One of the main reasons that Vince Russo always gets the asterisk beside any of his accomplishments in the Attitude Era is that he was always so darn tone-deaf.
Sure, it’s great to push the envelope sometimes, but some envelopes don’t need to be pushed.
Case in point, coming up with a storyline where Hawk of the Road Warriors turns into a parody of an alcoholic on live TV, because it’s “funny."
The Road Warriors had taken a sabbatical from the WWF in late 1997 after losing the tag team titles to the New Age Outlaws, with the premise being that they were old and washed up and D-Generation X was the future. However, in typical fashion for wrestling, Vince McMahon wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
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The Warriors were repackaged into “LOD 2000” at WrestleMania XIV and given Sunny as their manager, so that the company could continue to have heels mock them for being old and washed up, but also make money off them by pushing them again. It wasn’t exactly a rousing success, with the team mostly having terrible matches with the New Age Outlaws on TV and on the lesser PPV shows and never winning the belts back again.
By summer time, the rebranding was clearly a failure and change was needed. Upcoming new star Darren Drozdov (aka “Puke”) started hanging around with the LOD on TV and was anointed a sort-of third member of the team. Sunny was fired in August for refusing to go to rehab and left for ECW to be exploited there instead. Vince Russo came up with an idea to split up the team and draw some eyeballs to “RAW," or so they hoped. The idea was that Hawk would begin exhibiting signs of someone either drunk or high on drugs (it was never made 100-percent clear which it was), which would lead to the team splitting up and feuding with each other.
To really sell this idea, Hawk started showing up on commentary while “injured” and told rambling stories while slurring his words, making inside jokes like reminding Jerry Lawler how he learned “not to sell the piledriver.”
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(Inside baseball clarification for you millennials: Hawk always took a piledriver in every match and immediately popped up from it, no matter if the person doing the move had ever performed a piledriver before in his career.)
As the story progressed, Hawk started showing in no condition to perform (like at the Summerslam '98 pre-show) and cost his team victories against easy opponents as a result. More and more, Animal was trying to phase out his embarrassing partner and replace him with Droz instead, but could never pull the trigger. I guess if they had just gone that far and left it, it would have been tacky but acceptable. Hawk was temporarily written out of the story and said to be in rehab for his demons, leaving Animal and Droz to team up as the Legion of Doom for a few weeks. Eventually, he returned, giving us the awkward moment when you get out of rehab and your long-time tag team partner has replaced you.
Then, in November, on an episode of “Sunday Night Heat," they finally followed through and had Animal turn on his best friend in one of saddest break-up angles in history.
(Sad as in “pathetic”, not as in “emotionally invested.”)
Hawk was so distraught over this rejection that, the next night on “RAW," he got loaded again and attempted suicide on live TV by jumping off the top of the Titantron screen. I swear I’m not making any of this up.
Unfortunately, crossing that line didn’t reunite the team or increase ratings or make anyone care. There was one last twist in the story where Droz was revealed to have been supplying Hawk with drugs and booze all along in order to cause the breakup of the team, but by then it was too late. Hawk and Animal were both disgusted by the direction of the story and left the WWF for good a few months after the incident, their friendship in real life mostly ended as well, before returning for a quickie reunion a few years later in 2003. A few weeks after that appearance, Hawk died of the very drug problems that Russo was mocking with this storyline.
In the end, it wasn’t entertaining or funny or ironically detached, it was just bold-faced exploitation of one man’s very real problems.
