Rockin’ Around the Ouija Board: Starrcade ’97 and Hogan vs. Sting
Christmas, Pro Wrestling, and Ouija Boards . . . ?
For Christmas 1997, I got a Ouija board. I must have circled it in the Sears catalogue and then forgot. Surprise, surprise: here’s a Ouija board under the Christmas tree. Happy Birthday, Jesus. Celebrate the birth of our Savior by opening up what just might be a portal to hell.
I’d always liked trash culture artifacts like that. It wasn’t even a conscious thing. I just gravitated to it. Occult stuff, horror movies, pro wrestling — it was all my domain. Still is.
Speaking of wrestling, WCW was all the rage in December 1997. Some said World Championship Wrestling was better than WWF (or WWE, as it’s now known). On December 28, 1997, WCW held its flagship end-of-year pay-per-view, called Starrcade. Hulk Hogan, who’d long since dropped the yellow trunks and red knee-pads and turned to the dark side, would finally square off against Sting, the perennial fan-favorite who’d also gone dark, but in a most mercurial way, plagiarizing Brandon Lee’s face-paint from The Crow. At Starrcade, Sting would finally give the egomaniacal Hogan some long overdue comeuppance for his excesses (i.e., monopolizing the WCW World Title and wrestling only a few crappy matches per year for a seven-figure salary).
But I wouldn’t be seeing the match, because I was spending Christmas in a cabin without electricity. The nearest house — my grandparents’ — didn’t have cable and its denizens wouldn’t spring for a pay-per-view, even if it was the season of giving. And the internet, at this point in time, was something most people in our neck of the woods still got through a landline. Ergo, I wouldn’t even be able to get the results as they came in on the evening of the 28th.
But I did have a Ouija board. So on December 29, I busted out my ghoulish gift and commandeered my mother. Together, we arranged our fingertips on the planchette and attempted to contact a spirit. Soon enough, the planchette began to move with a power of its own beneath our conjoined fingers. My unwitting mother and I had contacted a spirit on the other side. After a few preliminary greetings, I cut right to the chase.
“Spirit, who won the main event at WCW Starrcade?”
My mother and I watched as the planchette moved our hands over to the “H.” It moved away, and then circled back to the “H” again.
“Hulk Hogan won?” I asked.
The planchette moved over to “YES.”
“Wow,” I said. “Hulk Hogan beat Sting.”
I felt a strange ambivalence as I verbalized this. My disappointment stemming from the outcome of a scripted fight outweighed my excitement stemming from the possibility that I may have been talking to an actual paranormal entity. (Never mind the fact that that “paranormal entity,” on account of likely being no more than an epiphenomenon of the subconscious energies of my mother and myself, was not exactly a credible source.)
Soon enough, the planchette moved over to “GOODBYE,” and the session was over. But my curiosity had been satiated . . . at least with respect to the Starrcade results.
In the next couple days, I went up to the farm house and phoned a friend of mine in town who was a wrestling fan in general and a Sting fan in specific. He had the luxury of owning a descrambler and had illegally obtained the Starrcade feed.
“So,” I said, after we’d exchanged our greetings. “Hulk Hogan won, huh?”
My friend paused on the other end. “I guess he sort of did.”
“Sort of?” I asked. Could the Ouija board have deceived me?
“He did win,” my friend explained, “and then he lost.”
My friend then explained to me what had happened in the Sting/Hogan match, which will go down as one of the most convoluted finishes in pro wrestling history. Wrestling is, of course, pre-scripted, but this match was like watching a screenplay that has been rewritten so many times by so many authors that it plays as wholly nonsensical (see The Rise of Skywalker).
In pro wrestling, letting someone pin you is called “putting someone over.” The 1997 Starrcade main event got complicated because, in short, Hogan didn’t want to put over Sting (or really anybody else, but that’s another story). But the year-long, ever-simmering feud between the castaway hero Sting and the tyrant Hogan couldn’t really end satisfactorily without Sting winning. So the WCW writers effectively had both men win to keep all parties happy. This didn’t exactly make for a five-star match.
After the two combatants brawled within and outside the ropes for the opening portion of the match, Hogan delivered his trademark leg-drop on Sting in the center of the ring. Referee Nick Patrick, who had briefly been in the thrall of Hogan’s New World Order faction earlier in the calendar year, made the three-count. Hogan had won, defending his championship.
But then Bret “the Hitman” Hart appeared at ringside crying foul. Hart had defected from the WWF a month earlier after owner Vince McMahon had changed a scripted finish without Hart’s consent so as to spite the Hitman. At the Survivor Series pay-per-view in Montreal, McMahon had had the referee ring the bell prematurely when Hart’s opponent, the incommensurable heartthrob Shawn Michaels, applied Hart’s own patented leglock, the “Sharpshooter,” even though the match wasn’t scripted to end on a submission. This would go down in the wrestling annals as the “Montreal Screwjob,” and now, a month later, WCW was trying to pay parodic homage to this at its marquee event. At the heart of the Hitman’s complaints was the claim that Patrick’s pinfall had been too fast.
Hart then appointed himself the referee and restarted the match. This was not completely out of order, as Hart had served as guest referee in the preceding bout. When the match resumed, Sting promptly landed his patented “Stinger splash,” and applied the Scorpion Deathlock, a leglock indistinguishable from the Sharpshooter. Now Hart was calling for the bell in the absence of an actual submission, and Sting was declared winner of the match and presented with the championship belt.
If this reads confusingly, it should. The match had been scripted to please all participating parties. While it may have succeeded in doing that, it also baffled the tens of thousands in attendance and the millions watching on pay-per-view. Given the controversy of the outcome, Sting’s title reign only lasted 11 days before he was stripped of the championship, setting up a February rematch.
And yet the outcome was far more definitive for the Ouija board my mother and I consulted that night in December, 1997. For the spirit that we may or may not have been talking to, Hogan’s victory was clear-cut. Perhaps it was all the product of our collaborating subconsciousnesses (or more likely my subconscious, as my mom barely knows who Hulk Hogan is, and has probably never heard of Sting). But perhaps it was all too real.
Now let’s consider this scenario for a moment — I mean, really ponder it — from the perspective of a denizen of the spirit world. Maybe you are the soul of a deceased person, in limbo in the afterlife, seeking contact with the living world. Or maybe you are a demonic entity, waiting for a passage into the material realm through a human host. Either way, you locate a teenager and his mother manipulating a Ouija board in a cabin in the snowy woods. You swoop down (or up, or around — the spatial parameters of the hereafter are unclear) and become present on the scene. You make yourself available. You are about to have human contact. You are about to collapse the boundaries between the living and the non-living, the material and the ethereal. Whether your intentions are good or evil or neutral, you thrum with anticipation.
And then you start getting peppered with questions about professional wrestling.
At this point, whether demon or spirit or dryad, you are overrun with questions yourself. You find yourself experiencing doubts of an existential nature, even if you don’t necessarily exist in a conventional, material sense. You desperately seek to manifest even for just a few precious moments on the plane of the living, and the people you meet up with are wholly preoccupied with pseudo-sports (and this is WCW, so not even particularly good pseudo-sports.) It must be akin to immigrating to America from a war-torn country and seeing people getting stressed out about marginal increases in meat prices or cellphone fees. Here you have people blessed with life — with souls encased in bone and flesh — and their primary concern has to do with whether a steroidal man with a sprayed-on tan and beard “pinned” another steroidal man with face-paint. At this point, you have to ask yourself, as spirit or demon or revenant or whatever, whether or not crossing into the living realm is actually worth it. Maybe it has been over-hyped. Maybe the centuries of disembodied limbo have made human existence seem like some kind of paradise — that is, like something it’s clearly not. Perhaps it’s one of those “grass-is-greener” situations, even though The Other Side is, in this case, the realm of ensoulment itself. Maybe the spirit, as it moved that planchette beneath our fingertips, came to resign itself to its present situation, and that’s why it answered my questions so summarily and then ditched.
Or maybe the entity on the other side of that Ouija board was a Hulk Hogan fan. Maybe the steroidal man with sprayed-on beard and tan represented everything that spirit ever wanted to be. In that case, given Hogan’s onscreen character at the time and his off-screen offenses both before and after (including his racist rants and his apparent pact with Peter Thiel to kill Gawker through frivolous lawsuits), I’d bet that on that cold night in December of 1997, my mother and I came into brief contact with something truly evil.
