[Evil Vito]

Originally Posted by Tazz Dan Yeah. And like I posted in the Wrestlemania thread, I'm sure when Sting signed and they mapped out the plan through to Mania to him, he would have known he'd be putting Triple H over before putting pen to paper. And he still chose to sign. He's a businessman.

While I don't doubt Sting had been clued in to some of the plans before he signed, what happened in the build vs. what we actually got in the match seemed very contradictory.

Look at the build. Sting made it very clear during his pre-Mania Raw promo that he wasn't fighting for WCW (going as far as to say "that would be ridiculous at this point"). He was fighting to save WWE from suffering the same fate as WCW. He didn't want a tyrant authority figure dragging the company into the ground.

Then the match comes and all of the talk about it not being about WCW winds up meaning precisely dick as it's basically all the announcers talked about. Then you have DX, the nWo, and the announcers gushing on about the 90s. The WWE.com write up for the match just painted the entire point of the match as a final WWE/WCW showdown.

And then after all is said and done, Sting shook hands with the very tyrant he swore to stop, and Triple H then proceeded to gloat about it later that night to build towards what appears to be a match with The Rock at some point.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the nostalgia of the match. But based on how it went down, maybe it would have been better for Sting to say he was fighting for WCW in the buildup. Instead what looked like it'd be a long-term story that might have ended in a power struggle type deal with a SummerSlam rematch just seemed to get scrapped in favor of yet another Vince McMahon "remember, I killed WCW" ego stroke.