10 Most Shameless WWE Promotional Tactics
10. Hawk Falls Off The Wagon, The TitanTron And The Map
What was it about 1998 and promoters having fun with the addictions of others?
Millions of people were tuning in to both Monday Night Raw and Monday Nitro as 90s business collectively boomed, and they were rewarded with both Michael 'Hawk' Hegstrand and Scott Hall's very real personal problems being cheaply exploited for sh*t midcard angles.
Top star Stone Cold Steve Austin drank a billion beers a week, but this was a cake-and-eat-it era for the rampaging organisation. Hawk‘s boozing wasn’t to be celebrated but judged and castigated.
Stumbling over during entrances, being too intoxicated to realise Animal needed to make tags, and slurring his words on commentary, the disparate portrayal of the former tag team icon was too mean-spirited to be entertaining, and never once promoted the tag team nor sell a big pay-per-view or TV match.
Droz shoving a suicidal Hawk off the TitanTron structure to imply he was his 'pusher' was the inciting incident, with the former 'Puke' enabling Hawk's problems to steal his spot in the team. Midcard fluff mining the worst of humanity, all for payoffs that never came.