10 WWE Attitude Era Disasters That Even Jim Ross Couldn’t Get Over
10. Who Ran Over Austin?
This strange whodunnit is the result of slapping together a quick storyline to excuse Stone Cold's injury without thinking it all the way through. "Let's hit him with a car!" was the simple solution in explaining Austin wouldn't be appearing on television for awhile. And that's fine. But...who hit him? And why? Those last two questions didn't have an easy--or even a reasonable--answer. And Mick Foley is a lot of things, but "great detective" isn't one of them. During his long-winded monologue about the evidence obtained at the scene of the crime and fingerprints and motive and yadda, yadda, yadda, I couldn't help but feel like I was trapped in a rough draft of a particularly unimpressive episode of CSI. And to go through that drawn-out explanation for him to swiftly state The Rock's innocence, then immediately finger the real culprit without taking a breath? Talk about an anti-climactic ending. ("I'm gonna tell you who did he did.") For one thing, never let Rikishi talk on the mic for that long. It was an excruciating few minutes while Rikishi tried to explain why he ran over another human being with a car. (He did it for his real-life distant cousin, The Rock, apparently as a means to further race relations in WWE.) There wasn't really much time for J.R. to get a word in about the matter during this whole pseudo-Clue breakdown, leaving the home audience to reach for the remote control, which was an ultra-rare occurrence with The Rock in the ring. In fact, Jim Ross sounds about as bored by the whole event as everyone surely was, reading his scripted lines while presumably being distracted by his crossword puzzle. "I'm shocked. I'm stunned. Rikishi. Why. Dammit. Can I go home yet?" Okay, so that last bit was only inferred, but it's still a pretty bad deal when Mick Foley and Dwayne Johnson are in the ring together and J.R. can't even muster any enthusiasm for it. The whole thing would be mocked by The Rock only weeks later, reminding people that "Oh yeah...that was a thing that happened. Why again?"
