10 Wrestlers Who Were Driven Out Of The Business

Wrestling was such an ugly business.

It still is, on the fringe, where wrestlers implicated in #SpeakingOut still get booked on some vile shindie and will not listen when they get told to piss off, despite that happening for years, plural, at this point.

It was somehow worse in the old days.

Populated by the smallest, most petty men large only in physical stature and heroic only when the booker's scripts call for it, so many of these awful people, genuine sociopaths in some cases, were pure hell to deal with. They were real men, respected veterans of this business, and if you upset them, you were f*cked. If you misremembered some etiquette or other, you were knackered.

Maybe you forgot that you weren't meant to grip on the handshake, and in a memory lapse, you went in quite hard because there's a big man stood opposite that you thought you were meant to impress. Somebody might actually sh*t on your toothbrush and tell you to sing 'Happy Birthday' twice to do the job correctly.

Sadism was a common theme of the wrestling business in the 20th century, and it might have been most rife in the early 21st, when a group of locker room henchmen, presiding over a monopoly, deemed themselves the only authority. This explains why more than one TV wrestler felt they had no choice but to get the F out.

Some wrestlers were so awful that the decision was made for them...

WWE were bloody lucky to secure the exorbitant TV rights fees with which the promotion was able to succeed despite spewing out some of the worst content of all time in the late 2010s; a decade prior, they buried the network that aired SmackDown at the time, UPN, for the reasonable request to not vomit out such awful, sponsor-adverse material.

Palmer Canon, played by developmental graduate Brian Mailhot, was a slimy, meddling, politically correct hypocrite who represented the station and regulated WWE programming to its satisfaction. A Right To Censor retread and exercise in pissy defensiveness, Canon lasted about a year.

Perhaps WWE should have shoot regulated the abhorrent sadists of the SmackDown locker room - because they drove Canon out of WWE.

Bruce Prichard has subsequently claimed on Something To Wrestle that that Canon "wasn't ready mentally, maturity-wise" to enter the business. Since the dark "rumour and innuendo" was that Canon was duct-taped in a shower and tormented about what might have happened next, for six hours, perhaps Canon wasn't the immature one here.

Canon alleged that he was harassed by Chris Benoit and JBL and was so disturbed by Wrestler's Court that he flew himself home from a European tour, handed in his notice, and made only a handful of indie appearances before vanishing from the public eye.

The worst of it is - if it's true etc. etc. - is that JBL and Benoit weren't exactly the reason WWE monopolised the industry, and yet they still felt invincible and beyond reproach atop it.