10 Female Wrestlers Ignored In WWE's Revisionist History

For those who never saw her work, Bull Nakano was basically a scarier, female Braun Strowman. Having won her first championship at the age of 17, Nakano was already a respected veteran in Japan when she joined the WWF in 1994, aged 26. At just over 200 pounds, her size alone got the crowd’s attention, to say nothing of her wild makeup and crazy hair, but it was her physical charisma in the ring that made her a WWF star. Her clotheslines and leg drops look devastating, and she even went to the top rope for truly impressive dives.

With such a gap in talent between Alundra Blayze and the rest of the division, Nakano was initially brought into the WWF to provide a credible threat to her championship reign. Beginning at SummerSlam 1994, the two began an extended program that saw Nakano capture the championship at a Tokyo Dome event in November and then drop it back to Blayze the following April. When Blayze took time off to recover from plastic surgery, the WWF made plans to build a feud between Nakano and the newly-signed Bertha Faye. Unfortunately, Nakano was caught with cocaine and forced out of the company soon after, a harsh punishment coming from the company that had employed the likes of Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, The Ultimate Warrior, and others. She had a brief stint in WCW, but retired from wrestling shortly after, with only the odd comeback match since.

As with the Jumping Bomb Angels, Nakano was a talented foreign worker more famous for her work outside of the WWF than in it, and her tenure in the company lasted under a year. Coupled with the cocaine incident, it’s not a surprise that she’s rarely talked about in WWE today, but her work speaks for itself, and she helped set the standard for later stars like Chyna, Kharma, and Nia Jax.