10 Wrestlers EVERYBODY Was Wrong About

If only Muhammad Hassan hadn't been lumbered with a one-note, retrograde gimmick insultingly typecasting him as Foreign Menace du jour, he could have been an absolute superstar. Or so goes an increasingly challenged prevailing piece of received wisdom.

Recast as the 'Arabian Nightmare' Muhammad Hassan, Mark Copani made his WWE bow in 2004, launching into a series of earnest promos in which he lambasted Americans for prejudicing people of his ethnic background as 'terrorists' following the events of 9/11. What began as a subtle, even thought-provoking study of fear-induced xenophobia quickly descended into typical WWE farce. Hassan implicitly became the very thing he'd chastised fans for calling him, the low point being an angle which saw a group of masked men garrote The Undertaker on his behalf.

With regrettable timing, London was tragically hit by a terrorist attack just hours before the show aired. Following the understandable uproar in the wake of such insensitive material making the screen, SmackDown's network UPN ordered WWE to remove Hassan from television. Copani had been set to become the company's youngest ever champion at SummerSlam that year; instead, his career had been effectively ended through no fault of his own.

Circumstances worked against Copani, but is he really one of the biggest missed opportunities in WWE history? The proof is in his post-controversy pudding. Sent back to developmental for refocusing, Hassan entirely failed to reinvent himself, and when WWE let him go that fall, announced his retirement from wrestling. Despite his bitter end, a man with so much apparent talent could have forged a new path for himself elsewhere; the TNA of 2005 would not have thought twice about snapping up a man of such notoriety. Instead, he called it quits.