10 Wrestlers Who Were Driven Out Of The Business
3. Tom Zenk
Tom Zenk was not a mark; he happily volunteered after he called time on his career that he was only in it for the money and knew that Rick Martel, his partner in the Can-Am Connection, was earning more than him.
Zenk, young, handsome and gifted athletically, thought he was a sex symbol and thus should have been a major and well-paid star. The WWF disagreed, and he left following a financial dispute in 1987. He resurfaced in WCW in the late '80s, having worked what was left of the AWA in the intervening years, and achieved modest success. His work with Brian Pillman was critically acclaimed for its time.
After a while, he stopped trying. He dropped weight, wilfully abandoning the "look" required of talents in that era, and was more or less done by the mid-90s. More than being driven out of the business, perhaps a more accurate way of putting is that he was never truly drawn to it as anything other than a vehicle with which to earn a decent wage.
If he ever wanted a way back in, he'd have been driven out; he wasn't that big a star, ultimately, to command any sort of fee for a Monday Night Wars comeback, and he took to shooting on the industry as a very entertaining unreliable narrator so inflammatory that he even received legal threats from WWE.