Hi Scott
I'm very much enjoying the blog's reviews of Prime Time and Wrestling Challenge.
This is the time I started watching the WWF. I was 9 years old and just took everything at face value.
For weeks, Rick Rude was insulting the Big Boss Man's mother and then he got fired for it. I was a kid, that was the story.
Forward 30 years and we all now know there was stuff going on behind the scenes and he left.
So what happened? Did they know he was going so did this angle as an excuse, or did they just get lucky and have a pre established reason to explain his TV absence?
They definitely didn’t know he was leaving. In fact they were advertising him while he was injured and Rude got mad that his name was being used to sell tickets but he wasn’t getting paid for it. That’s why he left.