10 Shocking Moments When Wrestlers Risked Losing Their Jobs

7. Bigmouth Strikes Again

The sharp rise and steep fall of Mr Kennedy within WWE had all the hallmarks of a performer's usual troubled navigation through the company's political minefield, but the Green Bay loudmouth dropped enough bombs himself to ensure his unhappy ending.

In March 2007, he won WrestleMania 23's Money In The Bank ladder match, looking a lock to use the briefcase to ascend to the upper echelon following an encouraging rise on Smackdown.

After an injury misdiagnosis got his recovery time wrong by approximately seven months, he was sadly suddenly without his title shot and his carefully crafted momentum, but help was at hand in the form of an enormous upcoming angle. He was to be Mr McMahon's illegitimate son, following the abandonment of his 'death' after the real-life demise of Chris Benoit.

It would be the Benoit tragedy that really sunk Kennedy. Leaping to the company's defence in the immediate aftermath, Ken credited the Wellness Policy with getting him off steroids in a failed effort to divert media attention away from the company's lax testing procedure.

His wafer-thin defence was utterly shattered when he himself was revealed to be involved in the Signature Pharmacy scandal that listed numerous wrestlers ordering banned substances on a regular basis. It couldn't have been a bigger PR disaster.

Serving his suspension, he'd eventually get hoofed in 2009 after a laundry list of mistakes and missteps in and out of the ring. He was lucky to have lasted that long.