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#4. CM Punk
Current AEW superstar and former WWE champion CM Punk should never have had any kind of aura around him prior to his UFC debut in 2016. After all, he wasn’t coming from any kind of martial arts background, had been banged up during his WWE tenure, and was already 37 years old.
But when the UFC matched him with a near-amateur in the form of Mickey Gall at UFC 203, dedicated a countdown episode to him training with a highly-respected camp in Roufusport, and showed him seemingly in far better shape than ever before, it was hard not to be sucked in.
So by the time UFC 203 rolled around and Living Colour’s Cult of Personality played over the speakers, fans all around the world – particularly those who’d followed Punk in WWE – were quick to jump onto the hype train.
Unfortunately, said train came flying off the tracks when Punk looked every bit like a rank amateur against Gall. He threw one of the worst-looking punches in UFC history to open the fight and was subsequently taken down, beaten up and choked out.
Punk was completely respectful of Gall after the fight and appeared to have taken his opportunity seriously, but it was immediately clear that he simply wasn’t cut out for the rigors of the UFC. Any ideas that fans had of him transitioning into an MMA superstar were out of the window.
The former WWE champ had one more fight with the UFC – another loss, this time to Mike Jackson – and quickly left the sport, eventually heading back to pro-wrestling with AEW.
#3. Kimbo Slice
In the mid-2000’s, Kevin ‘Kimbo Slice’ Ferguson quickly became one of the first viral stars of the YouTube era, when footage of a number of his street fights in Miami, Florida, were uploaded onto the web.
When the hype began to build, it was only a matter of time before he became involved in MMA. And despite footage of him losing a street brawl to policeman and one-time UFC fighter Sean Gannon being readily available, Kimbo was quickly signed up by burgeoning promotion Elite XC.
The street fighter won his first two professional MMA bouts, beating Bo Cantrell and Tank Abbott, and the ratings he drew on the Showtime network were enough to convince the CBS network to broadcast his next fight live on a Saturday night.
And so in May 2008, Slice’s knockout win over James Thompson headlined the first Elite XC show on CBS, and immediately became the most watched MMA fight in television history to that point.
Elite XC seemed to have a superstar on their hands, and began to market Slice as the next Mike Tyson – despite the fact that he was still largely unproven. Five months later, the house of cards came crashing down.
Initially booked to fight UFC legend Ken Shamrock in another CBS-broadcast fight, Slice ended up faced with UFC washout Seth Petruzelli after Shamrock cut himself backstage during a warm-up. And just 14 seconds into the fight, Petruzelli knocked Slice down with a jab and quickly finished him off.
The Miami street fighting legend’s aura was thoroughly shattered, his Tyson-like reputation proven to be smoke and mirrors. Elite XC would close its doors just months later, and while Slice did make his way to the UFC for a brief time a year or so later, he was never able to regain the hype he initially had around him.
