10 Crazy Wrestling Scandals You've Never Heard Of
WWE's IYO SKY once had a literal brush with the law...
A scandal by definition is in fact something you've heard of - but that's if you are deep in the weeds of that which has provoked outrage amongst the public.
Vince McMahon retired in disgrace as part of a scandal broken, through excellent journalism, by the Wall Street Journal. Vince being Vince - an unrepentant narcissist who operated as if the rules did not apply to him throughout his entire waking life - tried to no-sell it.
He appeared live on SmackDown and Raw, garbling out about 10 words across both appearances with his old, sh*t mouth, and even tasked poor Titus O'Neil with a phenomenally bleak onscreen PR exercise. Ultimately, the heat was too much, and he "retired" via Twitter on July 22, 2022.
He left behind a legacy of just the worst business practises. His going out with poetic justice was the only good long-term story he had plotted in decades.
Here, however, the scandals plagued corridors of the industry you may never have walked through; whether on the other side of the pacific, the border, or in the bleak suburbs of the independent scene, the dark underbelly of the industry exists everywhere...
10. The Antonio Inoki Embezzlement Scandal
At Wrestle Kingdom 17, New Japan Pro Wrestling announced that a feature film depicting the life of company founder Antonio Inoki is in pre-production.
There isn't enough time. It is no exaggeration to state that only a multi-season Netflix series would do justice to the endless and endlessly fascinating source material. To tell the epic, insane story of Inoki's life, you might even have to tally up the combined runtime of every Triple H WrestleMania match. That's probably too long, actually, but the point still stands: even a three-hour film would only act as a shallow glimpse.
Inoki founded, oversaw and starred in the biggest puro promotion ever for decades. To grasp the scale of his legacy, he was both Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan at the same time.
In the early 1980s, NJPW was a monster of a success turning an incredible profit, but Inoki almost tanked the entire company; his side business, a biotechnology company operating under the name Anton Hisel, was floundering. In response, he embezzled and siphoned cash from New Japan's live gates to keep it afloat. The interloping Ishin Gundan stable were incensed, NJPW's hottest angle was abandoned, and Inoki stepped down as President (though still performed as a talent). Business plummeted for a few years with the best thing going dead, but Inoki soon found himself back in power as a result of what many deemed clandestine political machinations.
That Vince comparison goes further than you might think, too; Vice President Hisashi Shinma was fired, John Laurinaitis-style, for the benefit of the optics.