The WORST Wrestling Moment Every Year (1989 - 2025)
28. 1998 | Hawk’s Fall
Vince Russo wasn’t a good guy.
What helps Russo, reputation-wise, is that there is a tier of rancid men in wrestling history, and he’s nowhere near the top. He’s not even where Paul Heyman is, since Russo was never his own boss. Russo is loathed by many for his putrid ideas and even worse-smelling values, but he was never in control of anybody’s fate. He didn’t have the power to ruin anybody’s life.
However, while he didn’t personally set up any of the stunts used throughout the Attitude Era, Russo scripted several scenarios - none of which enhanced any match or story - that involved wrestlers taking unnecessary risks for which they were not trained.
One wrestler was the Legion of Doom’s Hawk, whose real-life struggles with addiction were incorporated into storylines because that’s what you want to see out of an apocalyptic ass-kicking powerhouse. This was gross and exploitative, since the hook to return to Raw and not change the channel was Hawk, at best, making a sad spectacle of himself.
The Hawk character became so depressed at one point that, on the November 16, 1998 episode of Raw, he scaled the scaffolding that propped up the TitanTron. Hawk, kicked out of LOD 2000 for costing his team multiple wins, threatened to end it all before Droz tried to do it for him.
Hawk, who was actually an addict and thus hardly guaranteed to have his bearings, completed the first part of the stunt without any safety equipment. This wasn’t just in spectacularly bad taste and removed entirely from pro wrestling: it was unspeakably dangerous.