10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Rhyno
9. He Pitched Muhammad Hassan
WWE may never write another character as problematic as Muhammad Hassan again.
What started as a relatively straightforward but ill-advised attempt at portraying an oppressed Arab-American in a post-9/11 world soon escalated to full-blown terrorist allusions, with WWE delivering a tasteless segment in which five masked men choked The Undertaker with a piano wire just a few days after the London bombings of July 2005. This shambles should've been cut from the broadcast, but no: WWE persisted, and the backlash was immense.
The angle effectively ended Hassan's wrestling career, as WWE's network forced the character off television, and the man himself was released just a few months later. His name now lives on in infamy as one of the most ham-fisted portrayals of a big picture topic in company history, but the original idea didn't come from one of their many faceless TV writers.
It was Rhyno who provided the original Muhammad Hassan blueprint, as revealed in an interview the following year. WWE originally dismissed it, but the character eventually made it to television, and while WWE's offensive direction was a big divergence from Rhyno's original blueprint (much to his chagrin), the gimmick wouldn't have existed had he not pitched it.