10 Wrestlers Who DESTROYED Their Career In A Single Moment
4. Dave Schultz
David Schultz was a very intense individual who, were it not for one career-altering incident, would have enjoyed a more than decent run amid the cable TV boom.
He had a nasty, intimidating aura, knew his way around a threat, and could go to the level required, not that that was of tremendous importance at the time. Physiques and personality mattered more, and Schultz, a dark alley nightmare, was equipped with both. As often happens, his flashpoint moment has led many to romanticise his career. He wasn't the heel Magnum TA, and it's just as likely that Vince McMahon would have put him in some silly gimmick or other when the high-vis NBC era came around.
This career, however it may have looked, didn't end up happening because, in an infamous incident, Schultz assaulted '20/20' reporter John Stossel when asked if wrestling was fake. Well, Stossel didn't ask. He outright said "I think this is fake," not that it remotely justified Schultz's reaction. Without barely drawing his hand back - i.e. trying - he slapped Stossel so hard that the victim claimed to have felt and heard "pain and buzzing" in his ear up to eight weeks after the attack. Many in wrestling circles believe that Stossel, with the worst kind of hypocrisy, was as much a worker as Schultz. Stossel himself on Dark Side of the Ring hardly helped that perception. "I held onto that pain until I got paid," he said. But he was assaulted, ultimately.
Schultz got in deep sh*t with the New York State Athletic Commission for his actions, and had to work in Japan for a time afterwards, but the narrative that he was blackballed is not entirely a "shoot". The WWF felt they couldn't use him. He resurfaced in Memphis and Stampede, but other promoters - who were hardly going to respect the wishes of Vince McMahon in the mid-1980s - wanted nothing to do with his temper.
A separate incident with Mr. T, whom Schultz resented as an outsider, is what led to his departure. Hulk Hogan may have embellished or changed his story in subsequent years, but more than one eyewitness believed Schultz to have posed a danger to T, and he was marked as a liability. (The Dark Side of the Ring covered Schultz, but the ending of that episode was left vague, almost insinuating that it was a political hit on the part of Hulk Hogan.)
His career was destroyed of his own doing, ultimately.