us, gave me a kind of peace I hadn’t felt in years. It might have been one of the sparks that inspired this whole project. That feeling felt like it was all over the arena, and the match itself absolutely reflected it as well.

We see highlights of his career on the screen, then Sting’s first son walked out in Surfer Sting gear. I didn’t realize who it was at first. I was far enough away that I briefly thought Sting was going to wrestle in that gear. It made zero sense, but I was ready to believe it. A moment later, another son in Wolfpac colors walked out, and suddenly the whole night tilted into something even more special.

Sting wasn’t just retiring. He was saying goodbye in the exact way he deserved: with his sons beside him, with his chosen successor at his side, against opponents who worked their asses off to make him look untouchable, (The Young Bucks, who were the stooging heels of a lifetime, and made sting look like a million dollars) in a city that had birthed his legend. He got to go out surrounded by people who loved him, respected him, and understood what he meant.

He went out in a match that made perfect use of what he still can do very well while his partner, opponents, sons, and special guests all put in the maximum possible effort in order to ensure it all came together as spectacular as someone like Sting deserves. Most of us won’t retire, and if we do, we’ll be lucky to get a cake. Sting got the greatest send off someone could possibly hope for because he’s that important and iconic to the wrestling business, and I got spend that moment with the guys that mean the most to me. Few people will ever experience what Sting did, but it’s my sincere hope that everybody reading this will get to experience what I did.

That’s what this whole project is about, really—the way wrestling bleeds into life, and life bleeds back. The way the things we love when we’re young become mirrors we carry into adulthood. The way a wrestling match can crack your heart open and show you something about yourself you didn’t expect.

After thirty-plus years of devoting energy, money, hope, and emotion to pro wrestling, I got something back: the love of my friends, the roar of a crowd united in purpose, and a single, perfect evening that made me feel grateful to be alive.

Lying in bed that night, I remember thinking:

If this had been my last day on Earth, it would’ve been a good one to go out on.