It’s very easy to get caught up in Rouseymania, as we here at With Spandex have been displaying as of late. But looking beyond just one person or one event, there’s quite a lineage of pro wrestling and mixed martial arts colliding. Even before organizations like UFC hit their glory days and shootfighting was still something of an unknown variable, it wasn’t terribly uncommon for athletes to jump back and forth from pro wrestling and MMA. With that in mind, here are some of the WWE stars who have taken up unarmed combat at some point, with varying degrees of success:
Brock Lesnar
Let’s start with the obvious one. After Lesnar’s initial departure from WWE, he would eventually turn his attention to MMA. Following a tune-up fight with Dynamite!! USA, he became a UFC heavyweight stalwart, eventually winning the title from Randy Couture at UFC 91. After a few successful defenses of the Heavyweight Championship, he would suffer a resounding loss against Cain Velasquez, proving that karma is very real when you get all racist with a Mexican-American badass. He would suffer another loss against Alistair Overeem and then publicly retire following the fight. That’s how we got our Malevolent Suplex Demon back!
Batista
I’ll say this about Batista’s one and only professional MMA bout, the timing was just right. In conjunction with his role in RZA’s movie The Man with the Iron Fists, Dave “Brass Body” Bautista got in the cage for CES Mixed Martial Arts against fellow heavyweight Vince Lucero, whose accomplishments included being a fat dude. In a one-sided affair that didn’t even get out of the first round, Big Dave scored the win via TKO.
Sean O’Haire
Following his departure from the WWE, O’Haire tried his hands (and feet) at K-1 kickboxing. He posted a winless record there, but would eventually rack up a respectable 4-2 record in other MMA promotions.
Alberto Del Rio
Proving that he can do pretty much anything, Alberto embarked on a sporadic MMA career starting in 2001, balancing MMA with his lucha libre schedule in Mexico. His 9-5 overall record is pretty impressive, and in 2003, he was a hot enough prospect to make it to the stacked card for Pride Bushido 1 in Japan. He would become the first Mexican to compete on their roster, the first man to compete with a mask, and one of many to have their head kicked into low-earth orbit by Mirko Filipovic.
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Remember, this was 2003, when Cro Cop was basically an Eastern European Terminator with hydraulic kick-assist. Times have changed.
Bart Gunn
Oh, Brawl For All. Easily found in Chapter 1 of the “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time” handbook. The WWF’s venture into a for-real fighting tournament resulted in little more than injuries and infamy, but at the end, the surprise winner was Bart “Not Billy” Gunn. His reward? A boxing match with Butterbean at WrestleMania XV, which went about as well as Johnny Knoxville’s attempt in a department store. After his wrestling career was over, Gunn (real name: Michael Polchlopek) had a pair of MMA bouts in 2006, culminating in a decision loss at Pride Bushido 13.
Bobby Lashley
Here’s a wrestling/MMA success story that’s still going strong. Lashley has been fighting professionally since 2008, pretty much right after his release from WWE. He’s worked his way up the ranks into Bellator MMA, which could arguably called the No. 2 MMA promotion in America. At a record of 12-2, he’s certainly no slouch, and the fact that he’s balancing Bellator with a position on the Impact Wrestling roster is a testament to his skill. He just extended his Bellator contract last month, so there’s quite a bit more MMA in his future.
Ken Shamrock
They don’t call him The World’s Most Dangerous Man for nothing. Shamrock is one of the few guys who could stand on equal footing as a pro wrestler or a mixed martial artist, although MMA is really where he established his dominance. He was there for the birth of Pancrase and UFC, and when he took a little vacation to the WWF, he ended up as an Intercontinental Champion, Tag Team Champion, and 1998 King of the Ring. From there, it was straight back to mixed martial arts. His long-running feud with Tito Ortiz helped put UFC on the map, and he’s still considered one of the all-time greats. At fifty years old, he has a bare-knuckle boxing match scheduled sometime this month, and a Bellator fight with Kimbo Slice is in the works. Basically, at any given time, Ken Shamrock is either fighting or sleeping. He can’t stop.
Dan Severn
SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO ARE UNSTOPPABLE…
My first exposure to Dan “The Beast” Severn was a friend’s old VHS copy of King of the Ring 1998 (the same one where Shamrock triumphed), and at the time, I had no idea just how much of a force of nature he was. During an MMA career that spans nearly two decades, Severn racked up 101 wins, 19 losses, and 7 draws. UFC, Pride, WEC, King of the Cage… Severn would fight anyone, anywhere. I think his mustache tapped a guy out once. Dan Severn will end you.
CM Punk
Remind me to come back and fill this part in eventually.
Sorry, just messing around. Punk has yet to make his UFC debut, but as of right now, he’s training with Duke Roufus in Milwaukee. Have we covered that yet? I feel like it’s newsworthy.
Semi-honorable mentions go out to Nathan Jones, Kid Kash, and “Dr. Death” Steve Williams, each of whom went 0-1 in their short MMA careers. They can’t all be impressive, I guess. But for an actual Very Honorable Mention, we turn to…
The Undertaker
If you’re wondering why ‘Taker is on the list without a single fight to his name, I’m just going to assume you haven’t seen this interview conducted directly after Lesnar’s championship loss to Cain Velasquez.
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That’s such a weird video to watch, now that we live in a post-streak world. Anyway, The Undertaker is clearly an MMA superfan. I’ve lost count of how many pictures I’ve seen where he’s wearing that Bas Rutten “Roots of Fight” shirt. As interviewer Ariel Helwani mentions in that video, Undertaker brings elements like MMA gloves and the gogoplata choke known as Hell’s Gate into the world of wrestling. And can you imagine if we’d actually seen that parallel universe where he ended up as a fighter instead of a wrestler?
