10 Wrestlers With The Most Five Star Matches
5. Akira Taue - 14
Akira Taue is sometimes held up as the weak link of AJPW's Four Pillars Of Heaven, which isn't entirely fair. He was perhaps a shade or two below his cohorts in terms of raw skill, and his movement and execution sometimes looked awkward, but he was still a first-class worker on his day, as proven by his track record.
Taue notched the fewest five-star matches of the group, but was involved in plenty of classics. His series of tags with Toshiaki Kawada (as The Holy Demon Army) against Kenta Kobashi and Mitsuharu Misawa is legendary, with their June 1995 showdown rightly considered among the greatest tag bouts of all time. He was a fine singles wrestler too, scoring a ***** bout with Misawa in 1995, along with a series of others in the four-star range not only against his fellow Pillars, but also the likes of Yuji Nagata and Steve Williams.
Taue's last ***** match came in 1997, when he and Kawada teamed against Misawa and Jun Akiyama. He remained a serviceable worker who knew how to work around his escalating physical limitations well into the next decade, but eventually called it a day in 2013.