8 Famous Wrestlers Whose Careers BRUTALLY Faded Away

4. Kane

Glenn Jacobs got lucky. None of his early wrestling gimmicks held any substance - of course they didn't: he was cast as a humanoid Christmas tree, an evil dentist, and a poor man's Kevin Nash doppelganger - but when The Undertaker needed a towering antagonist to fill the role of his kayfabe half-brother Kane, he knew just the man. From this came one of WWE's most menacing and, more importantly, most successful gimmicks: as Kane, Jacobs became both a Triple Crown and a Grand Slam Champion.

He was hardly doing that as Isaac Yankem.

Then, Glenn Jacobs got unlucky. As the years progressed, so too did the base-level expectations fans now expected from their wrestling. Even in WWE, a promotion founded upon headlocks and body slams, the influx of super-indie wrestlers drove away any interest left in the Kane character. Take Damian Priest as a prime example. Both he and Kane can hit a Chokeslam as well as the other, but what did fans want to see more of: a giant that wrestles like a giant, or a giant that wrestles like a cruiserweight on steroids?

'The Big Red Machine' unofficially entered part-time status in 2016, however, he hasn't wrestled at all since his short stint in the 2021 Royal Rumble match, meaning that his apparent retirement match played out before zero fans: that was the same for his Hall of Fame induction that year. It made for quite the bleak end to such a legendary career - and it couldn't have happened to a better guy!