10 Early Wrestler Finishers You Totally Forgot About

3. Triple H - Pedigree Pandemonium

Debuting in the WWF after his forgettable stint in WCW as Terra Ryzing and then Jean-Paul Lévesque, the man who would become The Game was lumbered with the midcard lifer gimmick of a Connecticut blueblood, Hunter Hearst Helmsley.

Although he'd transition it into Triple H within a year or two, and leave the whole gimmick behind him, he had a few kinks to iron out first. As Terra Ryzing, his finish had been the inverted Indian deathlock, a convoluted submission that Ryzing didn't yet have the chops to pull off in a dramatic enough fashion. When he was repackaged as Jean-Paul Lévesque, a French aristocrat, he adopted the double-underhook facebuster we've all come to know and love.

However, in his debut matches with the WWF, despite playing a superficially similar character, Helmsley used a version of the cutter, a.k.a. the Ace Crusher, that some bright spark called the Pedigree Pandemonium. Sadly, his cutter looked abysmal. Fortunately for him, only a few weeks after starting with the WWF, old WCW colleague Diamond Dallas Page called him and actually requested that he stop using the move as his finish. Page had just begun to get over at long last, using the Diamond Cutter as his finish, and was worried that wrestling fans would see the younger, fitter, better-looking Paul Levesque wrestling for the competition and using the same move.

Page was convinced that at his age, he'd only have this one shot to get over. Hesley agreed, and he readopted the double underhook facebuster into today's Pedigree, a move that got over big-time.