10 Wrestling Finishes Performed On The Fly
5. Chasing The Dragon
For a change of pace, let’s look at an example of an incident in which the finish radically altered, not because of horrendous injury or human error, but because of one man’s desire to pay tribute to his hero.
At WrestleMania XXV in April 2009, Chris Jericho was the villain in an elimination handicap tag match against three WWF/E legends, Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka, ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper and one of Jericho’s real life all-time heroes, Ricky ‘the Dragon’ Steamboat. For the first few minutes, the match went about as well as you’d expect. Snuka was a shrivelled husk of his former self, while Piper’s spirit was willing, but his flesh wasn’t really up to it.
Steamboat, on the other hand, was the surprise of the show. In his first match in fifteen years, not only could the babyface marvel of the eighties still go at fifty-six years old, but he could go like the clappers. In what could have been a snooze for the crowd in attendance, he saved the match for Jericho and the WWE, flawlessly delivering his trademark crossbody dive, a plancha to the outside, skinning the cat and more.
He was so good that the company booked the pair of them to continue the feud past WrestleMania, working another pay-per-view match at Backlash. In addition, over the next few months Steamboat would wrestle on the card at several house shows, usually losing to Jericho… except for July 19th’s Smackdown/ECW live event in Greenville, South Carolina.
The Carolinas were the NWA’s neighbourhood, Flair country, proper old school territory - and the crowd remembered Ricky Steamboat. In fact, they had popped so big for the Dragon upon his entrance that (as detailed in his last book of memoirs) it gave Jericho an idea.
Just as in their WrestleMania match, Jericho delivered the scheduled Codebreaker to end the match... but as he covered the legend, he whispered to him to kick out. Steamboat did - and the crowd went ballistic.
Jericho had decided to change the finish and pop the crowd with a win for a bona fide legend: unable to remember the exact sequence he was after, he muttered “WrestleMania III finish” to his opponent, lifted him for a body slam, and Steamboat countered to roll him up for the three count, just as he’d beaten ‘the Macho Man’ Randy Savage all those years ago.
There was no angle to pursue, no knock-on consequences for the following week’s television: just one performer expressing admiration for another by looking at the lights for him when he didn’t have to. Class act.