8 People You Won't Believe ALMOST Became A Wrestling Champion
3. The Brian Kendrick
Brian Kendrick has proven himself a phenomenal pro wrestler at every level of the industry and can already count Ronda Rousey as a success story from his second life as a trainer, but a man of his size was always going to struggle to lift Vince McMahon's top prize. It's why there was something so idiosyncratic about him coming within minutes of actually making it so.
As a Cruiserweight and tag team division regular in the mid-2000s, Kendrick's cards were always marked, but he briefly shook off the "good hand" tag with a shimmy of his swaggering shoulders in 2008.
There was something wholly believable about a smaller star breaking free of his usual tribe by walking with the confidence of a man twice his size (or buddying up to somebody that fit the profile, anyway), as there was when Kendrick used Unforgiven 2008's Scramble concept to become a footnote in the history of the industry's richest prize
An "interim" Champion as per the stipulations of the match, WWE eventually moved to make it perfectly clear that only the man holding gold at the very end of the trialled 20-minute concept would actually be recognised as a holder. That honour went to Triple H, naturally, but this mid-match hypothetical was as close as Kendrick ever came.