10 Dumbest Ways WWE Wrestlers Killed Their Push

In WWE, opportunities to ascend the career ladder are pretty hard to come by. Unless your name is Hulk Hogan or John Cena - wrestlers who were earmarked for super-stardom almost the very second they walked through the door - you can probably expect a long and arduous walk to the promised land.

As with any walk, the best way to alleviate the pressure on your feet is to travel light. Avoid carrying any unnecessary baggage, in other words, which in a wrestling context means don't get on the wrong side of any of your backstage superiors, don't break any cardinal industry rules, and perhaps most importantly, don't ingest the wrong substances.

Sounds pretty easy on paper, but several of the company's biggest names have fallen foul of this advice over the last couple of decades. In consequence, they've ended up killing their pushes dead in their tracks, generally for infractions that can strictly be defined as completely and utterly dumb.

Honourable mention: Robbie McAllister appearing in the Impact Zone. That was Darwin Award levels of stupid (although he didn't really have a push to kill, in fairness).

Apart from The British Bulldog, William Regal is probably as close as UK fans have ever got to seeing a homegrown wrestler capture WWE's biggest prize, with perhaps the best run of his career coming in 2008 when he won King of the Ring.

Regal, who was also serving as Raw general manager at the time, then looked set for a long-overdue upper mid-card push, one that might have culminated with world title gold were it not for an ill-timed Wellness violation right around the same time.

Instead of heading for the moon, the Blackpool-native was forced to take 60 days out, being written off screen after tasting defeat in a loser leaves town match against Mr Kennedy (whose own indiscretions we'll get to momentarily).

He was reinstated to television a couple of months later, but all the momentum was now lost. He was back to being a comedic sideshow, feuding with the likes of Jamie Noble and Santino Marella. Oh, what might have been...