10 Wrestlers Who Lost All Passion For The Business
9. Dustin Rhodes
Under Vince McMahon, WWE - and there were always exceptions, because he was an insane person - did not want to book old people as old people.
Vince didn't think his product would feel hip and fresh, if a wrestler had a streak of grey in their beard. He might have done better he had he not cast his babyfaces as completely lame geeks, but then, he was also very incompetent.
He held such an aversion to the ageing process in general that he apparently ordered his backstage producers to dye their beards. He also f*cked his own face up with surgery to shield himself from reality, but the effect was more or less the same as if he'd bumped like Uncle Howdy into the fountain of youth, missing his target completely and splatting the concrete enclosing the spring.
This is why he barely booked Goldust for too long after his mid-2010s renaissance. Dustin Rhodes was old, and even though this actually opened up a wealth of narrative opportunities - which AEW later explored to poignant effect - this isn't a strand of storytelling that Vince held much interest in.
Dustin, shelved by 2018, was devastated. He felt worthless, telling AEW Unrestricted in 2020 that "When another company who doesn’t value you at all, and you’re sitting there knowing you have so much more to offer...you kind of lose your passion. And for the first time in my 31 years, I lost my passion for the wrestling business."