Those Times Wrestlers Dodged Career-Killing Bullets

Debuting as the utterly frightening and unhinged Mankind, the legendary Mick Foley very quickly captured the attention of folks all over the planet after sticking his hand down Bob Holly's throat back in 1996.

However, there was a point there before he first showed up as that masked menace when Foley's character very nearly went by another, far less intriguing name.

As Foley would recall during a Hot Ones appearance (at 9:00 in the video below), he heard early on that his character was going to originally be known as Mason the Mutilator, remembering Vince McMahon's dreadful pitch of, "In this business, we’ve had crushers, we’ve had destroyers. We’ve had executioners, but we’ve never had… a mutilator."

There and then, Foley sensed that name would have been a career death knell. So, he swiftly told his boss that, while he liked that cartoonish moniker, he had another suggestion: what about Mankind the Mutilator?

After pitching the name as one that possessed a double meaning - "the destruction of mankind, the future of mankind" - all those ideas were noted down. And what would have almost certainly been a career-killing name was ultimately dropped, with McMahon just going for the chilling and soon-to-be iconic handle of Mankind for 'Mrs. Foley's Baby Boy'.