5 WWE Superstars who almost quit wrestling
WWE viewers can like or loathe the over-the-top Superstars they witness on Raw and SmackDown Live every week, but everyone can appreciate the hard work that the real-life people behind the characters put in on a daily basis to entertain audiences all around the world.
NXT Superstar Johnny Gargano recently sent out a tweet revealing that he still has a 2015 email from WWE, in which the company rejected him following an unsuccessful tryout. He said he “looks at it from time to time to remind myself how far I've come and why any of this happened to begin with”.
Main-roster veteran Natalya chimed in, saying she also has her rejection email and it is “very important to keep fighting”.
The Twitter exchange got us thinking about other WWE Superstars who never gave up on their dream of making it to the very top in pro wrestling/sports entertainment, so we delved into the archives to find out which current men and women on the WWE roster almost quit wrestling earlier on in their careers.
#5 Luke Harper
Luke Harper has been a solid worker for WWE ever since he signed with the company’s FCW development brand in 2011.
Back then, he was due to work a tour with Dragon Gate in Japan and, as his wife was pregnant at the time, he decided that he was going to step away from wrestling as a full-time career and he was only going to wrestle locally.
Then, as he revealed in an interview with the Democrat and Chronicle, WWE surprisingly invited him to a tryout and everything changed.
"I said to her, 'This is it. I’m done. I can’t be away from you, we just have to figure something out.' I was just going to wrestle locally and I come back from the tour, make the decision, everything’s good, then WWE calls and says, ‘Hey, we want you to come try out.’ So, literally, I was as far out as I’ve ever been in my life away from pro wrestling, and they instantly pulled me back in and it was back to it.”