8 Best Second Act WWE Careers Ever

After a stellar career as a tag champion with his brother Dory, and a singles run that saw him capture the NWA title, Terry Funk was in something of a rut. He turned to stunt work, and by the late 80's he was teaming with something called a Jimmy Jack in the WWF and getting beaten up by Sylvester Stallone on screens across the nation.

Terry Funk returned to the NWA in 1988 and piledrove Ric Flair through a table, the first such occurrence on an American wrestling show. Funk would abandon the traditional-grappler-with-an-edge style that had carried him for two decades and instead embraced full-scale ultraviolence. The aging Funker became a force of nature, his brittle, aging form becoming the vessel for a primordial chaos god. His orgies of near-murder made him an icon in Japan and in ECW, where he captured a world championship nearly two decades after his faded NWA title reign.

Funk returned to the mainstream soon after, first as a chainsaw maniac (that we were somehow not expected to realize was him) and later as the psychotic commissioner of WCW (which included the infamous moment in which Funk nearly fought a horse during a barnyard match with Shane Douglas).

Today, Terry is better known as a hardcore visionary than as the man who held the NWA championship all those years ago.