The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin headlined three WrestleManias against each other between 1999 and 2003, a run WWE's own biography of Austin singles out.1 The memorabilia market agrees: on October 24 a match-worn, signed Austin knee brace from around 1999 sold at Heritage Auctions for $225,700, the highest price any Austin item has fetched.3
Austin has not had a regular match since 2003. The Rock wrestled a WrestleMania main event as recently as April 2024 and has a film career that dwarfs every other wrestler's. Fourteen rankings below put at least one of them in the field, and most carry both.
Austin built his whole case in seven years and closed it in 2003; The Rock never stopped adding chapters, so every list ends up deciding which years it is willing to count.
Stone Cold vs The Rock: the 62 greatest WWE wrestlers
Start with the plainest question: who is the greatest WWE wrestler ever. Its 62 options run from Bruno Sammartino and André the Giant to Rhea Ripley and Gunther, and both men are in it.
Austin's case is a short, vertical spike. Six WWE Championships, a 1996 King of the Ring win and a 2009 Hall of Fame induction all sit inside one decade.1
The Rock's case is longer and wider: eight WWE Championships plus the WCW title, a 2013 title win over CM Punk, and a crowd pull that outlasted the Attitude Era by twenty years.2
Then there are The Undertaker and Hulk Hogan, each with a claim neither Attitude star can touch: thirty years under one gimmick, and the 1980s boom that made WrestleMania possible in the first place.
The Rock vs Ric Flair: wrestling beyond WWE
Widen the field past one company and the history gets older. The top 22 professional wrestlers include Lou Thesz, who held the NWA title across three decades, and Dusty Rhodes, alongside Becky Lynch and Bianca Belair from the modern roster.
Ric Flair is the name that changes this list. His sixteen world titles came mostly in the NWA and WCW, and his promos set the template both Attitude stars later borrowed from.
The Rock and Steve Austin are both here, and for once neither has the oldest claim. A voter who values longevity across territories will look at Flair first; a voter who values one red-hot run will look at Austin.
WrestleMania X-Seven: Austin vs The Rock against Undertaker vs Michaels
Here the rivalry is literally an option. The 53 greatest WrestleMania matches list carries two Austin-vs-Rock entries: WrestleMania X-Seven in 2001 and WrestleMania XIX in 2003.
At X-Seven in Houston's Astrodome, Austin beat The Rock for the WWF Championship and shook hands with Vince McMahon afterwards, a heel turn nobody in the building saw coming. Two years later in Seattle, The Rock finally beat Austin, and it was Austin's last match for nineteen years.
The series had started at WrestleMania XV in Philadelphia in 1999, where Austin also beat The Rock for the title. That makes the head-to-head on the biggest stage two wins to one for Austin. Rock fans answer that X-Seven is the better match of the three anyway, and that he carried the build for all of them.
Facing it in the frame is the 2009 Undertaker vs Shawn Michaels match, the one that tends to come up whenever anyone calls a WrestleMania bout perfect. Bret Hart vs Austin at WrestleMania 13 and The Rock vs Hollywood Hogan at X8 also made the cut, so each man appears in three or more entries.
Dwayne Johnson vs John Cena: wrestlers who became actors
Off the mat, the gap stops being a contest. The greatest wrestler-turned-actor ranking holds 13 names, from Roddy Piper and Jesse Ventura to Dave Bautista.
Dwayne Johnson set a Guinness World Record before most of them had a speaking part: $5.5 million for The Scorpion King in 2002, the highest salary ever paid for a debut starring role.4 HBO's Ballers, the Fast & Furious films and San Andreas followed.
Steve Austin is on the list too, mostly for action films like The Condemned and The Expendables. John Cena is the serious threat to Johnson here, with Peacemaker, The Suicide Squad and a comedy run that keeps growing.
"Austin 3:16" vs "If you smell what The Rock is cooking"
Catchphrases are where both men are strongest, and the best wrestling catchphrase ranking sets their lines next to Hulk Hogan's "Whatcha gonna do, brother?" and John Cena's "You can't see me."
Austin's line arrived in one speech. After beating Jake Roberts in the 1996 King of the Ring final, he turned Roberts' born-again gimmick into "Austin 3:16," and the slogan went straight onto T-shirts.
The Rock's line was built over hundreds of promos. He talked about himself in the third person, invented insults on live television, and closed with "if you smell what The Rock is cooking" so often that crowds finished it for him.
The two lines also sold differently. Austin's became a merchandise slogan that needed no promo at all, while The Rock's only worked with him holding the microphone, which is why his catchphrase list runs long: "Know your role," "It doesn't matter what your name is," "Just bring it."
Ric Flair's "To be the man, you gotta beat the man" and Roman Reigns' "Acknowledge me" also made it, a reminder that the best lines usually belong to the best talkers.
The glass shatter: wrestling's greatest entrances
Few entrances work in silence, and Austin's is the opposite of silence. The sound of breaking glass, then the walk, then two turnbuckles and two beers.
The Rock's entrance was slower and more theatrical: the music, the pause, the raised eyebrow, the pose on the turnbuckle. It worked as a promo before he said a word.
The 18 greatest entrances in wrestling history also include The Undertaker's lights-out walk, Shawn Michaels' "Sexy Boy" and Goldberg's walk from the locker room through pyro. Only Austin's starts with a sound effect instead of music.
Royal Rumble winners: Austin's three against The Rock's one
Austin holds the Royal Rumble record with three wins, in 1997, 1998 and 2001, and no one has matched it since.1
The first was the strangest. Bret Hart threw Austin out in 1997, the referees missed it, and Austin climbed back in to win. The 2001 win came ten weeks before he beat The Rock at WrestleMania X-Seven.
The Rock won the 2000 match at Madison Square Garden, eliminating Big Show last.2 Replays suggested his own feet touched the floor first, which WWE then turned into a storyline.
The greatest Royal Rumble winner ranking also covers the two-time winners: Hulk Hogan, Shawn Michaels, John Cena, Brock Lesnar and Cody Rhodes among them.
Stone Cold Stunner vs People's Elbow
Finishing moves split the two cleanly. The Stone Cold Stunner is fast and violent: a kick to the stomach, a three-quarter facelock, a drop to the seat.
The People's Elbow is the reverse. The Rock throws his elbow pad into the crowd, runs the ropes twice and drops a plain elbow, and the crowd cheers the ritual more than the move. His real finisher, the Rock Bottom, is one of the other 26 moves.
Randy Orton's RKO, Brock Lesnar's F-5 and The Undertaker's Tombstone are the other names in contention.
Stone Cold vs The Undertaker: the best gimmicks
A gimmick ranking rewards characters, and that brings The Undertaker into the frame. He debuted as the Deadman at Survivor Series 1990 and played it for three decades.
Austin's gimmick was close to the man himself: a beer-drinking Texan who hit his boss. Before 1996 he had been "Stunning" Steve and then the Ringmaster, and neither worked.
The Rock's character grew out of a failure too. Fans booed Rocky Maivia, the smiling third-generation babyface, so he turned it around and made arrogance the act. Mankind, the Million Dollar Man and Razor Ramon are among the 17 on the list.
SummerSlam: Austin vs Undertaker 1998, The Rock vs Lesnar 2002
The SummerSlam main events list keeps the two apart, which suits a summer show they rarely headlined together.
Austin's entry is 1998 at Madison Square Garden, where he kept the WWF title against The Undertaker. The Rock's is 2002, when he dropped the WWE title to Brock Lesnar, who became the youngest WWE Champion in history at that time.5
Those two matches show the careers going in opposite directions. Austin was defending the belt at his peak; The Rock was handing it to the next star on his way to Hollywood. Cena vs Lesnar in 2014 and CM Punk vs Cena in 2011 are the modern challengers.
The Rock vs Brock Lesnar: the best part-timers
The Rock owns the part-time era almost by himself. He came back in 2011, beat John Cena in the main event of WrestleMania XXVIII, lost the WWE title to Cena at WrestleMania 29, and won the WrestleMania XL tag match with Roman Reigns.2
Steve Austin is absent here, and that absence says a lot about him. After 2003 he wrestled exactly once, beating Kevin Owens at WrestleMania 38 in Dallas in 2022.6
Brock Lesnar is the other model: a handful of dates a year for more than a decade, most of them for a world title. Goldberg, Batista and The Undertaker fill out the 21.
The Corporation vs the nWo: the best heel turns
The Rock's 1998 turn at Survivor Series is on the best heel turn list. He won the tournament final, then sided with Vince McMahon and joined the Corporation as the company's top villain.
Hulk Hogan's 1996 turn at Bash at the Beach, the night he formed the nWo, is the benchmark everyone else is measured against.
Austin's own turn is missing. At WrestleMania X-Seven he shook McMahon's hand to beat The Rock, and the heel run that followed is still debated as a mistake, and it is not among the 11 options.
Steve Austin vs Roman Reigns: the most dominant title reigns
The most dominant world title reign list flips the absence. Austin's 1998–99 run is here; The Rock's eight WWE title wins add up to many short reigns rather than one long one.
Austin's run started at WrestleMania XIV, where he beat Shawn Michaels with Mike Tyson as the guest enforcer, and carried Raw past WCW's Nitro in the ratings war.
Roman Reigns is the frame's opponent: the longest-reigning Universal Champion, with Bruno Sammartino's 1960s reign the old record holder on the same list.
Austin's neck injury vs The Rock's Hollywood exit: WWE's biggest what-ifs
The biggest what-if in WWE history is the least flattering ranking here for Austin, and a rare one that asks what The Rock cost wrestling.
At SummerSlam 1997, a piledriver from Owen Hart dropped Austin on his head and injured his neck.1 He kept working through the pain for six more years and retired after WrestleMania XIX at 38.
The Rock's what-if is a choice, not an injury. He wrestled his last regular match at WrestleMania XX in 2004 and did not return to the ring until 2011, the prime years of his film career.
Shawn Michaels' 1998 back injury, Edge's 2011 retirement and Daniel Bryan's 2016 concussions are the other careers cut off mid-sentence on the same list.
Seven years against thirty
Every list that stops at 2003 leans towards Austin: the Rumbles, the title reign, the entrance that still gets a pop. Every list that keeps counting after it, through the part-time main events and the box office, belongs to The Rock. All fourteen get sorted in pairs, two names per screen, which is how a head-to-head ranking sorts a field.
If your Attitude Era favourite is missing from all fourteen, build a ranking around them and see who they meet.
More rankings, more angles
- Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson Among the Greatest Wrestlers: 12 Lists — a $260m DC misfire and a Venice premiere
- John Cena vs Brock Lesnar Rivalry: 17 World Titles vs a UFC Belt — same 2002 WWE class, opposite careers
- Is The Undertaker the Greatest Wrestler of All Time? 16 Lists — Mark Calaway beside Sting and Simone Biles
Sources
- WWE — Stone Cold Steve Austin profile: six WWE Championships, record three Royal Rumble wins (1997, 1998, 2001), 1996 King of the Ring, 2009 Hall of Fame, three WrestleMania headliners with The Rock 1999–2003, neck injury at SummerSlam 1997: wwe.com (checked 2026-11-02)
- WWE — The Rock profile: eight WWE Championships, WCW Championship, 2000 Royal Rumble winner, 2013 title win over CM Punk, WrestleMania XXVIII and 29 against John Cena, WrestleMania XL tag win: wwe.com (checked 2026-11-02)
- Fightful — Austin's circa-1999 match-worn, signed knee brace sells for $225,700 at Heritage Auctions: fightful.com (checked 2026-11-02)
- Guinness World Records — highest salary for a debut starring role, Dwayne Johnson, The Scorpion King (2002): guinnessworldrecords.com (checked 2026-11-02)
- WWE — Brock Lesnar profile: beat The Rock to become the youngest WWE Champion in history at that time: wwe.com (checked 2026-11-02)
- Fightful — Steve Austin beats Kevin Owens in a No Holds Barred match on Night One of WrestleMania 38 in Dallas, his first match in nearly two decades: fightful.com (checked 2026-11-02)