Sting is/was the platonic ideal of the naive babyface, the hopeful, brave, and constantly taken advantage of hero that we’ve all kind of come to mock. Fooled by everyone, from Ric Flair, to Luger, to Flair ten more times, we look at him and ask, 'How are we supposed to believe he’d keep falling for it?"
The thing is, with the WWE, we’re all Sting now.
Most of the people on this forum are not who Vince wants as customers. You can tell, because he’s not making his product for us, and he hasn’t for a while.
With the new TV deals more than ever before, he’s proved that he doesn’t run a wrestling business, and that’s why he doesn’t book like a wrestling company. The WWE experience is what he’s booked as his top babyface, and all of the talent is there to job to the idea of what the WWE is.
And us, we keep falling for his schtick by convincing ourselves we can see what we want to see, what we hope to see in the product. You know, just like Sting did all those times with all those dastardly heels.
And just like the Stinger, we’re left high and dry over and over again, hurt, shocked, and put out by something we should have seen coming.
Flair didn’t want Sting’s friendship, and Vince, deep down inside, doesn’t want fans like us. We’re hard to please, we get in the way of what he wants, and he’d rather have a family of four in the crowd than 4 smarks who want to see individual talent, and not a publicly traded company, get over.
We’re all Sting now, because week in and week out we think Vince hasn’t done what he’s done, we deny the fact he actually has succeeded in creating Sports Entertainment, with its own rules, its own measures of success, its own book philosophies, and its own discrete models of making money/doing business.
(And sorry about the length, but I thought this was worth writing out and sharing)