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8. Bully Holly

WWE veteran Bob 'Hardcore' Holly has a reputation within the industry for, at times, being a bit of a bully. 

Incidents like him roughing up Matt Cappotelli during an episode of the second season of Tough Enough and later battering Rene Dupree over an unpaid parking ticket (which caused Holly a major headache and could have seen him have his license suspended to be fair) are two of the more notorious examples of the grizzled veteran taking out his frustrations and settling scores during matches. 

This week, former WWE star Chris Masters spoke with Metro.co.uk and outlined his own issues with the former Tag Team and Hardcore Champion. 

According to The Masterpiece, Holly had it in for him from the beginning of his WWE career and supposedly went out of his way to be booked opposite him in order to, as Masters puts it, rough him up in the ring. 

"Bob Holly just had a bad impression of me from the start, and that’s a whole other story. But I ended up missing my first TV taping in Ohio Valley Wrestling, and Bob Holly happened to be there.

So, he knew that I'd missed it – again, that's a whole other story, but he already had a bad impression of me. So, I go with the OVW crew to visit SmackDown so they can see the talent before the show and what not.

I'm making way round backstage, I greeted mostly everyone I've come in contact with. But I walk through the locker room and I’m just walking straight to my bag and I don’t see out of the corner of my eye, but Bob Holly's there and he's having a conversation with a couple of other vets.

I went straight to my bag, and Bob already had a bad taste in his mouth about me but he took that like I was shunning him or not showing him respect. When really, I wouldn’t say it was that at all.

He got really angry, man. He's cutting promos on me. He was trying to get that [match with Carlito] switched to me, essentially so he could rough me up, probably chop the sh*t out of me and all of that.

I was just really worried, like, 'Oh man, will I be able to withstand this?'. It was just really a mindf*ck. But on the drive home I realised, 'This is what you wanted to do, this is your dream. This is what you've wanted to do your whole life, so you don't have any other option, you gotta push forward and you gotta learn from this'". 

Masters - who now works for the NWA as Chris Adonis - did say that incidents such as that ended up helping him become more aware of backstage etiquette.