10 Wrestlers Who Lost All Passion For The Business
1. Jon Moxley
As Dean Ambrose, Jon Moxley was thoroughly miserable by the end of 2018.
He was miserable at the prospect of returning. He had a spark of an idea of a new wrestling style he wished to debut - the violent grapplef*ck Warrior-influenced approach he introduced to awesome effect last year - but realised that he would never be able to do it in WWE. As he rehabbed his elbow injury, he watched live concert DVDs and again felt a twinge of sadness and work dread. Watching frontmen control the crowd made him jealous; he knew that he had to follow a script when he next had a microphone in his hand.
Even Ambrose - a man grimly aware that WWE was a wacky, fake-feeling promotion that he was above - couldn't know just how bad those scripts would be.
He turned on Seth Rollins after Roman Reigns suffered a real-life recurrence of his leukaemia diagnosis, and was told to say that God had it out for him. This disgusted him, as did, in the dumbest storyline ever handed to a top star, the odour emanating from the audience. The "vermin" smelled so bad that he had to wear a gas mask. They were so diseased that he had to inoculate himself from them. Mean-spirited and stupid, this was the nadir of his entire run - and he once had to squirt mustard on people. He was wacky!
He was also despondent, recounting to Chris Jericho on the most infamous podcast since 2014:
"It's like they take wrestling away from you. Promos used to be my favorite part of wrestling, I loved ‘em. They ended up becoming my least favorite part, the part I dread, because it’s not me coming up with ideas and coming up with a way to hook you into our story, it’s me trying to not look like an idiot."