Which wrestlers are great title chasers?

Regardless of the entertainment genre, people are captivated by "the thrill of the chase". Generally, we can all identify with the pursuit of an ultimate goal, whether it's winning a prize that someone has worked years to earn or gaining the affection of a lifelong love (as long as it's not one of those situations where the person "wears the other down"...or tries something worse to gaslight the person into going on a date with them).

In professional wrestling, the most obvious way we see this trope employed is through a top babyface going after a championship. Of course, fans aren't just invested in seeing someone win a belt for the sake of it; the wrestler's progression in the ring and as a character also serves as the necessary hook to pull people into their journey.

Those wrestlers' stories continue after those momentous wins, and for some of them, the high they experience going after the gold is difficult to follow up on once the reign starts. This doesn't mean that those title runs are bad or that those lesser reigns diminish the chase, but it shows how hard it is to maintain that level of fan interest after witnessing such a creative crescendo.

So, let's talk about three wrestlers whose chase to the championship exceeded the subsequent title reign (in WWE and All Elite Wrestling).

"Stone Cold" Steve Austin

As with many things WWE retells, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's rise to the top of the company wasn't as linear as you would think. Yes, he won the 1996 King of the Ring tournament (a spot originally slated for Hunter Hearst Helmsley), but with WWE "pushing" Vader as the top heel, the promotion did little with him until his career-defining feud with Bret Hart.

By early 1998, things got back on track. With Austin's popularity skyrocketing, he won the second of his three Royal Rumbles. From there, Austin's first WWE Championship win was all but a formality, even with the specter of then-champion Shawn Michael's hesitance (to put it generously) to lose matches.

Indeed, Austin won the belt at WrestleMania 14. Unfortunately, the WWE roster at the time lacked an abundance of top heels for Austin to work with. This led to the company centering most episodes of Raw around Austin's feud with Mr. McMahon. Everything worked out thanks to Austin and McMahon's on-screen chemistry, but aside from a couple of fun matches with Dude Love, Austin never had that signature in-ring foil during any of his babyface world title runs.

This trend continued when Austin chased after The Rock for the gold in 1999. Sure, it came with some baffling booking decisions -- McMahon winning the 1999 Royal Rumble, The Big Show's WWE debut -- but the formula of Austin hunting the champion (as a proxy for Vince) proved fruitful. Once more, though, it led to a sub-60-day stanza with Austin as champion. Shortly after, he returned to feuding with McMahon.

To be fair, this was the era of WWE that approached title changes more liberally than other periods in order to chase those sweet ratings. As such, it's fair to judge Austin in that context. Nevertheless, his title reigns will, at best, be a footnote in his legacy.

"Hangman" Adam Page

Before devolving into a revenge-minded arsonist, "Hangman" Adam Page was at the forefront of one of the most compelling babyface arcs in modern pro wrestling. You could argue that Page's rise started during the Bullet Club schism in 2018 in New Japan Pro Wrestling when he had more competitive outings against Kazuchika Okada and Hiroshi Tanahashi.

But there's no dispute over how AEW felt about him when he fought Chris Jericho for the world title in the main event of the company's second pay-per-view, All Out. Page fell short in that match, but it merely marked the start of the cowboy's long, arduous road to the championship.

Along the way, we saw Page win the AEW World Tag Team Championship with Kenny Omega, succumb to an alcohol dependency, lose friends in The Elite, make new friends with The Dark Order (who could forget their great entrance on Dynamite before facing The Elite?), step away from AEW, and finally regain his confidence to challenge Omega for the world title at Full Gear 2021.

Unlike his match with Jericho two years prior, Page didn't fail against Omega, and at long last, he realized the promise so many saw in him in 2019.

So, how did AEW follow up with Page after his momentous win? Well...they did a nice job. The company started by sending Bryan Danielson after Page and it resulted in a pair of classic matches, including a 60-minute time-limit draw at Winter is Coming 2021 that earned a 9.53 rating on Cagematch and five stars from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter's Dave Meltzer.

After vanquishing Danielson, he moved on to Adam Cole, who represented the final vestige of Page's feud with The Elite. While it seemed like a step down for Page, he still shined as the foil to Cole, and it led to a pair of fun gimmick matches. Then, we got the infamous storyline with CM Punk where Page tried to wake us up from the dream that was Punk's return to pro wrestling (that "worker's rights" dig turned out to be prophetic in hindsight). It marked the end of Page's reign but also the beginning of the end of Punk's time in AEW.

To reiterate, Page's time with the AEW World Title wasn't bad, and certainly not as bad as some fans online made it out to be at the time. However, he became a victim of his own success. A lot of fans saw his saga with Omega and The Elite as an early creative peak for AEW, it would've been hard for anyone to maintain that level of storytelling. Page has reached that point again in his rivalry with "Swerve" Strickland, showing that these sort of generational stories don't come around often and they make the merely good ones pale in comparison.

Sami Zayn

Like Mick Foley and Ricky Steamboat before him, Sami Zayn has become one of the quintessential white meat babyfaces in pro wrestling. It took some time for Zayn to get to this point due to Vince McMahon seeing him as a comedic midcard heel (a role Zayn excelled at, to be fair), but now he's positioned properly as one of the top protagonists in WWE.

Fans of Zayn's work in Ring of Honor (and other independent promotions) as El Generico knew he had this in him, and NXT fans learned this early in his time with the Black and Gold brand. After making a name for himself on the show via his great matches with Antonio Cesaro (aka Claudio Castagnoli), Zayn next targeted Adrian Neville's (aka PAC) NXT Championship. With Neville leaning to the heel side during the feud, Zayn was out to prove that he didn't need to cheat to win the belt.

Eventually, he got his one-on-one chance against Neville at NXT TakeOver: R Evolution. As expected, Zayn's conscience came into conflict when he had an opportunity to nail Neville with the NXT Championship belt to get the easy win. But Zayn declined to taint his efforts and instead finished Neville off with the Helluva Kick, winning "the big one" in NXT on his own terms.

The fans didn't get to celebrate Zayn's win for long, though, as the debuting Kevin Owens attacked him after the match to bring their years-long blood feud to WWE. Weeks later, Zayn lost the NXT Title to Owens via referee stoppage, a sign that the company planned to reset Zayn as a title chaser before an injury in a match against John Cena changed those plans.

Zayn's recent runs with Tag Team and Intercontinental Championships show that long title reigns don't dwindle the fans' interest in him. But as we saw with "Hangman" Page, it's hard to match the high anticipation of a title change.