10 Wrestlers Lumbered With Dead On Arrival Gimmicks
8. Pirate Paul Burchill
The British scene is a wrestling hotbed in 2017. That decidedly wasn't the case a decade prior; there was simply no viable platform on which to showcase the talented men who comprised it. One such talent - Paul Burchill, a beast with the most spectacular cult move in wrestling, the C4 - escaped the drudgery and made it to the WWE promised land...
...only to be lumbered with two rotten gimmicks and sapped of any enthusiasm and star quality.
By the mid 2000s, Vince McMahon reverted to type and presented something akin to a New New Generation - another raft of silly, antiquated characters rendered even dumber than their occupational progenitors because they were unlucky enough to fade in the still-looming shadow of the Attitude Era. Burchill, after a middling start, was recast as a wrestling Jack Sparrow because of his ancestry or some such sh*t. This involved him making his entrance by winking to the camera in a tacit acknowledgement that, hey, at least he was getting paid, before swinging from stage to ramp via rope.
You can sort of make a similar leap and suggest that a quest for Championship gold might represent his own treasure hunt, but really, the only pirate connotation you can accurately use is buried.