8 Wrestlers Who Saved Their WWE Careers (By Being Awesome At Something Else)
What were they doing BEFORE?
A side-gig or hobby is an intelligent long-term play for any pro wrestler, or at least it was before even the most naff could earn a decent wedge on the newly-banterfied Independent circuit.
Just think: if the Undertaker had fallen out with Vince McMahon and not invested in property, he may in a wonderful alternate universe have appeared on a GCW Spring Break show. He could have delivered a Canadian Destroyer to Marko Stunt, hating himself inside and doing very little to conceal it. Yet another example of capitalism's inherent evil.
But it isn't necessarily a guarantee of success.
Take, for example, Dolph Ziggler's decision to moonlight as a stand-up comic. Just a passion, perhaps, but Ziggler possibly used the medium as an outlet to hone his improvisational mic skills and earn the trust of management to get himself over. This didn't work - saying "It should have been me" about eight million f*cking times breaks comedy's rule of three - but God love him for trying. When a wrestler's career grows stale or is threatened outright, often, a wrestler will gamble on a new look, or a new entrance theme.
Other times, they'll stick to what they know...
8. JBL - Finance
JBL was fairly doomed by the early 2000s.
It took years for him to connect as a talent. A burly powerhouse of a man, his deeply basic, colourless work looked painful without being entertaining, drawing crickets in every incarnation - cowboy to satanist - until the Acolytes morphed into the APA, and he was encouraged to show off his belligerent quick wit on WWF TV. "I'd offer you a beer, but I only got six," was a boy-popping example of it, but they couldn't hang with the TLC generation, and were mostly - effectively - used as ancillary characters in Chris Kreski's sublime shared universe.
With Kreski gone, and the Attitude Era fading, Bradshaw failed to impersonate Stan Hansen and toiled in an exponentially less interesting Hardcore division. This might be trademark romantic exaggeration on the part of Bruce Prichard, but he has claimed that Bradshaw was on the same chopping block as partner Faarooq, were his new character to have failed to get over.
That new character - John Bradshaw Layfield - adhered to the age-old adage. This was Bradshaw's real personality, amplified; an astute investor, he had released 'Have More Money Now' to earn more of it, which informed the pitch.
His side-gig mutated into a pro wrestling-sized version of a mega-moneyed sh*t-heel, the libertarian element of which in turn informed his infamous xenophobic promos. This did save his career, if not his job, and that isn't an exaggeration; somehow, JBL became a main event-level talent by suffusing the backlash with buckets of blood in dramatic spectacles that just about did the job.