#2 Santino Marella lied about his accent to WWE
Santino Marella's WWE debut is easily one of the most memorable since the former star was plucked out of the crowd in Italy and was then chosen to defeat Umaga and become Intercontinental Champion.
Whilst this later earned him the nickname "The Milan Miracle" there is more to his WWE signing than meets the eye. It appears that the former Champion was forced to lie to the company in order to be handed a contract.
Whilst talking to Chris Van Vliet, Marella revealed that WWE needed him to be able to speak Italian and when the company asked if this was possible, he said he could, but he actually couldn't.
“I get a phone call and it was Mike Bucci, who was Nova with ECW and he knew that my background – my Dad’s from Italy and Anthony Carelli is my real name – and he just called to see if I could speak Italian.
"I just repeated a couple of phrases from this tape that I would listen to and I believe it was ‘Voglio mezzo chilo di formaggio’ which means ‘I want a half kilo of cheese.’ Like the most random expression and then I said ‘My name is Anthony Carelli, where is the hotel?’ or something like that and then I could literally see them looking around at each other going, ‘sounded good, yeah, ok yeah that’s good, we’re going to fly you out tomorrow to Italy’”
Despite the mix-up, Marella went on to have an entertaining WWE career and now runs his own professional wrestling school where he is currently training his daughter.