The main event saw champion "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair defend the NWA World Heavyweight Championship against long time rival "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes, with boxer Joe Frazier acting as the special guest referee for the match.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was tradition for the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) member Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP) to hold major professional wrestling events at Thanksgiving and Christmas, often at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina in the center of JCP's Virginia, North and South Carolina territory.

In 1983, JCP created Starrcade as their supercard to continue the Thanksgiving tradition, bringing in wrestlers from other NWA affiliates and broadcasting the show through its territory on closed-circuit television.

The Starrcade show featured a number of professional wrestling matches with different wrestlers involved in pre-existing, scripted feuds, plots, and storylines.

The Zambuie Express would break up during 1985, Kareem Muhammad would spend a short time in Ole Anderson's CWG promotion, then move on to Championship Wrestling from Florida while Elijah Akeem would resume wrestling under his previous incarnation of "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" and move to Japan and then to the UWF.