When “The Icon” Sting announced to the professional wrestling world on AEW Dynamite that he was rapidly approaching the finale of his professional wrestling career, with his retirement officially set for AEW Revolution 2024, the fans from far and wide started to talk about who should be the man who retires the 64-year-old WWE Hall of Famer.

Should the honor go to the Stinger's number-one pal in AEW, Darby Allin, the performer who has been working alongside him since shortly after his debut at Winter is Coming in 2020? Or how about someone with a serious history alongside the NWO member, maybe someone with WCW experience like Chris Jericho or even Goldberg, who is trying to have his own final tour through the professional wrestling world?

Or how about Rob Van Dam, the former face of ECW who wrestled “The Icon” nine times from 2010-11 during their shared tenure in the company once and soon-to-be again known as TNA?

Discussing his kind of co-worker's impending retirement on his 1 Of A Kind With RVD podcast, “The Whole F'N Show” offered up his services as a potential final foe for Sting, as he's more than down to do the deed.

“When speaking about the Sting's retirement and possible opponents, I'll put him out,” Rob Van Dam said via SE Scoops. “I'll put him out to the pasture. Why not?”

All right, is RVD the man to do the job? Probably not, as his history with the Stinger isn't exactly retirement-match level. Still, RVD does have some interesting insight into the end of Sting's run in TNA and how he almost hung up his boots a decade earlier.

“The way that I remember, when we did the first Hall of Fame for TNA/Impact inducted Sting, he gave his speech, and he told everybody that he thought he was done, he was retired already. And Dixie Carter's husband called, ‘Hey man, we've got this thing. We really need you.' And he was like, ‘No, I'm done.' ‘Hey, it's just PPV. Once a month or something, once a week,' or whatever they had. ‘I think I'm done.' ‘But what about if we give you this much money?' ‘Okay, I can do it for a little bit,'” Rob Van Dam said via Wrestling Inc.

“That's what I remember from the speech that Sting gave when he got inducted into the Hall of Fame. That they kept saying, ‘Well, just another six months or another 12 months, we'll pay you this much.' He'd say, ‘Well, I guess I'll keep going.' That was back in 2009 or 2010, I guess. So that's why I didn't know if he already retired or not, but I know it's been on his mind for a while.”

Would the professional wrestling world have been different if Sting retired at the end of his TNA run, when he was roughly the same age as Chris Jericho is now, if you can believe it? Most definitely. While his run in WWE was notable for all of the wrong reasons, his AEW run has been fantastic and a perfect final act for an older performer who is still trying to hold on in a wrestling world that is rapidly changing. His retirement, in turn, should be special, too, even if RVD has to watch it as a fan instead of as the man on the opposite side of the ring.

Eric Bischoff reveals who he'd like to see retire Sting in AEW.

Speaking of who should retire Sting at his AEW finale, fans broached the question to one of the men who helped to put the Stinger on the map, Eric Bischoff, at a virtual signing with K & S WrestleFest, and the former WCW booker jokingly named the perfect final opponent for the one-time Blade Runner.

“Ric Flair [smiles] I don't know if that's gonna happen, but that's what I'd like to see,” Eric Bischoff joked via Fightful. “You didn't ask me who I think it would be. You asked me who I'd like to see. I'd like to see [Sting face] Ric Flair.”

Taking things in a more serious direction, Bischoff named off two members of the AEW active roster that he thinks make sense for Flair's final match, one with no in-ring history and one with a lot of it.

“I don't know. Chris Jericho? I don't think they've ever had a match, and there's history there,” Bischoff noted. “That'd be kind of cool. I'm sure there would be a great story with Darby Allin, right? So it depends on what you're going for and how you want to present it. Do you want to present it as part of an angle or a storyline, or do you want to present it just as a celebration, acknowledging everything that Sting's done, which is what I suspect that they'll do, and it'll be more of a dream match kind of format or presentation, which, there's nothing wrong with that, in my opinion in this case.”

While it feels like Allin is the only choice to retire Sting at this point, as he's been working alongside the do-it-all “Icon” since he arrived in the promotion and has probably let a few opportunities fall by the wayside in order to keep their partnership going, there is a growing number of fans who would like to see Jericho get a match with the Stinger before his final curtain call. Whether that happens in Sting's final match, however, remains to be seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-X4ySevR60