8 Lesser Known Wrestling Streaks

Think of wrestling winning streaks and two things come to mind: The Undertaker's 21 and 0 record at WrestleMania, ended three years ago at the hands of Brock Lesnar, and Goldberg's purported 173-match run at the height of his WCW fame (ended in 1998 - at the hands of, err, a stun-gun).

In recent months, though, a new winning streak - still ongoing at the time of writing - has began to gather some momentum. Formidable NXT Women's Champion Asuka has now surpassed the (somewhat sketchy) record held by Goldberg for nearly 20 years, having also bested the 434 days CM Punk spent as WWE Champion between 2011 and 2013.

But there are also a few lesser known winning or undefeated streaks that have largely been consigned to the dustbin of wrestling history - generally because they either haven't had the legs to make it into record-breaking territory, or because the holder of the streak has faded into irrelevance.

Either way, winning runs in wrestling - where stars come and go on a near-weekly basis - are pretty rare, and those that have managed to rack up successful victories, however brief, deserve to be remembered.

TNA had to have something special in mind for Samoa Joe after they lured the fledgling indie star away from ROH in mid-2005, and a year-and-a-half undefeated streak - finally ended at the hands of a debuting Kurt Angle at the tail end of 2006 - wasn't a bad way to go.

The Samoan Subission Machine was booked, from the outset, as the rampant, take-no-prisoners wrestlers' wrestler we all know and love; an exciting outlier in the mostly cruiserweight X-Division, where he became acquainted with the likes of Christopher Daniels and AJ Styles (not least of all in their unforgettable triple threat at Unbreakable; a match in which Joe, lest we forget, wasn't actually pinned).

You can argue that having him lose the record against Angle - a WWE icon - was the wrong decision, but Joe emerged from the feud a bigger star than he was going in.