Anyone with even a passing knowledge of ’80s and ’90s WWF knows of the Ultimate Warrior. With his humongous biceps, wild face paint, endlessly high energy, and incomprehensible-yet-exciting interview style, Warrior was the personification of wrestling’s cartoonish superhero side. But as he continued to burn bridges with wrestling companies and wrestlers alike, Warrior found himself in the ring less and less.

Warrior (that became his legal name in 1993, by the way) became a controversial right-wing motivational speaker and blogger, and if the caption below his TV appearances didn’t identify him as “Warrior,” you probably wouldn’t recognize him. He had a goatee, no face paint, far fewer muscles, and his hair wasn’t nearly as teased as it was when he was body slamming fools at WrestleMania. His final public appearance, at WWE Raw in 2014 just a day before his death, showed a short-haired guy with a white goatee who only looked like the Ultimate Warrior when he put on a mask resembling his old face-paint and began to talk like him. He’s gone now, but it’s good he was able to remind fans who he truly was one more time before he went.

“The Total Package” Lex Luger had one of the most impressive physiques in wrestling history. In WWF, they called him the Narcissist, because his body was so perfect he couldn’t stop staring at himself. It wasn’t even close to an exaggeration.

Those days are, sadly, gone forever. Present-day Luger is a literal shell of his former self. That’s because in 2007, he suffered a spinal infraction that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He’s since gained feeling in his body and can even briefly walk with a cane, but all his muscle mass is gone. Where once he was 275 pounds of solid strength, he’s now roughly 185 pounds of skin and bones. As he explained it in 2008, “I was one of the strongest guys on the planet. … I was bench-pressing 450 pounds my senior year of high school. I was a freak. Now I can’t lift a 1-pound dumbbell.” He can probably lift at least a few pounds these days, but the only way he’ll grasp 450 pounds is if he travels to England and hits the ATM.

Since then, he’s been focusing on family, his faith (he’s been a born-again Christian since 2006), and rebuilding his life outside wrestling. He has far more personal strength than physical at this point, and that’s almost certainly for the best.

In 2007, Eve Torres won WWE’s Diva Search, a competition designed to find new female superstars. Over a six-year career, Torres won the Diva’s Championship three times and became a popular weekly fixture, though she was rarely presented as a true physical threat, as this was during a period in WWE when Divas were, sadly, more about physical beauty than ring prowess.

Today, however, Torres could be considered a true physical threat. She looks largely the same, but she’s now a full-fledged fighter. Married to Brazilian jiu-jitsu icon Rener Gracie, Torres is a purple belt in the martial art. She’s also a trained kickboxer and the head instructor of a women’s self-defense program called Gracie Women Empowered, helping other girls become as tough and brave as she is. When in a less bruising mode, Torres works as a party planner with her sister-in-law. Together, they run an event rental company called “inJOY The Party.” In addition, according to a leaked WWE Raw script from 2014, Torres worked (and possibly still works) as an ambassador for WWE after retiring from the ring. If she does return, however, she could absolutely be a believable WWE Women’s Champion, especially now that the company is focusing on women who can actually wrestle.

In his prime, Scott Hall was the coolest. In the WWF, he was Razor Ramon: basically Al Pacino in Scarface if he wrestled. In WCW, under his real name, he was one of the tough-talking, rebellious founders of the New World Order. Unfortunately, like many a grappler, drugs and alcohol overtook Hall, and he’s been struggling to become himself again for a long time.

Today’s Scott Hall looks like Scott Hall in the face, but that’s about it. His famously wet, curly hair is now gray and scraggly, and he’s heavier than he used to be. But amazingly, a few years ago he looked even worse. In 2011, Hall was drunk in public, completely out of shape, and could barely walk — by 2013, he looked pale, tired, bloated, and was using a wheelchair. That was the year (as recapped by Jim Ross for Fox Sports) that he finally began to turn his life around, thanks to fellow retired wrestler Diamond Dallas Page. He began religiously working out and living healthier through Dallas’s DDP Yoga program, and not only regained much of his strength and mobility, he stopped drinking as much. By 2017, he was showing off a ripped physique on Twitter, one that could very well signal a return to the ring sooner or later. Wrestling needs more bad guys anyway.

Few wrestlers were as imposing in their prime as Vader. At over 450 pounds of muscle and a knack for legitimately injuring people he wrestled, Vader was a scary, scary man. There’s a reason WWF nicknamed him “The Mastodon” when he worked for them. He was basically a human elephant.

Since 2007, Vader has been mostly retired, and you can tell. He now looks less like a huge muscleman, and more like just a big, bald, tired dude. He’s been through a lot that would explain his haggard appearance, however. Around 2007, he had double knee surgery, which became infected and forced him into bed for six months. Then he fell unconscious during a flight and was comatose for a month; he lost 112 pounds in the most effective diet plan no one should ever try. In 2016, Vader tweeted he’d been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and had two years to live. He later retracted that timeline, but sadly it turned out to be pretty accurate. He died June 18, 2018.

Before he passed, he kept fighting and kept inspiring as a motivational speaker for the Wounded Warriors Alliance. As he told WWE.com, “These guys may have one arm or one leg, may have been shot in the shoulder or the chest. … I stand up in front of them and tell them [what I’ve been through]. … If this old man can do what he did and come out on the other side and actually be here tonight, then what can someone do at 23 with their whole life ahead of them?” Let’s face it: When a mastodon speaks, you listen.

For much of Kamala’s career, he was billed as the Ugandan Giant, a cannibal from Deepest, Darkest Africa. He spoke no English, barely seemed to understand what a wrestling match was, wore tribal facepaint and a loincloth, and would do things like eat a live chicken on the air. Later, he was “saved” by Slick, a pimp-turned-preacher, who convinced Kamala that he was a man, not an animal. Then they went bowling because wrestling is weird.

Since his retirement from full-time wrestling in 1993, however, life has not been kind to Kamala, according to People. He was diagnosed with diabetes, and in 2011 it resulted in his leg being amputated. The following year, he lost his other leg, leaving him permanently confined to a wheelchair. Aside from that, he’s still a big man, just not the bruiser he used to portray in the ring. He doesn’t sound like Kamala either, as the character’s grunts and shrieks have been replaced by a sweet baritone he uses to record soul music. He’s clearly living his life in the best way a man in his position can hope to.

Fred Ottman is most famous for portraying one of two characters: the friendly Tugboat, or the menacing Typhoon. (He’s most infamous, meanwhile, for portraying the Shockmaster, who never met a wall he couldn’t trip over.) However you prefer your Fred, he was a monster of a man — nearly 400 pounds of power and a menacing mug that struck fear in opponents’ hearst even as he walked around the ring yelling “toot toot!“

Today, the retired Ottman doesn’t look anything like he used to. His long hair is now cut close, and he’s got a goatee. Both hair and goatee are chalk-white. He looks less like Tugboat or Typhoon and more like a 400-pound Kevin Nash. He looks good and healthy for his age, though, and that’s really what counts most. He does look a lot like Shockmaster still though, though that’s likely due to his wearing a mask and remaining adept at bumping into everything.

Whether he was Haku in the WWF or Meng in WCW, Tonga Fifita played the same character: a tough-as-nails Tongan you’d rather not fight if you didn’t have to. Stories of the man’s legitimate toughness are legendary, though possibly exaggerated. That said, if an anecdote like “Meng bit off a man’s nose during a bar brawl” is even half-true (Tonga insists it’s all true, but you know how wrestlers lie), that still makes him tougher than most anyone you’ve ever met.

Today, Meng looks as close to a normal guy as someone that tough can look. His famously wild hair is cut super-short, he’s traded his ring robes and islander-inspired tights for sensible polo shirts, and he works as a car spa director for David Maus Toyota in Sanford, Florida. And no one loses a nose at his dealership, even if they wreck a new car during the test drive … probably.

Brutus Beefcake turned one of the silliest ideas ever — “he’s a barber, but he also wrestles” — into an actual success. Between his shredded tights, conspicuous bow tie, giant garden shears, and wide-eyed, psychotic grin, he came across like a legitimately dangerous, crazy person than a guy who gently evens out your sides by day and bashes the Iron Sheik’s skull in by night.

Today, Beefcake is mostly retired, though he still works the occasional independent show. But if he’s not wearing his gear and wielding those shears like his life depends on chopping off some heel’s precious ponytail, you’d hardly know it was him. He’s much heavier now, and his hair is far shorter, almost like he did a barber-job on himself. He, like many wrestlers before him, battled drug issues — in 2004, the Boston Herald reported that Beefcake caused a scare on the Boston subway system, by leaving behind a bag of his cocaine that passengers feared was anthrax. He checked himself into rehab shortly thereafter and appears to have mostly taken care of himself since. He may not look as great as he did in the ’80s, but considering his face was all but shattered in a 1990 parasailing accident, the fact that he’s still kicking period is nothing short of a miracle.

Awesome Kong was a mammoth of a woman who could (and still can) mix it up with both guys and girls. Her brief WWE run as Kharma was cut short by a pregnancy, which sadly ended in her baby’s death, and since then she’s been a part-timer in wrestling.

Since her WWE and TNA runs, Kong has become a totally different person. She’s dropped tons of weight, which she proudly shows off in her Twitter profile picture. She isn’t wrestling much anymore, but she still plays a wrestler in TV. That’s because she’s signed onto the Netflix revival of GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), playing a character called Tamee who’s forced to portray a wrestling welfare queen. As she told TV Guide, she can relate to Tamee because she too was saddled with a character she initially didn’t like: being called Kong, which can be a huge insult for an African-American person. But, as she said “[Being Kong was] this big opportunity, just like Tamee has, but the price is she’s gonna portray a welfare queen. … I decided, and I believe Tamee would identify with what I did, [to] take that name and own it and make it mean something of respect.” If she ever does return to full-time wrestling, she’ll have just as much respect as she did when she left.