Shane Douglas said Scott Hall approached him several months before his death in 2022 and apologized for the backstage politics that derailed Douglas’ WWF career in the mid-1990s, telling Douglas that he and Shawn Michaels were the instigators and that it “should have never been done to you.”
Speaking on his YouTube channel, Douglas gave a detailed account of the conversation and said it is one of the things he is most thankful for when he looks back on his career.
“He came to me and said, ‘Hey, can we talk?'” Douglas said. “Sure, we went and sat down and talked. And he said, ‘Look, he and Shawn were the instigators of the whole thing, and that Scott and Hunter and Pac really had nothing to do with it.’ And he said, ‘We should have never done it to you.’ And he said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And I said, ‘Bro, I’m so thankful he came and said that. Water under the bridge.'”
Douglas said the reconciliation was immediate and complete. “We literally that day, talked, spoke about it, and put it behind us,” he said.
“That Took a Big Man”
Douglas said the apology carried significant weight given the nature of the wrestling business, where disputes are typically played out in public.
“I thought that took a big man to come and, especially in our business, where everything is always fought out in public and things are said,” Douglas said. “It’s one of the things I look back and I’m very thankful for.”
Douglas said he was heartbroken when Hall passed away on March 14, 2022, at the age of 63, particularly because it appeared Hall had finally turned his life around.
“I was heartbroken when he died, because it seemed like he finally was starting to get it together,” Douglas said.
The Backstage Politics That Derailed His WWF Career
Douglas provided context for the falling out. He said that in 1990-1991, during his time in the WWF as “The Dean” Shane Douglas, he was extremely close with Shawn Michaels, Marty Jannetty, and Dustin Rhodes. He also had a prior friendship with Hall from their earlier time working together.
“In ’90-’91, when I was in WWF, me, Marty, Shawn and Dustin, man, we were like four sides of these twins glued together,” Douglas said. “We did everything together. We traveled together, we ate together, worked out together. It was just non-stop, and we got along great, all of us.”
Douglas said he never understood what he did to warrant the backstage maneuvering that hurt his position in the company. He acknowledged that Michaels recently said in an interview that Douglas “wasn’t very good when he got here,” and Douglas agreed with the assessment, but said there was a reason for it.
“He’s 100 percent right,” Douglas said. “When you get paid $50, and I still have the pay stub for a semi-main event in Warren, Ohio, Packard Music Hall, where you get paid $1,600 over four months of working in a semi-main spot, yeah, you don’t get the bouncy Shane Douglas for that much money.”
Douglas said he believes the person who was hurt most by the politics, aside from himself, was Vince McMahon. “Vince, I think, really had plans to bring that character in and get that character over, and it got derailed with all of that,” Douglas said.
Douglas on His Own Addiction and Recovery
Douglas used the conversation about Hall’s death to open up about his own battle with opioid addiction. He said he was on a five-year oxycodone addiction that by all medical accounts should have killed him.
“I was told by all the doctors that there was no documented dose that high that didn’t kill somebody,” Douglas said. “Seventeen 80-milligram OxyContins, three times a day. So 51 80-milligram OxyContin tablets, three times a day.”
Douglas said the addiction was especially jarring given his background. He said he never used illicit drugs, could count on his fingers and toes how many times he had been drunk in his life, and could not stand the smell of marijuana.
“If it could happen to me, I wouldn’t say I was straight-edged like, say, CM Punk is, but I wasn’t far off from it,” Douglas said. “And yet, here I went on a five-year bender with OxyContin, enough that should have killed me multiple times over.”
Douglas described what early recovery felt like.
“When I first got off the OxyContin, I remember smelling cut grass, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, does that smell good,'” Douglas said. “Watching a sunset or a sunrise, looking at your son as an infant laying in the crib. Those were things that when you’re on the OxyContin, it was just oxy, oxy, oxy, oxy.”
DDP’s Work With Hall and Jake Roberts
Douglas praised Diamond Dallas Page for his work helping both Hall and Jake Roberts get sober, referencing the footage from DDP’s accountability crib in Atlanta that was the subject of the 2015 documentary The Resurrection of Jake the Snake.
“Whatever Dallas is doing, I’ve seen the videos, but if there’s something like some hidden ingredient behind the scenes, he needs to patent that s**t,” Douglas said. “Because if you’d have told me prior that Scott Hall and Jake would be successful in getting cleaned up, I’d have laughed in your face.”
Douglas said he was especially impressed by Roberts’ recovery. “I respected the war out of Jake, and I watched his insanity, and thought there is no way that anybody will be able to help him,” he said. “To this day, I love seeing Jake, because by my estimation, he should have been dead a long, long time ago.”
“Tell Them Tonight”
Douglas closed with a message to the audience, invoking advice his mother gave him.
“My mother used to say all the time, ‘Tomorrow’s promised to no man,'” Douglas said. “If you have somebody out there that you want to say you love, tell them tonight, because you don’t know if you’ll be here tomorrow. If you have something hanging over your head, bothering you, eating at you, take the initiative like Scott did.”
Douglas said Hall showed more grace at the end of his life than most people show in a lifetime.
“I thought Scott, at the end of his life, showed a lot more grace than most human beings do in a lifetime,” Douglas said. “Being man enough to fess up that he had a problem, to work hard to get it back on track. It just saddens me that he didn’t get a chance to enjoy it longer than that.”
Scott Hall passed away on March 14, 2022, at the age of 63. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame twice, once as a singles competitor in 2014 and once as a member of the New World Order in 2020.
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