10 Wrestlers Who Were Driven Out Of The Business
9. Daniel Puder
There were no rules.
The rules were what flew at the time, whichever thin pretext was devised in the minds of these lunatics to bully somebody.
In the case of Palmer Canon, he was too soft. He was a timid, goose-sh*t green wreck who may have lacked the experience to grasp the bizarre etiquette of a pro wrestling locker room, but even if that were the case, the response was wildly and horrifically disproportionate.
Daniel Puder meanwhile was too legitimately tough.
In 2004, in a shoot open challenge stemming from the events of Tough Enough, he infamously trapped Kurt Angle in a Kimura. Were it not for the quick-thinking intervention of the referee, who worked a patently fake three count, Puder might have badly damaged or even broken Angle's arm. Anyone who knows anything about real fighting knew that Angle was humiliated, and f*cked, in that ring. Puder was green, and reacted to what was, bizarrely, an impromptu shoot fighting segment that went unsanctioned by any legitimate governing body. Angle, after all, had broken the ribs of fellow Tough Enough contestant Chris Nawrocki just minutes prior. Puder had to either breach etiquette or protect his reputation and defend himself.
Could he be reasonably blamed for settling on the latter option?
If you're WWE, yes: in the 2005 Royal Rumble match, three of the most tenured members of the roster, almost pious about the apparent sanctity of the business - Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit and Hardcore Holly - were dispatched to beat and chop the sh*t out of Puder in what was a pathetic lesson in vigilante justice masquerading as entertainment conceived to "put smiles on people's faces".
Well done lads, very hard. There were three of you, and it's fake.
Puder did the odd shot elsewhere in the subsequent years, but more or less decided wrestling was a joke then and there.