10 Rejected Wrestler Names WWE ACTUALLY Pitched
9. Mason The Mutilator (Mankind)
A feature of the stunning illustrations for his character Mick Foley first shared in his awesome first autobiography, Mason The Mutilator was one of several the company drafted before a compromise with Foley himself landed on Mankind.
Jim Ross has noted before how he really had to "sell" Cactus Jack to Vince McMahon, and it's likely that the Chairman assumed he was getting an actual human being adjacent to the WCW/ECW wild man he'd presumably been forced to see some footage of. A caged, locked up maniac was the image that went with the original moniker which - much like the aforementioned ideas for Steve Austin - were so married to a daft gimmick that they were doomed from the start.
Mankind, much like the original version of the character, was extremely ambiguous and subverted the word's everyman quality by played with the literal. 'The Deranged One' was anything but the pleasant human he'd been uniquely billed as.