John Cena

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• Top 6 Pro Wrestlers of All Time

  Currently #6 · score 0

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• Ric Flair

  Ric Flair held the NWA/WCW World Heavyweight Championship a record 16 times across a career that stretched from the 1970s through the 2000s, a title reign count that remains the standard by which longevity and sustained relevance in professional wrestling's world championship picture is still measured. Flair's in-ring character, "The Nature Boy," built around a flamboyant, robe-and-limousine persona combined with a genuinely respected technical wrestling style, made him the dominant figure of the National Wrestling Alliance's territorial era before that promotion consolidated into the WCW that later competed directly with the WWF. His series of matches against rivals like Ricky Steamboat and Dusty Rhodes in the 1980s are still cited by wrestlers and historians as some of the finest in-ring performances the genre has produced, praised for pacing and psychology in an era when wrestling matches were often built around slower, more methodical storytelling than the faster style that came later. Flair's catchphrase "To be the man, you've got to beat the man" became one of wrestling's most quoted lines, and his influence carried into the next generation directly — his daughter Charlotte Flair became a dominant multi-time WWE women's champion in her own right, extending the Flair name's championship legacy into an entirely new era of the business.

• Hulk Hogan

  Hulk Hogan's win over Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III in 1987, in front of an announced crowd of over 93,000 at the Pontiac Silverdome, is still considered one of the most significant single matches in professional wrestling history, a moment that cemented Hogan as the face of the WWF's national expansion. Hogan's "Hulkamania" persona — built around larger-than-life physicality, a bright yellow-and-red color scheme, and a direct, simple appeal to young fans — helped transform pro wrestling from a regional, territorial business into a mainstream national entertainment product during the 1980s, a shift that reshaped the entire industry's business model. He held the WWF World Heavyweight Championship six times through the late 1980s and early 1990s, and his 1994 move to WCW, followed by his 1996 heel turn into the villainous "Hollywood" Hogan and the New World Order storyline, is credited with driving WCW's brief ratings dominance over the WWF during the mid-1990s "Monday Night Wars." Hogan's mainstream crossover fame — including a Saturday morning cartoon, movie roles, and a reality television show — made him wrestling's biggest star across two separate boom periods in the industry, and he remains the figure most credited with turning professional wrestling into a genuinely national phenomenon in the United States.

• The Rock

  Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson became one of the WWF's biggest stars during the late-1990s "Attitude Era," a period defined by edgier, more adult-oriented storylines, winning multiple world championships while building a catchphrase-driven, charismatic promo style — "Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?" — that made him one of the most quotable performers the genre has ever produced. His rivalry with Stone Cold Steve Austin, headlining WrestleMania X-Seven in 2001 in front of more than 67,000 fans at Houston's Astrodome, is still widely regarded as one of the greatest matches and best-attended events in WrestleMania history, capping the most commercially successful period the promotion had experienced up to that point. The Rock transitioned to a full-time Hollywood film career in the mid-2000s, eventually becoming one of the highest-paid actors in the world — a crossover from pro wrestling to mainstream movie stardom more successful and sustained than any performer before him had achieved, reshaping expectations for what a wrestling career could lead to afterward. He returned for occasional high-profile matches even after becoming a movie star, including a WrestleMania main event against John Cena in 2013, and his combination of in-ring success during wrestling's most-watched era and his subsequent global film fame make him one of the most recognizable performers to ever come out of the business.

• Stone Cold Steve Austin

  Steve Austin's "Stone Cold" persona — a beer-drinking, boss-defying antihero built around his real-life frustration with how he'd been previously booked at WCW — became the single most popular act of the WWF's Attitude Era, driving the promotion's ratings past WCW's for the first time in years during the mid-to-late 1990s. His feud with WWF chairman Vince McMahon, in which Austin's on-screen character repeatedly rebelled against and physically attacked his boss, became one of the most successful storylines in wrestling history, giving Austin a rebellious, working-class appeal that resonated with audiences in a way few wrestling characters before him had achieved. Austin won the WWF Championship six times, and his WrestleMania XIV victory over Shawn Michaels in 1998, capped by a beer celebration with Mike Tyson at ringside, is remembered as the moment the Attitude Era's new direction was fully cemented as the promotion's dominant creative approach going forward. A series of neck injuries forced Austin into early retirement from full-time wrestling in the early 2000s, but his catchphrases — "Austin 3:16" and his signature beer-toast celebration — remain some of the most recognized moments in wrestling history, and he's still widely credited as the performer most responsible for the WWF's 1990s ratings turnaround.

• The Undertaker

  The Undertaker's WrestleMania winning streak, "The Streak," ran undefeated for 21 consecutive years, from his debut WrestleMania VII win in 1991 through WrestleMania XXVII in 2011, making it one of the longest sustained undefeated runs at a single recurring event in the history of any competitive entertainment format. That streak finally ended at WrestleMania XXX in 2014, when Brock Lesnar defeated him in front of a shocked Superdome crowd in New Orleans — a result so unexpected that the arena reaction, largely stunned silence, became nearly as famous as the match itself, and remains one of the most talked-about singular moments in modern wrestling history. The Undertaker maintained his macabre, supernatural "Deadman" persona with remarkable consistency for nearly three decades, one of the longest-running unbroken characters in wrestling history, at a business where most performers' gimmicks are retooled or abandoned entirely well before that kind of longevity. His in-ring rivalries with performers across multiple eras — from Hulk Hogan-era legends through the Attitude Era and into the 2010s — gave him a career that bridged nearly every major period in WWE's modern history, and his 21-0 WrestleMania streak remains the singular achievement most associated with the entire event's identity.