Original subtitles

Jimmy Hart has programmed me to terminate on sight.

Get ready to feel the power of the renegade!

In the mid-90s, Rick Wilson dreamed of wrestling star.

He put his heart and soul into everything he did. He wanted to be a

wrestler so bad.

Only to be offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

That's right!

The Renegade, you idiot!

What aspiring rapper would turn down the spot to be Hulk Hogan's wingman?

That's the dream job. The mystery and intrigue that surround Renegade will add

even more excitement.

The shot at the spotlight quickly spirals into disaster.

Rick Wilson retired because he resembled a really popular character from several

years earlier.

But did you look like that Ultimate Warrior guy?

He said, yeah, that's the look they want.

No matter how you dress this guy up, it falls to advertise.

There was a ripoff.

In Experienced in the Ring, the Renegade is rejected by fans.

And eventually by the company that created him.

Why would you humiliate the kid? You're the one that shot Gunner two at a time.

God, that had to be devastating for him.

Unable to escape the fallout, Wilson descends into self-destruction.

There were two people in that house, and one of them did not leave that house.

I can't tell you what demons he was carrying around. Obviously, he's a very

disturbed young man.

Few could have known how far the renegade would fall.

Sitting on the outside looking in, thinking, oh, this guy sucks, he's a

dick. Well, I was wrong. I didn't know what was going on. They put him in a

tough spot, almost unwinnable spot.

He was a human being.

He had a heart.

And I think Bethlehem just tore him up.

In the summer of 1994, Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling searches

for a new identity in an increasingly competitive industry.

Check it out!

I think if you step back and you really looked at what was the WCW doing

creatively.

I've never seen two live bands come to wrestling, man.

We were limping along, trying to be competitive with WWF, but I felt like if

we were really going to turn the corner,

I had to shift the focus.

I'm Eric Bischoff. In 1994, I was vice president of WCW.

People on the outside of the business were very critical of me bringing in

Hulk Hogan.

Because they thought that Hulk Hogan's career was over, he's done, he's locked

up, he left WWF.

Well, that worked out pretty good.

After the introduction of Hogan, all of the guys that you had grown up with in

WWF were now starting to populate the WCW screen.

It signed Randy Savage and your John Pences and Ed Leslie.

Everything from Hulk Hogan's past is now WCW's future.

Everything that was old is now new again, brother.

And people were just naturally thinking, of course, the Ultimate Warrior would

make his way over here as well.

The Ultimate Warrior, for a period of time, was as popular a figure as the WWF

had. He becomes this phenomenon, headlining WrestleMania

VI.

All the way up to becoming WWF champion.

And then, almost as quickly as he

rises to the top, he just disappeared.

I think the best case scenario for WCW was to have Hulk Hogan, in theory,

avenge that loss to the Ultimate Warrior.

So, in 1995, WCW was going into a pay-per-view called Uncensored,

and Hulk Hogan began teasing the Ultimate Surprise.

See my Ultimate Surprise, brother!

I'm the sinister minister, Father James Mitchell, and I worked with the renegade

Rick Wilson in WCW.

Hulk Hogan was filming vignette in a smoke-filled room, and there was this

very familiar shadowy outline of a guy with the long Bon Jovi heavy metal hair.

But right now I'm standing on the dark side, brothers, with the most powerful

man I've ever met in my life.

The idea was to keep this mystery of who is this person, but nudging you, hey,

it's the ultimate warrior.

That's what the audience was being told.

The entire world was expecting the ultimate warrior.

Music fires up, and out comes the renegade.

All right, that music means it's time!

Ta-da! It's Rick Wilson, who most fans had never heard of. Who is this

renegade?

First of all, it was bait-and-switch advertising, and the crowd immediately

noticed something wasn't right.

These are kind of far back. This was closer to the time that I first met him.

It was beautiful.

My name is Kimberly Morrison, and I was once married to the man you know as

Renegade. From the day I met Ricky, he wanted to be a wrestler and famous and

well-known.

I don't know if it came from his childhood.

Maybe there's some deep-down issue that you want to be paid attention to and

validated.

But I think he may have felt unwanted.

Ricky's mom had him at 15 or 16.

He felt as though she blamed him for having him at such a young age.

He was unsure about who his biological father was.

He was told that it was a professional golfer. He never knew for sure.

Coach West was the coach at his high school.

He was a father figure to him.

I think after somebody goes through any kind of violence in the home, their

brain changes.

He was dirt at home, and that probably added to Ricky

wanting to be big, be tall, be somebody, be important.

My name is Eric Henderson, the man you know as Renegade, the wrestler, I knew

as Rio, the dancer.

He worked out.

Drew his hair out, and he became special. He became Rio.

Back in the 80s, I had a dance group that was working at Club La Vila in

Panama City Beach, and we came up with the name Ultimate Fantasy.

We didn't do the standard stripping.

Everything had to be choreographed, all of us in tuxedos.

We wanted to give the women a burlesque.

Classy show.

One afternoon, out on the beach was this huge guy.

Six, five, long hair, and his body was just so tight.

I said to myself, I gotta have that guy.

All right, ladies, one more time. Six foot four and hung to the floor.

Let it rock for Rio.

Rio loved being a shonen.

He would do a warrior routine.

And he had this big fur cape, big, huge sword. And he'd go, here I am, rock you

like a hurricane. And the place would erupt.

He was very sexy.

He was a very sexy. Now, I used to laugh and say he wasn't sexy at home.

That's one thing he was.

He was a totally different person at home.

He was a polite southern gentleman.

He was very thoughtful.

And we got married on June 2nd, 1992.

But he had a lot of trust issues.

I think he really had that abandonment wound in him.

I was placed to come home to while he was going on tour with Ultimate Fantasy.

He got a journal and started writing to me.

Hey Kim, wish I was with you. I can't believe how much I care about you. It

really scares me.

I'm hungry for my destiny, and I'm going to make it happen. I hope you agree and

want to stick it out with me.

Dancing was just something that provided him an income to allow him to pay for

wrestling school, and he would do anything to get into that world.

Stepping into the ring, Wilson's ambition doesn't lead to instant

success.

We trained at Oates Gym in Columbus.

Killer Kowalski's gym in Boston.

Financially, it was tough on him. We used to go to some shows. We'd drive two

hours, and he was going to get $100.

Then he went to Japan.

He went anywhere to do anything, just waiting on that big break.

And I think he got disappointed so many times.

His wrestling character was real Lord of the Jungle.

He would come out kind of screaming like the ultimate warrior.

He didn't have any makeup on his face, but he had the strings around his arms.

He would get little digs about that.

A wannabe warrior.

And that bothered me.

But one time, I saw him wrestle where the ultimate warrior was there.

Rio was very excited about it.

It was a pretty big deal.

Word of Wilson's resemblance to the ultimate warrior reaches Hulk Hogan's on

-screen manager, Jimmy Hart.

who sees an opportunity.

Oftentimes, people that are in the creative side of the business will go

back to formulas or characters that have worked for them in the past.

I knew that Hulk and a couple of the other key talents were interested in

having Warrior because there's more storyline potential.

But Warrior had a lawsuit going on with WWF. There was no way of knowing how

that was going to turn out.

Jimmy Hart said that they wanted Ricky to come in and they were flying him to

Tampa.

He was so excited that he was chummy with all these Hulk Hogan and all the

other wrestlers. They were his heroes.

I think Jimmy saw Rick's hair in the way he carried himself.

And I think Jimmy, with a lot of support from Hulk, thought, wow, what if we kind

of turned him into a Ultimate Warrior clone and recreate some of that magic?

I've always believed that you should never steal somebody's gimmick. You will

be perceived as a knockoff.

I think Rick Wilson would have played any character that they offered to him.

It sure beats The Alternative, which is just continuing to work independence.

And you're going to take a gamble. Like, maybe this thing will take off.

In just a little while, brother, I'm going to let the whole world know

exactly what Hulk Hogan's ultimate surprise is, brother.

He was like, it's happening. It's happening right now.

The audience liked the debut, and Rick was excited.

He's not watching!

Hi, I'm Joe Gomez, and I tag with Rick Wilson, the Renegade.

He had the big hair, and he came out acting really fired up.

Face paint was half a bright color, like Warrior did.

A man's name is Renegade. What powerhouse he is!

Fans bought into it.

It's not surprising that Rick Wilson was picked out of a lineup to play this

character.

But at the end of the day, this was, in many ways, The bargain bin version of

The Ultimate Warrior coming to WCW.

And it was only downhill after that.

Imagine you've been brought in as Hulk Hogan's best friend. It's your life

dream. It's what you've always wanted to do.

That's a great spot.

But how many people would have the wisdom to realize they weren't ready for

that spot?

What you gonna do when Hogan and the Ultimate Surprise destroy you?

After his debut, the Renegade's dream of stardom becomes real.

If you're up there with Hulk Hogan, you made it.

Everybody wants to know all about the Renegade!

To be respected and international, that's exactly what he wanted.

With the mysterious Renegade in their corner.

I was happy as hell for him, you know. I was like, good for you, man.

I'm Marty Zanetti, formerly of the Rockers. I met Renegade when he first

was getting into wrestling.

All of a sudden, he's buddying up with Hogan. He's the top dog.

If it was me and them only just started, I'd be scared to death.

At the same time, the comfort in it would be, I'm protected.

Can't nobody touch me.

But everybody else in the dressing room is going to be sitting there tapping

their fingers like, I've been here the whole day, wow, and I didn't get a

chance like this.

So there's going to be a lot of jealousy.

Pro wrestlers are like a bunch of teenage girls.

Very catty.

A lot of drama, politics, backstabbing, trying to work your way up the

popularity food chain.

People would shake your hand out of social decorum, but if they really

resented you, they'd say something shitty to you. So he felt a little

disrespected.

As Wilson's success becomes real, new temptations follow.

I had gone to our apartment.

And underneath the kitchen cabinets was alcohol.

We didn't drink.

And then on top of the refrigerator, I found a card.

And it said, I can't wait to swing from your 10-inch vine.

I destroyed our apartment. I destroyed it. I could wobble onto the

television.

And I destroyed clothes.

And then when he called me and said, come to Tampa and bring me some clothes,

I was like, hmm.

You don't have a lot of clothes left here.

When I got to the hotel, we had a huge blowout. And I took my wedding ring off

and I left it on the counter and I left.

I do think we would have laughed if he hadn't gone into wrestling because he

evolved into someone I didn't know.

Separated from his wife, Wilson throws himself into his wrestling career.

He told us that somebody was sort of giving him Ultimate Warrior lessons.

Saying do a little more of this and a little less of that, whatever was going

on with his hands.

He was doing exactly what he was told.

It was very clear that they were committed to trying to go with this guy.

And putting the television title on him was step one in that process.

No,

he's an asshole.

Watch his background.

Nobody knew.

And apparently he was a dick dancer in Boston, Massachusetts.

This is professional wrestling. I expect him to be a professional wrestler, not a

dick dancer.

This is Arne Anderson, the enforcer of the Four Horsemen. I wrestled the

Renegade many times.

I went and got him, went and found somewhere quiet.

I just was trying to get a feel of, is he nervous?

What do you want to do?

What can you do?

He didn't say much.

Come to find out, he didn't know much.

You want to have a good match with everybody, period.

That's your job.

There's so much mystery and intrigue about this Winnegan. We don't know that

much about him.

But he was a blank slate.

It wasn't filled in yet.

He knows some wrestling hold. He really does.

He was in the ring with Art Anderson.

One of the top five workers of all time, in my opinion. When you're in the ring

with someone like that and they can't get a good match out of you, it's tough.

You're going to look at the crowd at Harrah Arena.

It's kind of northwest of Dayton, Ohio here.

He's still very early in his career.

And you're seeing someone that's largely just trying to understand the basics of

working a wrestling match, but now it's happening on national television.

There's no fire.

There's no intensity.

He's just going through moves.

That was not the collision it should have been, and there's only so much I

can do.

That's hard to watch.

I've got to be honest with you, I've never been so glad for a match to be

over in my life.

The Renegade becomes the world television champion!

That's basically the high point of the Renegade's run in WCW.

So I get back to the curtain, who do I see?

Someone I've respected my whole career and who's a real badass.

Paul Orndorff, he went, oh, Jesus, Arnie, that sucked.

Yes, Paul, I'm aware of that.

Jimmy Hart has programmed me to D-O-S, terminate

on that!

The next big show in his first defense, Paul Orndorff against the Renegades.

This guy's wired like a cheap watch.

This was the Bash at the Beach event in 1995.

And here is the renegade, the babyface, to save the day here on this sunny day

on the beach.

But one of the few memories of this show is Paul Orndorff delivering a pile

driver to the renegade.

The fact that the audience is cheering for this, it's...

The worst case scenario for a babyface when the audience is metaphorically

turning its back on you and backing the eel.

After Bash at the Beach, I think everyone knew that this renegade

character was not going to reach anywhere near the aspirations that WCW

had when they brought him in.

I think it was a lesson for pro wrestling that it is the person that

makes the character and not always the character that makes the performance.

As the Renegade fails to connect with fans, he loses the support of his

biggest ally.

Hulk was pretty self-centered, and I think he just decided, I'm just going to

step away from it.

He's on his own.

You know, to every beginning there must be an end.

Renegade had a firm ending.

The end of the Renegade character, for all intents and purposes, happens in

November of 1995.

They have a match on television where Kevin Sullivan beats the Renegade, and

after the match, Jimmy Hart pours water over the face paint of the Renegade.

The symbolism of wiping that paint off was we gave you a shot and you failed us

miserably.

You know what he did? He just destroyed that man's identity.

You would have to know after that kind of humiliation. There's no coming back

from it.

After his character is publicly humiliated on WCW television, Rick

Wilson is left to pick up the pieces.

It had to be demoralizing for Rick Wilson. He had gotten in the door at

WCW, but there was no demand for this character.

It felt like an admission by WCW that this was a failed experiment.

You had to salvage something, and it was time to get a return on that investment.

But there was no heat off of it because the fans had already gave up on him.

When he'd go into the change room, people wouldn't talk to him, wouldn't

look at him.

The guys had moved on. It had been established what he had brought to the

table, and that wasn't much.

He disappears off television for a few months, and the Rick Wilson that would

return, yes, he is billed as the renegade, but he's a far cry from their

hopes that they had a year prior.

In the mid to late 90s, there was a lot you could have done with a Rick Wilson.

There are ways that you could camouflage his limitations, like putting him in a

tag team.

Joe Gomez!

Joe Gomez was a journeyman wrestler, and they were paired as part of this group

called the In Crowd.

They were not that in, to be quite honest. They were never quite in style.

When they put us together, we were both excited because I truly think they

wanted it to work.

I got on great with Rick.

We were both green.

I was taking it all for granted.

And I don't think Rick had a firm grasp on it, to be honest.

The smarter guys, they really work hard at it and they live it and they breathe

it.

Rick and I didn't take it seriously enough to hone our craft.

We had every opportunity in the world to shine. We just chose not to.

When you're brought in and

you're promised...

and it doesn't materialize, I'm sure that played a lot of games on his head

of how committed he was going to be to professional wrestling.

This is where he gets into the wrestling lifestyle, which included drugs, which

included drinking and partying.

Part of the business is to be social and always be in the hotel bar after and buy

the veterans around.

And I think Rick was trying to keep his place in the proverbial pecking order.

We had been separated for a while.

When I saw his wrestling pictures, his body had changed.

He looked bigger and bloatier.

His hair wasn't as nice.

He came to visit me in Panama City one time. He had a big belly, had a bandana

on covering up his lost hair, and he wanted to drink.

And that blew my mind because Rio never did drugs. He never drank, never did

squat.

We did these damn things called purple hooters.

And we did so many of them that when we were done doing the shot, we started

building this wall.

We had so many of those things. I didn't know my name. I was talking Russian. And

I shit myself. I peed my bed.

And it wasn't pretty.

And he stayed and drank, and I'd never seen anybody could drink like that.

As the renegade character falls further into obscurity, WCW enters a whole new

era.

In the summer of 1998, this is all hands on deck for WCW.

It is combating what is a thriving World Wrestling Federation.

And they're starting to lose market share.

So WCW.

You never know what Big Shot's going to do. Their instant answer.

Uh-oh.

Go to the past.

It's a silhouette of a man that we've seen right now.

Oh, my goodness.

Unmistakable. It's the warrior.

After years of anticipation, the ultimate warrior finally arrives in WCW.

There's only one, and that's him.

Eric paid him a lot of money to come in. Warrior didn't do anything cheap.

For years, I have watched while this industry has tried to recreate what

is simply unrecreatable.

Warrior was a big player. He still had great name value.

And the fact that Warrior had beaten Hogan at WWF, that story was there.

And it would have been fresh to WCW.

The Warrior's return spells trouble to Rick Wilson.

It was such a painful pill for Rick Wilson to have to swallow.

He is picked out to play this character of the Renegade.

You failed under the role that we crafted for you as the knockoff version

of the Ultimate Warrior, and then the actual Ultimate Warrior is finally

coming to WCW, and you're going to be his bodyguard.

Yes! Yes!

The Warrior!

And Hogan got him from behind!

There's no Warrior!

Wait a minute!

How did he do that?

We're going to build to the WrestleMania VI rematch at that year's Halloween

Havoc.

That's a disaster of a match, an all-time disaster.

After all the hype that was built around The Ultimate Warrior,

it's over in three months.

It turns out to be a much bigger financial disaster for the company than

The Renegade was.

In retrospect,

Ricky wasn't really any worse of a wrestler than the Ultimate Warrior.

And Ricky was a much nicer guy, by all accounts, than the Ultimate Warrior,

too.

The first time I really spoke to him was when he hitched a ride back to the hotel

room. And Ricky said he would sit and drink some beer with me. And we just got

to shooting the breeze.

I would have thought that he was going to be...

a bitter know-it-all who had hung out with hogan that would tell everybody to

shut up because they didn't know what they were talking about but he wasn't

that way at all he came off to me as a very genuine guy

We were sharing what it was like to kind of be thrown into a spot you weren't

ready for, but how can you turn it down?

He was a little bitter, kind of felt like he'd been misled a little. There

was a lot of looking down at his feet and saying, that's just such bullshit,

man.

But where else are you going to make that kind of money?

And he just laughed at me and he said, do you know what I make?

I think he said something like $500 or $600.

Every bad thing you see anybody doing wrestling comes down to the creative.

Rick and I completely commiserated on it.

He was dead on arrival because they didn't book

him properly.

This is all WCW's fault. That's the way I saw it.

Rick Wilson was green.

When he got to WCW, he didn't have a lot of national primetime exposure, so I

think he was thrown to the wolves.

And you know what? I shouldn't even blame that on Rick, because even if Rick

would have done the best job possible with that Renegade character, I don't

think the audience would have ever bought into it.

Already lost in the roster, Wilson's career unravels after a

positive steroid test.

Drug testing was not very prevalent in WCW or WWF at the time.

They knew that physiques were part of the sales pitch to its audience.

And quite frankly, if they were to do a drug test of everybody under WCW

contract, the results probably would not have been pretty.

They said everybody's doing it. There's just no way to be bigger than life like

that without them.

But this is how they let you out of your wrestling contract. They have that

little clause in there, and it cancels the contract.

Selective drug testing enforcement is very common in the wrestling business.

Those you want to get rid of can be popped at any time.

Renegade's not going to get up, I can tell you that.

He had his contract rescinded.

So that...

Broke his heart.

He became famous doing what he wanted to do. But, yeah, be careful what you wish

for. And when that gets pulled away, yeah, your world's going to come down.

Fired from WCW, Rick Wilson spirals into depression.

100% of his.

Identity was wrapped up in WCW. That's all he ever wanted in his life.

But I don't think he ever got to the level that he wanted to get to, and

he felt used.

It's hard to state how much you really lay at the feet of WCW. Did they

mishandle this character?

Definitely. But that's...

The industry.

There are going to be stars, and then there's going to be people that don't

pan out, and Rick Wilson was part of the latter.

What about WWF? He says the reputation's gone.

He's going out on bottom.

He was in a lot of financial debt, and he didn't know how to talk about how he

was feeling, so he just internalized it.

Disillusioned with wrestling, Rick leaves the business for a fresh start.

His friend, Wes, told me he was learning to shoe horses.

Farrier, they call it.

Very specific job.

He was at peace, working on his own out in the country. I thought that'd be

great for him.

Splitting up with someone, there's always animosity. And then as time

heals, all wounds.

You know, I could start seeing him as the person that I liked to begin with.

He was my friend.

I think both of us were in relationships with other people that we knew maybe

weren't quite right. We did talk on the phone through those relationships.

And it was always him calling me.

I think I was his best friend.

And then I think...

Shortly thereafter, he met Susie.

Susie worked at Gold Club in Atlanta, which was a tremendously popular

gentleman's club.

She's a life of the party kind of girl.

Kind of opposite of Rick, to be honest.

One night, Ricky called me, and I could tell he was on something. He was, you

know, and breathing heavy and talking in kind of circles. Could have been some

cocaine, too.

I was very uncomfortable. I'd never experienced that side of him.

Dating girls in that entertainment industry also is a tough deal.

Your girlfriend's out there, you know, shaking and getting tips.

Rick wasn't making that much money.

I'm sure it was exacerbated by his being released, and it's tough for some guys

to deal with that, I guess.

You know, if he had become all up on drugs, who knows what goes on behind

closed doors.

I didn't hear from him for quite a while.

But then in 99, he called me.

He was very back to his normal self talking to me on the phone.

He did mention he had broken up with his girlfriend.

We were just talking about all kinds of things, about how we had split up.

And I said to him, maybe you should come to Charlotte and see me.

And he said, maybe I will.

And I kind of thought, maybe we'll get back together.

I went to work the next night.

And a manager came to me and said, do you know a Rick Wilson? And I go, yes, I

do. They said, there's a phone call for you upstairs.

When I went up and picked up the phone, he said, this is Wes, Ricky's friend,

and I just want to let you know that he died.

I said, what happened, a car accident? He said, no, he took his own life.

On February 23rd, 1999, police respond to Rick Wilson's home in Marietta, where

he's found dead for the self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Shocking.

Never in a million years.

I was like, how in the, what happened?

Well, didn't we just see him a month ago? It seemed, it seemed like it had

only been a month.

When I went to Rio's funeral, it was an open casket, and his face was sunken

in, and his hair was almost gone.

I didn't even recognize him.

He was not the beautiful man that I was married to.

I told him, go f*** yourself, call him an asshole, because he took the coward's

way out.

And then his girlfriend, Susie, came in.

And we were all very surprised by what she was wearing.

Everybody else was in black.

And she had on a very short spandex-type dress with really

high heels that looked like club wear.

The story that I got was she had his drug, he wanted them,

and he shot himself.

That was all I knew until I read the police report.

A Marietta police report reveals disturbing testimony from Susie Squires

about the night of Rick's death.

The Squires advised that...

At around 10 p.m., she had dinner and drink with Mr. Wilson.

Ms. Squires advised that Mr. Wilson was belittled at her paying the bills.

Sometime this morning, Mr. Wilson slapped and pushed her.

Ms. Squires advised that Mr. Wilson slapped her hard again.

He hit me. He hit me like he would hit a man.

Ms. Squires advised that she went into the bedroom and got a gun.

The squire stated that Mr. Wilson took the gun from her, put the gun in his

mouth, and pulled the trigger.

I never would imagine him hitting someone like he would hit a man.

But if he was that despondent and had all that stuff in his system, he may

have done it. In anger, things happen sometimes.

collateral damage that comes out of suicide is you don't have answers.

You're left trying to explain the unexplainable.

He is messing with a lot of drugs. He's abusive towards his girlfriend.

When you put together all of these factors, here is somebody that was

probably not in the right state of mind.

Ricky's death hurts so much because the way I view Ricky is one of us.

I wish I had reached out to him. I really do.

To this day.

I think self-esteem played a huge factor in this and the obsession

with becoming a star.

But far more will fail trying to become pro wrestlers. And some of these

performers, they are not equipped to be able to handle that realization.

On that morning, he thought his life was over.

I don't have a wrestling contract.

I don't know what my future is going to be.

But there is life after professional wrestling.

240 pounds from Columbus, Georgia, Rick Wilson.

Several times I was released at WWF. So I know the depression that brings.

The only advice I would be able to give is like what you hear all the time. Let

somebody know what you're feeling.

It was really important for me to get out that he was a very genuine, caring

person. I don't know what happened later on in wrestling, but it was a totally

different person from the person that I was married to.

Renegade, may he be remembered fondly as a good man with a good heart and got

into a really tough business.

I like to remember Rio as being Rio.

Person at the beat, laying there in a thong when nobody did that.

He was good at wrestling, but he was a better dancer.

I hope that he is looking down at me telling this and realizing how much

he meant to me.

I still love you. I don't forget any of the good times that we had together.

And I hope you're at peace.