10 Classic Wrestling Rivalries With ONE THING MISSING
3. Ric Flair Vs Ricky Steamboat - A WWE Match
And only really because they came so close.
This isn't some sort of "it didn't happen in The Fed, so did it really happen at all?" dig at WCW or any other challenger brand, but one of the most legendary rivalries in wrestling history was right there in the hands of Vince McMahon, but the timelines didn't quite work out for WWE to host one of the 196 (!) bouts between the pair.
The overlap itself is intoxicatingly close. Steamboat wrestled his last match of an ill-fated run as The Dragon on October 20th 1991. Just a month earlier on September 10th, Flair defeated Jim Powers in his debut for the company, and proceeded to work 14 matches between then and Steamboat's departure.
It's very likely that McMahon simply had no desire to re-run the fun the two had had in the 1980s, and presumably wanted to get to the likes of Flair Vs Roddy Piper and Flair Vs Hulk Hogan with immediate effect. He'd spent lots of 1989 having to counter the two having all-time classics with his own entirely different brand of pro wrestling. In the brief period with them both on the books, he evidently just believed that he had better things to do.