Footballers who excelled at other sports (Part Four)

Concluding the brief series about footballers who excelled at other sports.

(For Part One click here; Part Two click here; and Part Three click here).

Curtis Woodhouse

Curtis Woodhouse was once a very promising footballer. He began his youth career with York City  before joining Sheffield United where the midfielder was so highly rated that he was capped four times by England at under-21 level.

He later made three appearances in the Premier League for Birmingham City.

However, he failed to build on his early promise and instead move between various clubs lower down the football pyramid.

He later confessed to having fallen out of love with football and that he had been involved in dozens of street fights.

That led him to consider taking up boxing, but although he won his debut fight on points in 2006, he spent the next few years alternating between his two sporting careers.

In 2012 he had his first major success in the ring, winning the vacant English welterweight title, but lost it again, before regaining it in 2014. He retired soon afterwards, but never really quit the sport and had another fight late in 2014. He took a three year break from pugilism them, but returned tp the ring with two more fights in 2017.

Meanwhile he returned to football on the management side, and was most recently in charge of Gainsborough Trinity, who play in the seventh tier of English football.

Tim Wiese

Tim Wiese was a goalkeeper who began his professional career with Bayer Leverkusen, and went on to play for Kaiserlautern and Werder Bremen, before joining Hoffenheim in 2012.

Between 2003 and 2006 he made 13 appearances for the German under-21 team, and then, in 2006, he made his full international debut against England as a second-half substitute.

Wiese would go on to win six senior caps for his country.

In 2014, though, at the age of 33, he retired from football because he believed that his best years in the sport were behind him.

Later that year, he was offered a contract by WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) to join one of their local divisions. He appeared as a guest time keeper at a WWE live event in Frankfurt, and began to develop muscle mass, changing his physique.

He began training at a WWE development facility and made his professional wresting debut at a live event in Munich in 2016, teaming up with two other wrestlers to defeat The Shing Stars and Bo Dallas.

He did not look out of place in the pre-scripted and theatrical world of professional wrestling, but he left WWE in 2017.