10 WWE Superstars you never knew once played very different characters
Wrestling is a weird business, one that's extraordinarily difficult to get a foot into, let alone gain an actual foothold. Many wrestlers come and go, some with a quick yet successful run, while others come in with a promising gimmick that goes south quickly.
In the case of the latter, there are occasions that see those individuals turn things around and make, to put it in family-friendly terms, lemons out of lemonade. It's a struggle to get over, let alone get to the top. Not every wrestler who turns things around to make something of themselves goes on to be a top star, main-event guy, face of the company -- whatever you want to call the 'elite' wrestlers in the business.
Again, it's a very, very weird thing, wrestling. Some guys even have successful careers under multiple personas, although that's pretty rare. Only two of them are on this list, and the first one is the man we'll start with. Indeed, here are 10 WWE Superstars that once played very different characters than the ones you are most likely to be familiar with.
#10 The Godfather and Papa Shango (and more!)
There is perhaps no man in WWE history who has been better or more successfully repackaged than Charles Wright , who you may know best as The Godfather. If you're a bit of an older fan, maybe you know him as Papa Shango. Maybe you know him for his brief stint as The Supreme Fighting Machine Kama. Or when he was given a last name and became Kama Mustafa, a member of the militant Nation of Domination!
Chronologically, the first of Wright's incarnations to make major waves in WWE was Papa Shango, a Voodoo-inspired character who feuded with the likes of the Ultimate Warrior and had high-profile matches with Bret Hart for the WWE Championship and, at SummerSlam 1992 in London, England, against Tito Santana.
Come the mid-1990s, Wright became Kama, a member of Ted DiBiase's Million Dollar Corporation, his highest-profile angle coming against the Undertaker, whom he battled at the 1995 edition of SummerSlam. A couple of years later, with his head shaved once again, Wright was repackaged and presented as Kama Mustafa, an early member of the Nation of Domination stable, clashing once again with The Undertaker as well as Ahmed Johnson. He would later become known as The Godfather of the Nation - something which fed into arguably his most popular and well-known gimmick - The Godfather! Charismatic and colourful, The Godfather was a staple of the Attitude Era and, when compared to Papa Shango, was a perfect example of Wright's uncanny ability to reinvent himself.