10 Second Generation WWE Stars Who Totally Failed

It's tempting to roll your eyes and sigh when you hear about WWE signing up yet another son or daughter of a legendary wrestler of the past.

But while nepotism is bad in theory, it sometimes yields decent results in practice. The Rock, for example, has gone onto become perhaps wrestling's biggest-ever name, in part owing to the fact that he got a foot in the door so early thanks to his famous dad. Similar things can be said of Randy Orton, Charlotte Fair, and though you may not care to admit it, Roman Reigns.

There's a reason second-generation WWE stars don't have the best reputation though. For every success story, there's at least four or five examples of wrestlers who spectacularly failed to live up to their family name, many of them looking like they had no business performing for the biggest promotion in the world, especially with so much talent waiting for a chance on the independent circuit.

But, really, can you blame them for taking advantage of their connections? The wrestling business is an exclusive club which discriminates heavily on the grounds of size and appearance - if you've got an "in", then you'd be mad not to use it.

Let's be fair here: Richie Stemaboat had some incredibly high expectations to live up to. His father, Ricky, wasn't just one of the best wrestlers of his generation, he helped usher in a whole new in-ring style in WWE with his performances in the late 1980s.

Richie had no such luck, getting released from his contract with the company about four years ago after spending more than a year on the shelf with a serious back injury, one from which he still hasn't returned even on the independent circuit.

It's not as though he was pulling up any trees prior to that, though. He was still yet to make a single appearance on the main roster at the time of his WWE exit, having instead competed on FCW and then later NXT, where he wasn't exactly a marquee name.

Given his injury troubles, it would be unfair to put him any higher on this list, but the fact is that he came nowhere close to matching the career of The Dragon (although that same charge can admittedly be leveled at 99% of wrestlers in history).