10 Times WWE Wrestlers Were Punished On Air

7. No Hugs Allowed

Wrestling isn’t real. This is fine. It doesn’t matter. Sasha and Bayley can stomp each other into protons and then cry and hug afterwards, it doesn’t matter. But apparently in the 90s, oh it mattered super hard.

Wrestlers would be fined if babyfaces shared cars with heels, shared hotels with heels, broke character for even a second, must have been f**king exhausting. In May 1996, Diesel and Razor Ramon were leaving WWE for WCW where they’d go on to have [checks notes] moderate success (obvious sarcasm).

On their last night together, in Madison Square Garden, the two men hugged it out with fellow Kliqmates Triple H and Shawn Michaels in a way that would make Dr. Shelby proud.

However, while Vince had originally signed off on this display of convivial appreciation, because it was an untelevised house show, a member of the crowd managed to capture it on video, and started spreading it around, until it gathered infamy as a relatively rare shattering of kayfabe, known as the curtain call.

Furious, WWE couldn’t punish Big Deez and Razzer, Shawn was the champ, so Triple H carried the can, being booked to lose to Marc Mero on countless house shows and, of course, losing out on being crowned King of the Ring, losing a first-round match to Jake Roberts on a late May episode of Raw.

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6. And They Call It Moppy Love

Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You’re at work, your coworker winds you up and you take it a little too far, get into a fight and are called in front of HR.

They tell you, this kind of thing is unprofessional, hand you a piece of janitorial equipment, and then say, cool, now tell everyone in the office that this is your girlfriend. That’s happened to you right, cause it happened to Perry Saturn.

After shoot beating the piss out of a jobber who’d accidentally dropped Perry on his head on an episode of WWE Metal in May 2001, which to be clear IS unprofessional and shouldn’t be condoned, Saturn was punished in the oddest way possible, by being given the world’s most embarrassing gimmick.

Within a week of the incident, he was brutalized by the APA on raw, given severe brain damage, which led him to dress up in a bra and panties, before finally falling in love with a mop that he once tried to use as a weapon.

He called the mop Moppy, and theirs was a brief summer fling, they did everything together, before she was murdered by Raven. And hey, Perry gave it his all, can’t say he didn’t.

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5. Royal Humbled

We recently released a list about the hazing culture in WWE and how it was bad. This is an example of hazing culture in WWE. It is bad.

Daniel Puder, won the 2004 Tough Enough competition and I guess bad things just happen to Tough Enough winners at the Royal Rumble. Watch your head, Maven. JEEZ.

In a now-infamous unplanned tale, on the November 4th episode of Smackdown that year, Kurt Angle challenged the tough enough competitors to fight him for reals. Daniel Puder, a man with a fivehead and real-life MMA training, fought him for reals, putting Angle in a shoot kimura lock, which could have caused Kurt serious damage.

As payback for what was seen to be a gross breach of wrestling etiquette, although y’know, don’t do unplanned wrestling spots with MMA fighters I guess, Daniel Puder was entered into the 2005 Royal Rumble, in a spot specifically designed to surround him with some of WWE’s most hazing-happy veterans, Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit and Hardcore Holly, who proceed to leather the kid with chops and it gets real tough to watch.

A rare case of wrestlers court given the green light to go public by the bookers and it’s all sorts of gross.

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4. WWE : Weight Watchers Entertainment

Vince McMahon has a muscle fetish and I refuse to say allegedly, I will stand by that statement in court.

He likes marbled beef and if wrestlers don’t conform to his myopic standards of chiseled then he covers them up like a teenager hurriedly stuff his porn collection under his bed. It exists even to this day, with Keith Lee being told to wear a shirt despite being history’s sexiest man.

Sometimes WWE creative has taken it even further, actually punishing stars for perceived poor care of their bodies. Mickie James was submitted to the supremely horrid Piggie James storyline because she was seen as overweight despite being very much not overweight.

But it goes back even further than that, even to Vince’s early years as big boss. In the mid-80s, Adrian Adonis, began to put on weight, and as punishment was stripped of his badass biker gimmick and was instead repackaged as Adorable Adrian Adonis, a large effiminate man who used gay panic and terrible make-up blending as mind games.

It’s a tale with a really sad end. After being cut from WWE shortly after Mania 3, Adonis went to Japan and over the next year lost 100 pounds, gearing up for a return to the big dub. Before he could make that return however, he died in a car crash in 1988, age 34.

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