10 Great Wrestling Careers Ruined By Bad Gimmick Changes
9. Paul Burchill Becoming A Pirate
It’s a huge shame that Paul Burchill’s pirate gimmick will go down as his WWE career’s biggest talking point. An immensely talented wrestler, the Englishman was criminally underutilised throughout his brief run, and never given the chance to showcase the full range of his abilities. Initially paired with William Regal, Burchill struggled to make any real progress up the card, and WWE decided to bury his credibility altogether in 2006.
Burchill announced to Palmer Canon, SmackDown’s network representative, that he had family ties to the pirate Blackbeard that he wanted to tap into. Unfortunately, he followed through the following week, and appeared looking just like Captain Jack Sparrow himself. Regal tried talking him out of it, but it was no use: Burchill went full-on pirate, swinging down to the entrance ramp on a rope, and renaming his finisher to “Walking the Plank.”
The gimmick fortunately came to an end several months later, but it was an unwanted flashback to the outlandish, cartoony gimmicks of WWE’s dark period in the early ‘90s. Chants of “Pirate Paul” unfortunately dogged Burchill for the rest of his career, and he was eventually released from the company in 2010. Unsurprisingly, a disenfranchised Burchill walked away from the business a few years later, and now works as a fireman.