15 Most Notoriously Unstable Wrestling Stars

2. Brian Pillman

In 1995 while in WCW Pillman underwent a transformation and adopted what is referred to as the €˜loose cannon€™ gimmick. It appeared that Pillman had lost the plot, rattling off incredible worked shoot promos, terrifying his colleagues, and just generally lending an overall air of anarchy to his persona. He was €˜fired€™ from WCW at the start of 1996, flew into ECW for a stint of madness, and then wound up in the WWE a few months later where after recovering from a broken ankle, he would be involved in one of the WWE€™s most infamous angles €“ the €˜Pillman has a gun angle€™, with Stone Cold Steve Austin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_s-CKQzPmM While this sounded like all good entertainment and was great for courting publicity for the WWE (the gun angle really summed up the statement that the WWE was trying to make), there was one major problem €“ the gimmick was less an act than it was an actual deterioration into crippling depression from Pillman. Pillman was a tortured soul. After a brutal break up with the mother of one of his children, she ended up killing herself in 1995 while on the phone to her mother (whom Pillman loved) which left Pillman a guilt ridden shell of himself. In 1996 a car accident caused by him falling asleep at the wheel almost killed him and destroyed his ankle, which is why he couldn€™t wrestle when he joined WWE. This led to the familiar pattern of painkiller dependence (he already had major narcotics issues), and as Pillman fell deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of addiction and depression both his colleagues and his long suffering wife Melanie were struggling to pull him back from the abyss. Pillman died in his sleep in 1997 at the age of 35. While it was an undiagnosed heart condition that may have been the culprit, Pillman had fallen so far he was not particularly interested in living anyway.