8 Wrestlers That Visibly Hated Working For TNA
4. Rowdy Roddy Piper
Or if he didn't have a visible problem with TNA, he certainly had a visible and painfully awkward problem with one of the more powerful people in the promotion.
Vince Russo was already as divisive a personality as he'd ever be in wrestling by 2002, and knowing that helped his on-screen persona even if he was one of the worst for misunderstanding what suited the work and what simply wouldn't scan as a shoot. The company's original weekly pay-per-view format was suited to his style though - crash TV by necessity, it had no choice but to deliver everything it possibly could whilst...promising everything it possibly could for the next week.
What a show like that needed was a talker like Roddy Piper - somebody who, even in his later days, could sell taking a dive in fight so effectively that he'd actually call it "taking a dive in a fight" rather than doing a job. There's somebody that could earn $10 one week and extract it the next...unless he was working for Vince Russo.
Debuting on December 4th 2002 less than six months after the launch of the promotion with apparently an awful lot to say, Piper instead plugged his book and website, called TNA 'the last place Russo hasn't killed', before doubling down on the darkness by noting that he'd kill the dreams of the younger wrestlers and asking, to gasps, "did you write in my cousin Owen's death?"
Piper wasn't long for the promotion, so not only was the line ill-judged but also literally bad for business. Dropped threads were all-too-common on a show that should have had none, but this was one people were happy to see the back of.