10 Wrestlers You Won't Believe Never Had A Five Star Match
1. Kurt Angle
Kurt Angle enjoys the distinction of being professional wrestling's greatest ever rookie. The improvement he showed within a year (the same amount of time he trained for, incidentally, which as Angle rightly claimed in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech was impossible) of his debut was frightening. Angle was Daniel Bryan before Daniel Bryan - a completely believable technical talent who was equally good at the entertainment component of the game.
He was no dry technician between the ropes. Angle wrestled what is perhaps the greatest Iron Man match in WWE history, opposite Brock Lesnar on a 2003 episode of SmackDown, in which he sustained audience enthusiasm with his expert grasp of pacing and psychology. Fans were gripped throughout - far more so than his greatest opponent, a man rewarded with two five star ratings, managed eleven years earlier.
Closest Candidate: Kurt Angle Vs. Shawn Michaels, WWE WrestleMania 21.
Angle Vs. Michaels, an ebbing and flowing back and forth dream match, was essentially the perfect distillation of what the story-heavy WWE style is, even if at ****3/4 the Observer thought it was merely outstanding. The histrionic manner with which Michaels sold Angle's match-winning ankle lock (and the duration spent in the throes of it) might not have been credible were it not for Angle's famed intensity. Angle looked like he was in the process of separating it from the tibia.
You could believe everything Angle did in the ring - so much so that he didn't need the full commendation of the Observer to become an all-time great.