10 Wrestlers That The Undertaker Couldn't Get Over

3. Vladimir Kozlov

You can somewhat understand what Vince McMahon saw in some of the monsters on this list. After all, their ungodly size gave them that “turn your head in the airport” look that the boss has always appreciated in his top stars. However, Kozlov seemed to have nothing of much going for him, which is why it was downright shocking when he pinned The Undertaker cleanly on an episode of SmackDown.

At Armageddon 2008, Kozlov defeated Matt Hardy, but he needed some bigger opponents if he was going to truly become a force to reckon with. Shortly after, he began a feud with The Undertaker. The first encounter saw The Dead Man pin the Ukrainian star in the Elimination Chamber match. A few weeks later, they went one-on-one on SmackDown and Kozlov picked up an incredibly rare win over Taker. This was to set up who The Dead Man was going to face at that year’s WrestleMania.

Kozlov went on to battle Shawn Michaels on Raw to earn that right. HBK won the match, delivering Kozlov his first loss in singles competition. Considering Kozlov already defeated Undertaker, it was a strange way to book a pay-per-view match. Luckily he didn’t win that night, otherwise we wouldn’t have got the brilliant Mania 25 classic between Taker and Michaels.

At some point, Vince realized a feud with The Phenom wasn’t going to work and gave up on Kozlov. The wrestler was reduced to a lumberjack for Mania 25, and then a few weeks later on SmackDown, he put over The Dead Man to even things up and was soon shipped off to ECW.