10 Marriages WWE Acknowledged And Turned Into Storylines
5. Goldust And Marlena
Fans today might wonder why the announcers repeatedly refer to Goldust as The Bizarre One. Thanks to the WWE Network, they can see the earlier incarnation of Goldie, which included his then-wife Terri Runnels as the cigar-chomping Marlena. In the early years, she simply accompanied the sexually suggestive Goldust to the ring, taking up a position in a directors chair and watched his matches. In 1997, Goldust acknowledged his true identity as Dustin Runnels, son of the American Dream, Dusty Rhodes. In pulling back the curtain a little, we learned that Marlena was really Dustins wife, Terri. The couple split on TV later that fall, but they would reunite several months later. The couple divorced for real in 1999, around the time that Dustin left WWE and returned to WCW (remember the aborted Seven gimmick?). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0JHHovyD4M Terri would continue to work for WWE into 2004 and Dustin would return to the promotion after WCW folded, going on to win the World Tag Team Championship with Booker T. Although the couple didnt work together onscreen again (undoubtedly due to the divorce), they still spent a solid two years as an out married couple working for WWE in the late 90s. And Goldusts split from Terri during a Jim Ross interview was the height of reality TV for that era.
Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.
