Sting is best known for being the beloved bleached-blond surfer babyface or The Crow-esque mysterious vigilante who terrorized the nWo for a year, but he is also no stranger to stables either. One of his best stables runs was with The Main Event Mafia, which included Booker T, Scott Steiner, Kevin Nash, and Kurt Angle and took over TNA (now known as Impact Wrestling).
However, fans can’t ignore Sting's time in WCW when he donned the red and black, joining Kevin Nash, Konnan, Randy Savage, and Lex Luger to form the New World Order babyface offshoot nWo Wolfpac. There’s a case to be made for both, so let’s evaluate both of Sting’s big stable participations.
10 Main Event Mafia: Clear Goal
As much as wrestling fans like to bag on Total Nonstop Action (and for fully justified reasons), not everything TNA did was bad. Take The Main Event Mafia, for example.
They had a clear, tangible goal: To keep the younger talent of the promotion down and keep themselves at the top. Sting has been held down by veterans and also been at the top, so wanting to maintain his spot is an understandable goal.
9 nWo Wolfpac: Extremely Cool
The Sting-nWo feud of 1997 was the hottest thing going in professional wrestling partially because it was so cool. The nWo were aging stars turned cool villains, and the extremely vanilla Sting had reinvented himself into an extremely edgy 1990s comic book superhero.
It was the perfect decision to bring back fans who got bored with wrestling being “for kids.” The fact that he not only joined the nWo but also joined the brand-new, vaguely hip-hop themed babyface offshoot was double cool.
8 Main Event Mafia: An Understandable Heel
Ever since he became a vigilante who dwelled in the shadows, Sting had flirted with darkness. There was even drama about him joining up with Hogan’s nWo, which seemed like a real possibility. But he fought the aging veterans who wanted to rule the roost in WCW, only to find himself becoming one of those guys in TNA.
The Main Event Mafia was Sting finally embracing the dark, selfish side of wrestling he fought so hard to overcome in the previous decade.
7 nWo Wolfpac: Got Them Over as Faces
Fans loved to hate the nWo but also thought they were cool as hell. After all, it was a configuration of some of the biggest names in wrestling, made inherently cool because they were a biker gang that thought WCW was lame.
The best way to capitalize on that concept was to introduce a babyface version of the nWo, and the best way to make it stick was to put among its ranks Sting, the ultimate babyface.
6 Main Event Mafia: Slick Suits
If there’s one underrated thing the nWo popularized in wrestling, it was the idea of a faction with a unifying aesthetic. Those guys had a T-shirt with a cool logo and ‘90s biker dad chic, and the Main Event Mafia had fancy suits and sunglasses, highlighting the “mafia” part of the moniker.
The only thing to really complain about when it came to MEM’s look was that Sting never wore his face paint while wearing the suit. It would have looked awesome, like when luchadores wear masks and suits.
5 nWo Wolfpac: Red Sting Variant
When Sting joined up with the Red and Black, he not only stuck with the facepaint gimmick but also changed up the colors to match his new friends.
As a result, fans got a fun Wolfpac variant of the Stinger, all red with black accents instead of the classic Brandon Lee black and white look. It was a much-needed refresh of Sting’s look and made his return to the classic vigilante facepaint a welcome thing.
4 Main Event Mafia: A Leadership Role
Sting wasn’t just a member of The Main Event Mafia – he was also the Godfather of the group, assuming leadership of MEM after beating Kurt Angle in a match.
Sting was too often second banana, like when WCW hired Hulk Hogan and made the Hulkster the top guy by default. Sting being the most important guy in a group (even a heel faction) was a much-needed acknowledgment of his importance.
3 nWo Wolfpac: A Babyface Supergroup
Kevin Nash may have been the leader of nWo Wolfpac, but Sting was arguably the biggest babyface star in the group – after Macho Man Randy Savage, of course. Along with Nash, Savage, and Lex Luger, Sting was in great company, as far as star power goes.
Sting didn’t need to be the leader of the Wolfpac because he’s such a prominent figure among fellow prominent figures. After all, if Sting wanted to be egotistical, he could have joined nWo Hollywood.
2 Main Event Mafia: Accomplished Its Goal
In 2013, Sting took it upon himself to reboot the Main Event Mafia after he had enough of Aces & Eights running roughshod over TNA. This time, however, they were a babyface faction and devoted to putting an end to Bully Ray’s biker gang of WWE washouts, and they ended up succeeding.
Once that goal was complete, the MEM announced that they were going their separate ways. For his part in giving a nWo-esque storyline a clear-cut ending and not taking part in yet another needless swerve or heel turn to keep MEM going, Sting is truly the ultimate babyface.
1 nWo Wolfpac: Never Got Betrayed
The thing about Sting is that he has spent his career getting betrayed by his friends. Even the Main Event Mafia ousted him at some point. However, in the nWo Wolfpac, Sting ended up getting a knee injury a few months into the run and disappeared from WCW television.
This prevented him from being betrayed when the Fingerpoke of Doom happened and the nWo reformed at full power. His feelings may have been hurt, though.