10 World Champions The Rock Wrestled Once

5. Ric Flair

The Rock V Ric Flair
WWE.com

2002 was a big year for matches featuring The Rock and world champions that would only happen once. Two years before the two would be on opposite sides of a WrestleMania XX handicap match, The Rock and Ric Flair went one on one on an episode of WWE RAW, hailing from Greensboro, North Carolina. WWE was deep in Flair Country, and the crowd made sure to let everyone know.

Jim Ross on commentary said he had been waiting a lifetime for this match, and that is understandable. A one-on-one match between arguably the greatest of all time and the greatest of his generation doesn't come around every week after all. The Rock vs. Ric Flair certainly wasn't Wild Pegasus vs. The Great Sasuke, but by gum was it a spectacle.

A particularly awkward spinebuster threatened to derail the momentum of the match, but things were quickly back on track with Rocky locking Flair in his trademark awful-looking Sharpshooter. The two traded chops and punches for a little while longer, but the Brahma Bull came out on top after surviving the figure-four and hitting a strutting Flair with the Rock Bottom.

The two shook hands after the match, never to meet again. Well, never to meet again one-on-one at least.

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.