10 Awesome Wrestling Moves That Nobody Ever Talks About

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.