MANIAC Wrestlers That Will Totally F*** YOU UP! ?
5. Ultimate Warrior
When the Ultimate Warrior returned to WWE in 1996, the company elected not to promote his extremely impressive win/loss record or even the fact that he'd won World and Intercontinental gold. They leaned in hard on the fact that he was absolutely bananas.
Perhaps this was the company trying to avoid allegations of rampant hypocrisy - videos on Warrior's prior best bits were being shown literally right before or after Vince McMahon's petty series of "Billionaire Ted" skits featuring parodies of Warrior's peers as being too over-the-hill to be part of the New Generation. The 60-Minute Iron Man match between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels was also on the docket for the upcoming WrestleMania XII, and that couldn't have been further away from the type of Champion the Warrior once was.
The strategy - if you can call "we've got this old guy back but he's a total nutcase so that's okay" a strategy - didn't work out in the end, but he f*cked plenty up in his short return. Triple H wanted a long match before he gave up his Pedigree finisher, but got just 90-something seconds out there. An Intercontinental Championship match with Goldust a month later remains by consensus one of the worst "matches" in company history, and even Jerry Lawler smashing him in the head with the back side of a painting was undermined slightly by Warrior sporting a baseball cap for the first time ever.
Back at WrestleMania and gone before SummerSlam, covering pretty much the exact same period missed by...