Greatest Practitioners: Ad Santel, Lou Thesz Toehold Variations Also Used By: Dory Funk, Jr, Terry Funk, John Cena, William Regal. The toehold is a move that can legitimately break a mans leg, if applied correctly. There is even an old story in wrestling that details hooker Ad Santel using the move to disable former World Heavyweight Champion Georg Hackenschmidt before his famous rematch with Frank Gotch in 1911. The story is probably a mat myth, but like all other mat myths, it is nevertheless fun to talk about and to ruminate upon. The great Lou Thesz likely learned the move from Santel (or maybe from his mentor Ed Strangler Lewis) and would later combine the stepover toehold with a front facelock, in order to innovate the STF (Stepover Toehold Facelock), a move that is (sort of) used today by WWE Champion John Cena. Over the years, many variations on the basic toehold have been employed. Perhaps most notable on the list of practitioners are the Funk brothers, Dory, Jr and Terry, who both used the Spinning toehold variation to great effect as NWA World Heavyweight Champions. By todays standards, the generic toehold is actually quite a boring manoeuvre to watch and would likely only be used to get an injury angle over. Having said that, the stepover toehold is still a supremely valuable piece of wrestling mechanics that holds a lot of other, more complicated, moves together. It may no longer be a main attraction, but it is still one of the sports vital building blocks.
I am a professional author and lifelong comic books/pro wrestling fan. I also work as a journalist as well as writing comic books (I also draw), screenplays, stage plays, songs and prose fiction.
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Latcho Drom,
- CQ
