10 More Wrestling Gimmicks So Bad They Didn’t Even Make It To TV
3. Deaf CM Punk
After changing the wrestling landscape with his incredible final programme in Ring of Honor, CM Punk arrived in WWE with high hopes for his what his future held.
And what did they want to do with him? Make him deaf, of course!
Original plans for the character would have seen Punk lose his hearing as "the first deaf WWE superstar". There are about a million things wrong with this, not least the fact that CM Punk wasn't deaf!
Then again, this was the same company that promoted Kofi Kingston as the "first Jamaican WWE superstar", so what can you say?
Because WWE in the mid-2000s was about as a funny as waking up next to a used toilet brush, imagine the sort of backstage "skits" they would have had for Punk's hard of hearing persona.
We'd say that it would get them cancelled today, but WWE have survived so many fiascos and scandals that it's hard to know if anything could take them down at this point.
In the end, cooler heads prevailed and Punk debuted as a stripped back version of his old Ring of Honor self. Thank God WWE officials weren't as tone deaf as they first appeared.