10 Legitimate Fighters Who Competed In WWE

After weeks (and by weeks we mean years) of speculation, Ronda Rousey finally made her WWE bow last week by interrupting Asuka's Royal Rumble celebrations and pointing awkwardly at the WrestleMania sign.

There have been more impressive wrestling debuts over the years, but few have generated as much mainstream interest as this one. A UFC box office draw for more than five years, the 30-year-old might just be the biggest acquisition Vince McMahon has made since Brock Lesnar in 2012.

In a way, whatever Rousey ends up doing in the ring (and, as of the latest reports, it looks like being an inter-gender tag team match against Trips and Steph) is unimportant. Her main function is to drum up some media interest in the Show of Shows, which takes place on 8 April.

But, as a matter of personal pride, you imagine she will want to follow in the footsteps of guys like Kurt Angle and Brock Lesnar - and not, say, Akebono. That is to say that, while the list of legitimate fighters to have performed in WWE is long, not all of them have been success stories...

Crossovers between the worlds of professional wrestling and sumo wrestling is rare, partly because few exponents of the former are actually large enough to make it anything more than a formality, and partly because exponents of the latter would probably have great difficulty performing a springboard dive to the outside of the ring.

Big Show, however, is one of those rare WWE employees who - at a purported 500lbs (this was probably greatly exaggerated, but there's no denying that he's a pretty substantial guy) - was well capable of standing toe to toe with a legitimate sumo supremo. Namely Akebono, who he fought at WrestleMania 21.

More than a decade later, it's still not entirely clear why Vince McMahon and co were so keen on this idea. It's not like Akebono - who had also competed in kick-boxing and MMA - was a household name or anything; in fact, he had much less of a profile than Show himself.

The feud also lacked any kind of story beyond the fact that both men, being very large, had a yearning to have a big, manly cuddle in the middle of the ring. Needless to say, the resulting spectacle was a pretty poor for those watching in the audience (though, mercifully, it only lasted about a minute).