Despite being one of the nicest people outside of the ring, Vladimir Kozlov was a failure of a wrestler. Sure, he had strength, an intimidating look about him, and some good heat from the evil foreigner gimmick; but those things didnt hide his flaws. Kozlov was slow and unimpressive in the ring, and generally came across as a boring and uncharismatic wrestler. In fact, some people even considered the Great Khali to have more charisma than Kozlov. Yet astonishingly, Kozlov held clean wins over the likes of Jeff Hardy and the Undertaker, and even wrestled for the WWE Championship in 2008. WWE clearly wanted to push this guy as a major star, but no matter who his opponent was, Kozlov simply couldnt get the crowd to react to him. When he first started wrestling regularly, he entered to no music, and even then he barely got a reaction. Even after defeating many Superstars and building up the pro-Russian Moscow Mauler gimmick, people didnt seem to care about him. He was basically the opposite of Rusev: he got no reaction despite having almost the exact same gimmick. The only salvation he got was a short-lived yet successful tag team with Santino Marella, but out of those two, it was Marella who was more popular by a landslide. Kozlov wouldnt last much longer, and was released in 2011, which mustve really disappointed all of the WWE higher-ups who thought that a man with as much experience in different martial arts disciplines as Kozlov could be a big star.
Alexander Podgorski is a writer for WhatCulture that has been a fan of professional wrestling since he was 8 years old. He loves all kinds of wrestling, from WWE and sports entertainment, to puroresu in Japan.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Queen's University in Political Studies and French, and a Master's Degree in Public Administration. He speaks English, French, Polish, a bit of German, and knows some odd words and phrases in half a dozen other languages.
