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Look back through the pages of wrestling history and you’ll see all kinds of legendary stars. Stemming from them, you’ll see great rivalries for which the in-ring chemistry contributed towards a good storyline and made it into one of wrestling’s all-time great rivalries.
Consider Ric Flair vs. Ricky Steamboat, Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels, or Kurt Angle vs. Chris Benoit. Not to take anything from any of these performers individually, or the stories that the creative powers concocted around them. The matches resulting from these particular pairings demonstrated legitimate chemistry.
There are other great pairs of wrestlers, however, who never quite gelled in the ring. It’s not that either one of them was necessary at fault. Despite their respective skills, the works out timings, and opportunities (sometimes multiple opportunities) they never had the chemistry to deliver the match we thought to have. Here’s a look at five of those pairs.
#5 AJ Styles and Kevin Owens
When you talk about the best all-around talents in WWE today, and particularly guys who have killed it in the ring with some notch matches, no can really match AJ Styles; Kevin Owens also makes it into the top 5 with ease. Put these two hard working indie-bred talents in the same ring, and the results ought to be magical, right?
Styles and Owens got a spotlight feud this past summer, warring over the United States Championship. The pair simply never clicked in their matchups. It’s telling that their best encounter was a SmackDown Triple Threat that also included Chris Jericho (who had proven chemistry with both men).
It’s also telling that the program included the biggest flub of Styles's WWE tenure (the finish to their Battleground match, widely theorized to have been botched when Styles was awkwardly pinned for a long three count) and that their highest profile blow off match at SummerSlam had much more to do with Shane McMahon than the men fighting.
#4 Shawn Michaels and Mr. Perfect
1993 was a rough year for WWE as the company struggled to find its identity and get the generation of stars ready for the spotlight. An Intercontinental Championship program between Shawn Michaels and Mr Perfect seemed like a recipe for success, pitting a future main eventer — HBK — against one of the best in-ring performers available in Perfect.
Their issue started with a backstage confrontation at WrestleMania 9 and came to a head with a title match at SummerSlam.
Sadly, Michaels and Perfect didn’t click it all, putting on a snooze of a match with a dirty finish. Maybe WWE booked the non-finish with the intention of having the rivalry continue.
Regardless of the original plan, no one was exactly clamouring for a rematch after that first lacklustre bout. The program mercifully came to a close from there as the two men never had a high profile match again.
#3 Bret Hart and Ric Flair
When Charlotte Flair and Natalya have clashed in recent years, WWE has sold the rivalry in part on the premise that it continued a great family rivalry. The uncomfortable reality? The Charlotte-Natalya matches are significantly better than the supposed Hart-Flair bouts to precede them.
To be fair, Charlotte and Natalya are quite good, and their match for the vacant NXT Women’s Championship, in particular, was a legitimate classic. It’s not like they needed to work four-star matches to live up to the previous generation, however.
In his book, Bret Hart blamed the failure of his series of matches with Flair over the WWE Championship on Flair messing them up—claiming the only question was if he were blowing them on purpose or was distracted and not performing at his best.
Their WCW matches down the road were a bit better, but hardly the classes you might expect from two legendary technicians of these men’s calibre.
#2 Jake Roberts and Rick Rude
WrestleMania 4 tends to get a bum rap. The tournament structure invited short matches that saved top performers to work multiple matches, not to mention that wedging sixteen matches on the card didn’t leave time for any half hour classics.
When you look back at a summary of the card, though it stands out that Rick Rude and Jake Roberts worked a fifteen minute limit draw, and you have to assume that giving those two talents fifteen minutes to work would easily result in at least a three star match.
Maybe Roberts and Rude were upset that they were both going to be eliminated in the first round of the tournament. Maybe the felt hamstrung by the time limit draw finish.
Whatever the combination of reasons, the match was an absolute bore-fest, for which Rude spent a disproportionate amount of time holding Roberts in a chinlock, and we never got any real sense of urgency out of these two guys, even as time was about to expire.
#1 Randy Orton and Bray Wyatt
Randy Orton and Bray Wyatt were put on a collision course in the fall of 2016. Their main event match at No Mercy was underwhelming, but it looked as though there was reason for optimism as the storyline grew a lot more interesting.
First, the two were allied as part of the Wyatt Family in an angle that combined the fun of a fresh super team with the intrigue of the question as to when they would turn on each other. That moment arrived when Orton burned down the Wyatt compound, adding an edge of magical realism befitting Wyatt’s character.
Despite an interesting storyline, Orton-Wyatt at WrestleMania was an unmitigated flop. You can blame some of it on bad booking (projecting worms and maggots on the ring to symbolize Wyatt’s magical powers did come across pretty lamely) but some of it comes down to the talents at hand, too, simply not working well together.
They’d follow it up with an arguably even worse House of Horrors Match at Payback before the rivalry mercifully came to an end.
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