10 WWE Stars Who Always Guaranteed You A Great Match 8

8. Ricky Steamboat

“The Dragon” is one of those rare specimens in wrestling that was never the greatest at any one, single ASPECT of wrestling, but was incredibly good at everything he did when he was in the ring. You can say that someone is the fastest, or the strongest, or the best high-flier, or the best technician, or the best brawler… but Ricky Steamboat just excelled at what he did without getting any of those titles.

Sure, he had his share of detractors who are quick to point out that promos were never his strong suit, or that he was one-dimensional as a character, staying a “say your prayers and always smile” face for his entire career. However, none of that stopped him from having legendary matches with the likes of Ric Flair, Randy Savage, Tully Blanchard, and many more. It didn’t even stop him from bringing a young and still relatively new to the BUSINESS Lex Luger to the best match of Lex’s career. That’s the kind of magic that Steamboat could create. Admittedly, it would have been nice to see him take his skills and turn that into a “I’m so much better than all of you” heel at some point, but that’s a minor complaint, really.

The craziest thing about Steamboat’s career is that, while the average FAN knows about his trilogy of matches with Flair in 1989 and his match with Savage at WrestleMania 3, he didn’t have a whole lot of high-profile matches after that, unless you count his three-on-one match at WrestleMania 25 (teaming with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka to face Chris Jericho) as “high-profile”. After his matches with Flair, he would leave the NWA soon thereafter, become a bit of a joke in his return to the WWF, and then go to WCW, where he was still putting on really good matches, but was a midcarder, at best. You would think those Flair matches alone would keep him in the main event scene for a majority of the rest of his career.