10 Unlikely Origins Of Wrestling Finishers
1. The Rock Just Fancied Making Somebody Laugh
The People's Elbow is f*cking ricockulous.
It's a move only the Rock could pull off, and that's the magic. Dumb as f*ck in almost any pro wrestling context, it worked because it defined him. Only he could do something so silly and grandiose and still make it cool. It is ridiculous because it was always designed to be. The Rock dreamed it up purely to corpse the Undertaker.
The undead zombie mortician with a fondness for mixed martial-arts and the power to summon lightning took himself and his character very seriously. He refused to break it. Otherwise, the public would not take seriously a man who could teleport, return from the dead and survive being buried alive.
'Taker was so adamant about this that his peers took it as a challenge, on the more freewheeling expressive house show loop, to make the bugger smile. And so the Rock removed his elbow pad, and ran the breadth of the ring purely to drop an elbow.
A set-up so absurd as to be totally pointless, the fans ate it up, and Rock recognised that it was just in-character enough to work on TV.