Last year, WWE held the first Starrcade since 2000, in its traditional home of Greensboro, North Carolina. Although it wasn’t broadcast or streamed, the show featured plenty of Southern Wrestling nostalgia and acknowledgement of legacy. We later learned the event was spearheaded by Michael P.S. Hayes, who had realized there was already going to be a WWE live event in Greensboro in late November, and thought it was a thing worth doing.
Now we’ve learned that there’s going to be another Starrcade live event this November, but for some reason it’s in Cincinnati Ohio. Local Cincinnati TV news has announced some matches for the event, but they’re all reprises of current feuds. The show does promise Charlotte Flair facing Becky Lynch in a cage, which ought to be pretty great, and “a concert featuring Elias with Nature Boy Ric Flair,” which sure sounds like fun. The question remains though, why would you do Starrcade in Cincinnati? Doing it in Greensboro again would be great, and Atlanta or even Nashville would make sense. But people who fondly remember Starrcade remember it as a southern wrestling event, and in fact of the 18 classic Starrcades, only two were held outside the South.
The first two Starrcades were famously held in Greensboro, North Carolina. The two after that were split between there and Atlanta. Then comes the least southern Starrcade of all: 1987’s event was held in Chicago, with the subtitle “Chi-Town Heat.” After that they returned to the South, holding the next two Starrcades in Norfolk Virginia and Atlanta, respectively. They left the South again to have Starrcade ’90 in St. Louis, before returning to Norfolk and Atlanta the two years after that. They held three Starrcades in a row in Nashville in the mid-90s, and then the final four were in Washington, DC.
You could argue about DC on a technicality, but it’s on the border of the Southern state of Virginia, so I think it counts as the South. Of course, Cincinnati is also on the border of a Southern state (Kentucky, for those of you like me who took geography in a southern school system), but unlike Washington it’s located within a decidedly not-Southern state. In any case, it was certainly never a part of the Jim Crockett Promotions territory.
I’m usually in favor of WWE focusing on the future and not dwelling entirely in nostalgia. Starrcade’s a different matter, though. Last year nostalgia was the whole selling point, and this year it seems to be again, but Cincinnati is just the wrong place to expect Jim Crockett/WCW nostalgia to happen.
