12 Things We Learned From Dark Side Of The Ring: The Fall Of Renegade
4. He Wasn’t Making A Boatload Of Money
Something else staggering was revealed during that aforementioned hotel room chat with James Mitchell over some beers. Get this: Rick told Mitchell that he was making between $500-600. That’s surely per week, but it isn’t the kind of cash James (or anyone else) believed that character would or should be making, certainly not when he was higher up the food chain near the main event scene.
It honestly smacks of WCW top brass wanting their own Ultimate Warrior, but never wanting to pay for it and thus kinda bulls****ing someone into seeing what'd happen if they 'took opportunity' and ran with it. Reflecting, Mitchell told VICE: “He was dead on arrival because they didn’t book him properly. This is all WCW’s fault. That’s the way I saw it”.
Even Eric Bischoff relents that they were swimming upstream with the gimmick from the off. He isn't sure there's much more Wilson could've done with The Renegade character. It was a terrible disappointment to fans after all the talk of Hulk's "ultimate surprise", and there was no way for Rick to have another crack at making a first impression.
Footage of a frankly knackered looking Wilson making his way to the ring on episodes of Nitro and Saturday Night for matches in 1997 and 1998 is hair-raising. He barely looked like the same guy at all, and it's pretty crystal that everything going on behind the scenes was taking its toll on him mentally and physically.
Rick didn't even have a big fat contract to lean on.