WWE's 10 Smallest World Champions Ever

The wrestling business is a big man's game. Always has been. Always will be. Smaller wrestlers come and go, but wrestling promoters like Vince McMahon are always looking for the next great big guy to be the "face" of a wrestling company. Why do you think guys like The Undertaker, Big Show, Brock Lesnar and others were top guys so quickly? They're big. As we have seen many times in WWE history, being big isn't all that matters. There have been plenty of great WWE/World Champions that have been on the smaller side and that's what we're here to look at today. When looking at all of these smaller wrestlers, there is something in common for nearly all of them. Almost all of them had to put in several years of consistently great work before they made it to the top of the company. There is an exception with one of these guys winning fairly early in his career (winning a gold medal helped), but the rest of them had to put in eight years or more in nearly every instance. Some of them may never have got a WWE or World Title if WWE didn't have two titles from 2002 to 2013, but it happened. In each case, we're using the listed height and weight that WWE has for these guys on their WWE.com superstar pages. For example, Bob Backlund is listed at 234 pounds by WWE. It's highly unlikely that he actually weighed that much because he looks smaller than some of the guys you'll read about here, but we have to use something close to official for this. If this was a look at 11 guys then Chris Jericho would come in that spot because he's listed at 226 pounds, which is one pound over number ten. Here's a closer look at WWE's smallest World Champions ever going by how much they weighed, or at least what WWE says they weighed.