10 Wrestling Moves That Look Like They Could Legitimately Kill You

So common was the piledriver in previous eras of wrestling it must have been easy to forget at the time just how horrific the implications of the move were. If it was 'real', a piledriver would force the entire weight of both wrestlers down on one man's head, compressing his spine and surely fracturing vertebrae as well as doing a tidy number on his skull.

This gross violation of skeletal integrity was a common transitional move in wrestling, and while Jerry Lawler for instance used it as a finisher, plenty of other wrestlers used it as just another move even though in reality it should have meant an instant, extremely serious injury.

The piledriver regained its mystique in later years when the WWE, perhaps in the wake of Steve Austin breaking his neck in a botched piledriver, restricted the move to the Tombstoine variations used by Kane and Undertaker. When CM Punk and John Cena performed one on Raw in 2013, it was sold as an event of shocking impact befitting the move's savagery.