10 Awesome Wrestling Moves That Nobody Ever Talks About
OR, another excuse to put Scott Steiner over.
Since wrestling is apparently only about moves now - Roman Reigns only knows five, but there are also too many (!) - they tend to dominate much of the discourse, and less flippantly, they do so because this elite global class of talent is outstanding.
Kenny Omega's One-Winged Angel is amazing because it is protected to a mythological extent, and is so convoluted in execution that it builds the struggle of drama and the story of his matches. Jon Moxley's Paradigm Shift is a literal elevation on his old Dirty Deeds finish, and he knows precisely when to deliver it from a greater, more sickening height in order to put over the most worthy opponents in defeat. Adam Cole's Last Shot is perfectly in-character; he spends his matches, like a next-gen Edge, constantly slipping away from his opponents. It's so fitting that he ends them with a strike from behind. Kazuchika Okada's Rainmaker is both wince-inducing lunging strike and a platform on which to get his opponents over, too; this year, Jay White nope'd it in a great bit of d*ckhead psychology.
Wrestling's past is losing itself to time because the present is so vital.
For shame...
10. Bret Hart's Russian Leg Sweep
Bret Hart was the best.
Bret Hart rewarded the intelligence of wrestling fans with his staunch refusal to do anything that made no sense in the context of a pro wrestling match. The details he applied to everything went unnoticed but not unappreciated by the adolescent fans who stuck with the post-fad WWF (for life, looking at that demo) as a result of his artful approach to it.
He was hardly the first wrestler to incorporate the Russian leg sweep into his repertoire, but Bret being Bret, the execution was sublime. Hart, as a technician, never went on a feed-punching tear, and even when he asked his opponents to bump for him, there was a pattern of logic to everything. His Russian leg sweep is a tremendous example of that: no invisible force struck his opponents down; he trapped their legs and forced them to the canvas.
It spoke to his expert, in-character grasp of control; Hart's hermetic sense of strategy never allowed his fans to stop believing, even when up against the giants he cut down. There was no better man in his era at hooking fans into his matches, and this was a literal illustration of his excellence.