10 Real Reasons Why Wrestling Fans Never Get What They Want
7. Finishers That Actually End Matches
Finisher kick-outs generate pops and everything you see in wrestling is done to get a pop. It's as reductive and simple as that.
The staggering irony of Kenny Omega's reception is that if you look at his work objectively, stripped of any discursive context, he does a lot of things that the "old school" fans revere about the form.
Beyond slyly introducing a wonderful throwback of a worked punch in recent years and working big men as if they are mountains nigh-on impossible to scale, Omega is about the only wrestler to have approached the finisher as exactly that: a guaranteed kill-shot from which there is no coming back. The One-Winged Angel has been kicked out of just once. Omega has built the mythology of the move to such an unprecedented extent that it might as well be an ax to the dome. There is no one shortcut to creating a megastar, but whomever kicks out of it - Konosuke Takeshita? - will get some head-start.
Few others do this because they get told by the booker what the finish is, for starters, and even fewer have worked themselves into Omega's position.
They also lack the patience and discipline not to seek out that awestruck reaction.