5 Wrestling Innovations That Did As Much Harm As Good
2. Diving Headbutts
Harley Race invented the diving headbutt, much to his regret. It shortened his career - but the successors who adopted it fared much worse.
One of the more heralded men to borrow it, Dynamite Kid, paralysed himself as a result of his unbelievably intense ring style. He used the diving headbutt ad nauseam. It was a vital component of his legendary matches opposite the original Tiger Mask. The move worked as well as it did because it looked as brutal as it did spectacular. It wasn't a plancha, even the best iterations of which required noticeable cooperation from the man receiving it; it was a literal aerial assault, a fusion of showmanship and believability. It came at a cost; because there was no sprawl of human mass cushioning the impact as with a splash, there was too much scope for the spine to compress, for the head and neck to strike the mat with too much force.
Two of Kid's critically-acclaimed successors, Chris Benoit and Daniel Bryan, borrowed the move in pursuit of realism. Benoit was one of the only men willing to receive a chair shot to the back of the head, which naturally contributed to his decayed and ravaged brain, now accepted by most historians of the 2007 double murder suicide as the primary reason behind his broken mental state. That he even deployed the diving headbutt from atop a steel cage only compounded matters.
Bryan retired at a relatively young age after incurring a spate of concussions and a lesion on his brain. His use of the diving headbutt was not coincidental.