8 People You Won't Believe ALMOST Became A Wrestling Champion

8. Tank Abbott

A pitch so bad it supposedly lost Vince Russo his tenuous place at WCW's top table, wrestling apocrypha has it that the struggling creative head honcho wanted the shock-and-awe from a Tank Abbott WCW Championship win as his Atlanta hail mary - it'd be his last act for months.

A tumultuous late-1999 start for the former WWE head writer had resulted in several wrestlers and pundits wondering aloud if Russo had been sent down from Stamford to pick at the grisly remains of a rotting opposition. Tank Abbott: WCW Champion was considered the gambit too far, even though the company would find ways to top it for stupidity following his return from exile just months later.

Abbott's own booking was one of those things - he'd gone from dangerous ex-UFC killer to comedy character in the sort of creative cul-de-sac the character simply couldn't survive. In that time, WCW had done more damage to the belt he was pitched to win by repeated title changes and an infamous run for actor David Arquette. Upon reflection over the final 18 months or so of the company's existence, the idea seemed relatively quaint.