10 Amazing Wrestling Moves You'll NEVER See Again
6. The Heart Punch
Deemed a little too silly for contemporary wrestling and simply not serious enough to be parodied on the irony circuit, the Heart Punch got stopped with the suddenness of a jobber taking it when Crush left WWE in late-1997.
The former babyface had adopted it when turning heel in late-1993, and used it regularly during his 1996/97 return, but anybody could have really - it was all in the sell. Stan Stasiak, Ox Baker and a pre-Undertaker Mean Mark Callous were all purveyors of the deadly strike, and plenty of people hit the deck in defeat thanks to the move.
It's strange how this was a particular strain of suspension of disbelief that audiences were no longer willing to submit to. The heart is a muscle like any of the other ones worked on in holds, but is a) substantially more important and b) potentially much easier to access, but perhaps the misapprehension that the move could stop the heart rather than simply cause it to skip a few beats was the specific leap too far? Wrestler deaths en masse in the early 2000s made the mere thought of a return for the move a little too dark, and nothing's changed on that front other than - thankfully - the industry itself.