Flair, Savage or Shawn Michaels, who was the greatest all round performer wrestling has ever seen

[HeartbreakKidOscar97]

When the conversation turns to pure in ring performers rather than biggest stars or drawing power, three names consistently come up above almost everyone else in the sport's history. Ric Flair built his entire legacy on the road, wrestling in front of small crowds in tiny towns across the NWA territory system night after night, a schedule that forged what became known simply as the Flair formula, a match structure so effective it is still taught to young wrestlers as the template for how to work an entire crowd across sixty minutes.

Randy Savage brought a completely different kind of genius to the table, a level of match psychology and storytelling that turned every single one of his bouts into a genuine spectacle, most famously his WrestleMania III classic against Ricky Steamboat, a match still regularly cited by other wrestlers themselves as one of the finest examples of in ring storytelling the business has ever produced.

Shawn Michaels, known simply as Mr. WrestleMania for his run of iconic performances on the sport's biggest stage, combined elite technical ability with an unmatched flair for the dramatic, delivering genuine classics against Bret Hart, Undertaker and Triple H across multiple decades that helped define what a WrestleMania main event was actually supposed to look and feel like.

Flair's stamina and territory grind, Savage's psychological storytelling mastery, or Michaels's technical brilliance combined with WrestleMania moment making. Which one actually gets the nod as the single greatest all round performer the business has ever had?

[SilverRider]

Savage against Steamboat at WrestleMania III is still the match I show anyone who claims wrestling cannot tell a genuinely compelling story in the ring. The psychology in that match holds up perfectly decades later.

[BigDog]

Genuinely think all three deserve to be mentioned in the same breath here rather than ranked strictly against each other, they each represent a slightly different definition of in ring greatness that does not always compare cleanly.

[Liam71]

Michaels wins this for me on the WrestleMania stage specifically. Nobody in the history of the business has strung together that many genuine classics on the sport's single biggest annual show across that many different decades and opponents.

[AJStyles_Submission]

Flair wrestling that many nights in that many tiny towns and still delivering at an elite level every single time is a different kind of greatness to the other two. That sustained excellence under a genuinely brutal schedule deserves enormous respect.

[RatedRStu10]

Michaels reinventing himself after his back injury and coming back to have an entirely new run of classics in the 2000s shows a level of adaptability neither Flair nor Savage were really tested on in quite the same way.

[TopTier88]

Flair's promos deserve just as much credit in this argument as his in ring work. The stylin and profilin persona combined with the actual wrestling ability is what made him the complete package rather than just a great worker.

[Squid]

Savage gets underrated in these conversations because he never had quite the longevity of the other two at the very top, but pound for pound his best matches are as good as anything either Flair or Michaels ever produced.