10 Times Wrestlers Secretly Went Undercover In Other Companies
Those times wrestlers opened the REAL Forbidden Door - by keeping everything a mystery...
The Forbidden Door was opened earlier than you think.
Yes, it became a popular tourist destination for a glut of professional wrestling groups from the moment freshly-crowned AEW World Champion Kenny Omega took the title to IMPACT Wrestling in a bizarrely excellent and genuinely unfathomable bit of cross-promotion between the two - but AEW was actually late to the party.
It had been opened when WWE acknowledged the existence of - and later purchased - WCW, and vice versa. It had been opened when ROH and CZW waged war on each other in the best execution of the trope. It had been opened when Rob Black's XPW invaded ECW during the 2000 Heat Wave pay-per-view. It had been opened when WWE embraced the independent scene at the height of NXT's global success, introducing popular indie darlings without touting them as projects of the WWE Performance Center. It had been opened when IMPACT Wrestling dared to challenge WWE to the Monday Night Wars, the worst of the three main wrestling ratings wars, that led to their mid-2010s, Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff-orchestrated downfall. New Japan and Memphis got there decades before anyone.
The Forbidden Door has been open for decades, is the point - and not just in front of the cameras...
10. Bobby Fish Wants His Job Back (WWE NXT Live Event, November 2022)
Bobby Fish is a paradoxical pro wrestler.
Ostensibly one of the most gifted strikers currently working the North American independents, Fish traded career-long success for career-long infamy upon realising that he could voice an opinion. Bobby may not like the guy, but it's a trait that worked exponentially for CM Punk - except, CM Punk was/is a vastly popular act whose vocal work stuck out in a sea of WWE's ailing scripted material.
Bobby Fish, meanwhile, was just a guy who happened to once be the Marty Jannetty of an NXT faction that had no Shawn Michaels'; Adam Cole, Roderick Strong, and Kyle O'Reilly all possessed redeeming qualities that made their characters work outside of The Undisputed ERA.
Leaving AEW in August 2022 after a publically heated tirade against the aforementioned 'Voice of the Voiceless', Bobby Fish had an arbitrary stint in IMPACT Wrestling in what was a meme-grabbing bit of business - but it wasn't before long that he was back trying his luck in Orlando. Reported, per Fightful Select, to be backstage at a non-televised NXT event, Bobby Fish was joined by fellow alum Anthony Greene, though exact details remain murky almost a year on.
Perhaps he was trying to get back on Triple H and Shawn Michaels' Christmas card list. A job would've been nice, too.