10 Best Ever Reasons For Wrestling Storyline Exits
7. Dude Love Embraces The Hate
Mick Foley's Three Faces schtick allowed him to shift from one character to the next seamlessly - he was sufficiently unhinged enough for a stark personality shift to resonate as something plausible - and the effect was often stunning.
If Cactus Jack was rendered midcard fare by early 1998, the character was renewed as a sadistic son of a bitch in early 2000 - the last, necessary measure to topple the McMahon-Helmsley regime. In early 1998, Cactus Jack was banished to the backyard as Vince McMahon sought to control the easy-going Dude Love into representing the WWF as its Heavyweight Champion. It was a weird subversion of the character, its doppelgänger, in effect: Dude Love was the introverted Foley's way of finding love and stardom, and he aimed to appease Vince here by doing his bidding.
When this failed, following the incredible events of Over The Edge 1998, he reverted back to the ostracised Mankind character, his way of torturing the world that had in turn tortured him in a grim cycle of abuse.
Again, he intensified the character in expert, if controversial fashion; where Mankind once ripped his hair out in the pursuit of painful catharsis, he flung himself from the top of Hell In A Cell in atonement for his failure. At the time, many veterans, not least of which Ric Flair, chastised Foley for his disregard to psychology.
He took a shortcut to the pop, but the character work underpinning it was stunning in its depth.