10 Pro Wrestling Moves That Need To Die
Old traditions and new innovations that suck equally.
Professional wrestling, like Hollywood blockbusters, rely on the same basic formulas to keep the wheels churning and the ticket sales coming in. It's bad guys versus good guys. It's hot chicks and muscular dudes (sadly this still applies, looking at the absolute state of NXT 2.0). Revenge is the most common motive and allegiances shift on a whim to "shock" the audience.
And just like clockwork, we're guaranteed to see the same moves and spots that have already been used hundreds upon thousands of times over the last year. While the repetition of certain maneuvers is necessary and unavoidable, there are too many wrestling throws and attacks that desperately need to go away.
Some of them are old relics from the past that don't make sense in today's environment, some are insanely illogical and stretch the boundaries of believability way too far, and some are just really, really awful to look at.
The main problem is that so many of these maneuvers have become stitched into the fabric of professional wrestling over the last several decades and it can be tough to rip those threads out.
But, dammit, it has to happen for the good of the product. These moves simply need to die.
10. Outside Dives Onto More Than Two Opponents
If one were to venture a guess as to why the suicide dives of yore - where one man would fly over the top rope and crash down upon another man - have been replaced with wrestlers diving onto the human equivalent of an inflatable bounce house, one would have to assume it has something to do with the industry's newfound concern for safety.
Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful that after decades of life-threatening (and sometimes life-ending) injuries, professional wrestling has tried to remove some of those old and unnecessary risks.
But there's only so far you can go in altering a risky manoeuvre before you suck all the life out of it. After all, most of those moves look dangerous because, well, they are dangerous. The suicide dive (or any sort of dive to the outside) was an "OH HELL YES" moment because that man-on-man (on-floor) impact was hard to fake.
Nowadays, when a guy launches himself over the top rope, there may be three or four (or ten) dudes there to break his fall in the most anti-climactic of ways. It's like a stage dive that somehow breaks incredibly beefy dudes in half.
It was novel and fun to see the resulting domino effect the first few times, but now it's like watching a BMX rider flip into a pool full of cotton balls.