Ranking Who Was Really The Man In Wrestling Every Year 1990-2020
20. 2001 - Kurt Angle
The first year in which the promotion thought, to its detriment, that the brand was king, much of 2001 was sold to fans on the idea of the all-conquering WWF pummelling WCW.
A huge swathe of the Attitude Era's audience had no interest in buying it. Wrestling is a star-driven business, and the WWF had mangled the alignment and core of the Steve Austin character. He was the one man the public believed in, and he was, inexplicably, directionless.
In a year defined by the death of the boom, and badly declining TV ratings and gates, Kurt Angle's babyface challenge of Austin, at SummerSlam, drew an impressive buy rate more or less consistent with the otherwise unrecoverable highs of Austin's own babyface run. Angle was also tremendous value on TV - its undisputed highlight - and enjoyed a cracking year in the ring, in which he graduated from prodigy to general on the strength of his unreal King Of The Ring performance. He wasn't the man. There'd be nobody truly deserving of that status in WWE until 2005.
But he was close. He was damn close.