My redemption for former WCW star The Renegade

Hey everyone, I wanted to write this piece after watching the latest episode of Dark Side of The Ring about Rick Wilson, who many may know as The Renegade.

By the time I became a wrestling fan I never had seen The Renegade, by 1998 – but after becoming a die hard fan after a few years, I did my usual research and I found out about a lot of things that had happened within the industry, a lot of things that made certain performers almost like a joke to the industry.

I always saw people talk shit about The Renegade and how green he was, how bad he was in the ring, how he was given an opportunity he didn’t deserve and fell flat on his face.

In hindsight, when you look back and apply real life experience and psychology, you can really figure a lot out. For Rick Wilson, this was not fair on him.

As 1995 rolled along in WCW, they were continuing to add people to the roster from the old Hogan WWF days. You had Greg Valentine, Jim Duggan, John Tenta, Haku, Brutus Beefcake, etc – all the guys who no longer fit into the WWF New Generation Era.

Trying to rehash things is what WCW tried to do and always failed at, like pretending that The Giant, Paul Wight, was the son of Andre the Giant. One Nitro in 1996 it was funny as the nWo were at commentary and you overheard Scott Hall say to Paul “Hey, is it true Andre is your Dad?” which had Paul Wight corpsing.

This grand idea of rehashing The Ultimate Warrior with a green Rick Wilson because he looked similar is a fart in church on sight. There were grown ups in the room at the time. They all sat there and decided this was a great idea, and it was so easy for all of this WCW Brain trust to after the fact talk about how it wasn’t going to work, yet – you all still let it happen.

Rick jumped at the opportunity, of course he would! He’s siding with Savage and Hogan. This is a dream come true for any human being.

You push him hard out of the gate like you’re supposed to because he’s supposed to be the next coming of the Ultimate Warrior. Did nobody think to maybe check to ensure that he was capable in the ring first before saddling him with a gimmick that is destined to fail on entry? Perhaps he could have made it work if he was at the Power Plant and it was ensured that the man didn’t throw a dropkick like a backyard wrestler.

You start this project with the Renegade, and you have him get victories on television, on WCW Nitro, WCW Saturday Night, WCW Worldwide, and all of the syndicated shows – as you’re building him up to an opportunity to wrestle Arn Anderson for the WCW Television Championship at WCW Great American Bash on June 18th, 1995.

If somebody can’t have a good match with Arn Anderson, then shouldn’t that raise alarm bells? You would think that if Arn Anderson was incapable of pulling a good match out of Rick Wilson, the Renegade, then, when those alarm bells go off, you would think that you have a very short amount of time with this human being that you are investing money and time into to get him up to scratch, maybe by sending him to the WCW Power Plant to get his ring work up to snuff so that his WCW Television title reign is not going to become an absolute travesty.

Continuing forward, when he wrestled at WCW Bash at the Beach 1995 against Paul Orndorff, you would think to yourself, “Okay, there’s a problem here.” And I understand. Of course they’re going to think, “We’ve got to pull back on this because it’s not working,” which they should have known in the first place. Everybody spoke about how he wasn’t ready for this, how it wasn’t going to work, so why do it in the first place?

It was so easy for everybody on the Dark Side of the Ring episode to talk about how this wasn’t working and it was never going to work, yet you still went forward and did it. You should have known ahead of time that this was not going to work. He kind of resembled the Ultimate Warrior, but not to the point where you were going to trick everyone. Everyone knew – no one’s stupid, and it did no favors for Rick Wilson.

You have him drop the WCW Television Championship to Diamond Dallas Page at WCW Fall Brawl 1995, and then, after that, have him get squashed by Paul Orndorff, Arn Anderson, and Kevin Sullivan on television. Then there’s that disgusting footage of Jimmy Hart wiping his face paint off his face and saying, “You’re nothing, you’re a nobody. You’re just plain old Rick. You should have listened to me, but you didn’t. You’re just plain old Rick.”

So where was he supposed to go from there? Do you take him off TV for a little while? Do you send him to the Power Plant? Do you get him to tighten up his work in the ring? Does he come back to go after the Dungeon Of Doom and maybe side with John Tenta who was also battling with them? No. You just try to put him with Joe Gomez, Jim Powers and Alex Wright with the In-Crowd, have the Horsemen beat them, so that wasn’t working either.

As time wore on, if you thought about it, what can we do to make it up to this young man, who we unfairly put into a gimmick that was never going to work? How can we make it up to him, try to repackage him, and sort out what he’s going to do going forward?

Well, as 1997 rolls around, you could have – maybe he was tagging with Joe Gomez before that – but as 1997 rolls around, you could start thinking about where you’re going to go with him.

And my friend Kev had a great idea. He thought to himself, “You know what? The Renegade – You could have put him in Raven’s Flock.”

You could have had him at the Power Plant, depressed, with things not working out. Sarge kicks him out of the Power Plant, and he’s angry, drinking in a bar. And who shows up? Raven.

Raven wanted to form the Flock with disenfranchised human beings and help save them—and make them cult members of his Flock. You could have repackaged him as a member of Raven’s Flock. He had the hair that suited Raven’s Flock, very similar to guys like Sick Boy and Scotty Riggs, I can’t see how he didn’t at least fit the bill if you stick some flannel on him as Kidman scratches himself next to him.

I know Raven was not a fan of retreading former characters and putting them in the Flock, but this is an idea that you could have used in order to give him something to do—some sort of identity. And that could have played through into 1998 as problems with the Flock in storylines were becoming apparent. We know the Flock were used to get beat up by talent higher in the pecking order, but at least he would be doing something than getting squashed on the B and C shows.

When Perry Saturn was having his issues with Raven and wanted to free the Flock from his grip, after Fall Brawl – well, Fall Brawl 1998 is the same pay-per-view where The Warrior showed up and went after Hogan in the War Games match. That was the night that the Flock were set free.

You could have had a situation where, between Fall Brawl and Halloween Havoc 1998, The Ultimate Warrior found an even more depressed and disenfranchised Renegade and brought him into the One Warrior Nation, like he did with Hulk Hogan’s Disciple.

Now, that really would have well and truly brought him to the dance, where you have the situation at Halloween Havoc 1998, with Hogan having the match against Warrior. At ringside, you can have the Renegade supporting Warrior, and he can be somebody who tries to combat Horace Hogan, who was there to help his uncle. You could have had Renegade’s axe to grind being that Hogan left him high and dry in 1995 and Warrior was going to fix that diabolical injustice.

If Warrior had stuck around in WCW a bit longer, maybe it could have worked. I mean, you saw in the Dark Side of the Ring episode how he put the Renegade over at an independent show, and maybe there was something you could have done with that. Maybe there was something that could have happened moving forward where the Renegade and the Disciple would be part of the One Warrior Nation as they battled the New World Order, who was also battling the nWo Wolfpac, and WCW.

That might have given him some legs, something to work with, and something to work towards. It might have helped him rebuild his passion for the wrestling business. Perhaps, if something like that had happened, it would have ignited his passion, and he might have stopped drinking and everything would have hope again for him. Maybe he would have started working out more, perhaps working out with Jim Hellwig – and gotten himself back into the shape that he used to be.

Maybe the future for Rick Wilson in World Championship Wrestling could have been something that he could look forward to and work on – something where he could find the success that he always pined for – if only somebody behind the scenes had thought about it for fifteen fucking minutes and said, “Maybe we could do something to help this guy instead of having him flounder and do sweet fuck all, like he had done between 1996 and late 1998.”

Maybe if you thought about it for 15 minutes, his 15 minutes would have lasted 15 years. We’ll never know. I can only imagine how it would have felt for that young man at the time, with higher ups making him promises he wasn’t ready for, and then he being blamed for it. All he needed was for somebody to give a shit.

33 years young. RIP Rick Wilson.

nWBro’s on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@nWBrosPodcast

nWBro’s on X
x.com/nWBrosPodcast

nWBro’s on Instagram
instagram.com/nwbrospodcast

nWBro’s on TikTok
tiktok.com/@nwbrospodcast

nWBro’s on Twitch
twitch.tv/nwbro