10 Wrestling Firsts That Happened Earlier Than You Think
4. The First Six Star Match
Dave Meltzer broke the internet when he shattered his own star rating system to award Kazuchika Okada and Kenny Omega's seminal Wrestle Kingdom 11 bout a ****** score in January 2017. A bold step from the Wrestling Observer man, who argued that matches of such calibre belonged in their own special category above everything else, though critics claimed he'd was making a mockery of the controversial scale by going beyond the usual ***** limit.
This wasn't the world-first it was portrayed as. In fact, Ric Flair and Ricky 'The Dragon' Steamboat actually notched the same rating as far back as 1989, with Toshiaki Kawada and Mitsuharu Misawa earning six stars of their own five years later.
Perhaps if those two matches had gone down in this era rather than the best part of three decades prior, they'd have provoked a similar response. Regardless, neither set off the same system-breaking string as Omega vs. Okada. Meltzer has since gone beyond ***** nine more times, with Okada and Omega's latest clash (at NJPW Dominion 6.9 earlier this year) bagging seven snowflakes.