12 Things We Learned From Dark Side Of The Ring: The Fall Of Renegade

3. WCW Do Not Come Across Well

Listen, World Championship Wrestling isn't even a company anymore, so it's hardly like anyone is gonna have to take accountability for this, but the way they handled The Renegade was shocking. VICE put across how cold and casually Rick was pushed to one side by Hogan etc. Then, there's how little they were paying him. As if that wasn’t enough, they terminated his contract when he failed a drug test for steroids.

Wilson told Kimberly that 'everybody was doing them', but James Mitchell called it “selective” testing, and said it’s more common than people think when companies want to get rid of somebody. The bottom line, as far as he's concerned, is that WCW top brass just wanted to get rid of this Renegade gimmick once and for all. So, they found a way.

That's so harsh. It's bloody vicious, actually.

Rick's personal life was falling apart, and all he really had to keep him sane was wrestling. WCW released him anyway in late-1998, and that'd set wheels in motion for the end of Wilson's life. No, nobody's suggesting here for a second that management at WCW were responsible for the man's death, but they certainly didn't help matters with how clumsily and carelessly they handled his career.

Sure, The Renegade himself takes the bulk of the responsibility for how things nosedived, but he was effectively pushed away because he couldn't succeed in WCW's mission impossible. It's been said before (even in this article), but it's worth repeating: He was set up to fail, then failed.