Mark Canterbury

Marcus Canterbury is an American retired professional wrestler He is best known for his appearances with the World Wrestling Federation in the mid to late 1990s under the ring name Henry O Godwinn He is also known for his appearances with World Championship Wrestling in the early 1990s as Shanghai Pierce In 1996 Canterbury was reunited with Knight who had been renamed Phineas I Godwinn The duo were portrayed as being cousins and were collectively known as The Godwinns The two were faces and were managed by Hillbilly Jim They began to feud with the Body Donnas with Phineas having a crush on Sunny and signed her as their manager They would beat the Body Donnas for the WWF Tag Team Championships Eventually Sunny turned on them costing them their titles The Godwinns feuded with the now heel Smoking Gunns in losing efforts In 1997 the Godwinns began a heel turn dropping Hillbilly Jim as a manager and picking up Uncle Cletus The Godwinns quickly won the tag titles a second time from The Headbangers and began a heated feud with the Legion of Doom which saw the team attempt to break Road Warrior Hawks neck They eventually dropped the titles to LOD in a match on WWF Monday Night Raw that had LODs career on the line Soon after that match they attacked and fired Cletus In April 1997 in a rematch between The Godwinns and the Legion of Doom Canterbury cracked his C7 vertebra when he fell on his head after taking the Doomsday Device He was advised by doctors to rest for fifteen weeks but returned to the ring in less than eight weeks In 1998 Canterbury entered the Brawl for All a shootfighting tournament held by the WWF He lost in the first round to Bradshaw Later that year the Godwinns dropped their pig farmer gimmicks now going by their real names and wearing sharp suits under the name Southern Justice the bodyguards of Tennessee Lee Six months later Canterbury herniated his C7 vertebra and pinched a spinal nerve necessitating spinal fusion surgery This came as a result of him returning to the ring too early after his neck injury He eventually left the WWF and retired due to the neck injury suffered in 1997 In September 2006 Canterbury wrestled several tryout matches with World Wrestling Entertainment On September 15 2006 WWE announced that he had been signed to a contract3 He debuted in Deep South Wrestling on November 30 as a tag partner for Ray Gordy Gordy was known as Cousin Ray and they both reformed The Godwinns Since both Gordy and Drew Hankinson went to the SmackDown brand however Godwinns role remained uncertain On May 19 2007 the Wrestling Observer reported that Canterbury had been released from his Personal life Canterbury has two sons named Shane and Jordan Jordan was accidentally shot by a high school friend and died on October 31 2003 in Pigeon Forge Tennessee On November 9 2011 Mark suffered two punctured lungs thirteen broken ribs and a broken leg in a car accident In July 2016 Canterbury was named part of a class action lawsuit filed against WWE which alleged that wrestlers incurred traumatic brain injuries during their tenure and that the company concealed the risks of injury The suit is litigated by attorney Konstantine Kyros who has been involved in a number of other lawsuits against WWE