Why Sting Can Never Wrestle In The WWE Again

Professional wrestling, also known as "the sport of kings," "the sweet science," "America's pastime," and "the anti-Cricket," has seen dozens of iconic performers come and go over the years. Its greatest stars have met with fates as varied as the myriad rainbow of singlets into which they jammed their thigh meat. Some disappeared into retirement. More than a few died young. Some became Hollywood stars, like Hulk Hogan when he showed up in Gremlins 2, or The Rock who, against all odds, leveraged an acting career out of The Scorpion King and then decided he'd prefer it if everyone called him Dwayne. 

And then there was Sting, the iconic, face paint-adorned staple of 90s wrestling. A staple of WCW and TNA, Sting, or Steve Borden to his friends, didn't make the jump to WWE until the mid 2010s, wrestling in the 2015 Night of Champions event before promptly announcing his retirement the next year. So what happened? How did the most well known pro wrestling organization in the U.S. lose one of the best known wrestlers so quickly? Why won't he come back? Will he ever write another song that slaps as hard as Demolition Man? Are we thinking of the right Sting?

The sad fact of the matter is that time catches up to all of us in the end, and people in the business of professional wrestling tend to give it a head start. For all of the snot nosed whining about how it "isn't real," it would be hard to overstate just how punishing the lifestyle really is. Whether it's a sudden, dramatic injury or a slow, creeping one, eventually your body is going to find a way to take you out of the ring.

In Sting's case, the final nail in the career coffin came when he was diagnosed with spinal stenosis in his cervical vertebrae, a bone disease in which the spinal canal begins to narrow, often due to repeated compression. Potential symptoms of untreated cervical spinal stenosis include weakness, loss of sensation, and paralysis. 

Combine that with the fact that Sting is now a sexagenarian and no amount of fan hype is going to protect the guy from the dangers of a high impact sport. The good news is, as an aged-in member of AARP with a working knowledge of black and white makeup, he's still got a promising career ahead of him if he can sneak into KISS without Paul Stanley noticing.