10 Wrestlers Who Changed Their Finisher When They Got Old
Protecting their bodies to protect their legacies, these wrestlers worked hard AND smart...
By its very nature, wrestling can be an unnecessarily cruel industry.
There are no set rules or guidelines regarding the ages wrestlers should break in, hit their prime, age gracefully and then disappear, but this trajectory is theoretically expected of each performer nonetheless. Without any obvious guideline though, this is all controlled by a series of impulses, feelings and emotions that in some cases are out of the hands of the wrestlers themselves.
Audiences may decide a wrestler is past it. Over the hill. Best years behind them. A promoter or booker might feel it too. The wrestler then has the choice to shock their critics into condescending begrudging respect, or live down to expectations with a performance that proves their harsh judgments correct.
All of this, remember, after years - decades even - putting their bodies through one of the toughest grinds imaginable. Your writer's RSI once in a blue moon can't compete with the injuries wrestlers start waking up with every day from the moment they take their first bump. We are all guilty of these sweeping generalisations about wrestlers, especially when it comes to age, yet set no guidelines to give them half a chance.
Perhaps the trick to dealing with our flawed ageist bullsh*t is to try and obscure the passage of time in much the same way they do just about everything else bell-to-bell?
That's what this lot did...
10. Scott Steiner
You just can't count the TNA ones from the top rope.
Mike Tenay called it a Frankensteiner, he wanted so much to sell it as one. We all called it a Frankensteiner, we wanted so much to believe that the Scotty of old was lingering below the surface of all those biceps. The thrill was real, but the move, sadly was not.
'Big Poppa Pump' was well north of forty and had muscles on top of his muscles during his various jaunts through the Impact Zone, and propping a guy on the top rope to take a seated hurricanrana was cool and dangerous. But it wasn't the Frankensteiner.
A reinvention as the 'Big Bad Booty Daddy' was the first farewell to the move, but time's arrow marching forward did the rest. The updated version was a total popper for the live crowds and a treat that put a match over as more than it was. The original, in all its youthful glory, was a violent spring-loaded weapon