10 Most Outstanding Career Revivals In WWE

Wrestling comebacks are a funny thing. Sometimes they’re clear cut, writ large: a performer returning from certain career oblivion or a long retirement, appearing with high drama, pomp and circumstance. These are the stars that shoot to the main event, the major angles - the comebacks that can be seen from space.

Then you get the workhorse comebacks, the career revivals based around a performer reclaiming a spot, or a gimmick, or their love for the business. These stories are quietly rewarding for wrestler and audience alike, as a whole new generation of fans fall for them like it was yesterday again.

Look at ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage and Terry Funk. Savage had been written off in the WWF, relegated to the announcer’s chair, but he knew he still had some ring time left in him, and WCW let him reintroduce Macho Madness to the world.

Meanwhile, Funk reinvented himself in ECW and IWA Japan in his late forties, fusing the bloody southern drama of the NWA with the wild man brawler he’d been in All Japan to pioneer the hardcore style of wrestling that characterised the latter half of his career.

Whatever the circumstances, however they work it, there’s something inspirational, even glorious about the comeback kid (however old that ‘kid’ might be)...

Dustin Runnels came up in Florida and WCW, but it wasn’t until his reinvention in the WWF that he truly found his niche in professional wrestling: as the flamboyant, eccentric and near-the-knuckle weirdnik Goldust.

It was off the wall, but Dustin made it work. Like the Undertaker before him, it’s impossible now to imagine anyone else in that role.

For a long time, though, it seemed as though substance abuse issues were going to call time on Runnels’ career before he, or any of his fans, were ready to say goodbye. A significant in-ring talent with a superlative pedigree, Runnels never seemed to last long in the WWF/E, WCW, TNA or the independent circuit, drifting from one to the next until he finally cleaned up around 2008.

A shoulder injury – and probably some trust issues – delayed the big comeback, but when it hit it was a doozy. A one-off appearance at the 2013 Royal Rumble gave him the biggest pop of his career, leading to Goldust’s return to the WWE in September as part of the Rhodes boys mini-angle with the Authority.

Clean and sober, highly motivated and in the best shape of his life, Goldust teamed with Cody Rhodes and their legendary father against the Shield for some of the year’s most electrifying matches.

The character was toned down from his Attitude Era heyday, but it didn’t matter: Goldust had always been over, and now he was over like clover.