The short and long tail of WWE Moves

Part twoThe long tail

§Why is a flip named after a Mexican film character?

Because the man who made it famous was wearing a movie hero's mask. Huracán Ramírez began as the title character of a 1953 Mexican film. When the wrestler who first played him in the ring gave up the mask, Daniel García took it over and made the character a star of lucha libre.

His signature was a leap onto a standing opponent's shoulders that rolled them into a pin. In lucha libre a pinning cradle of that kind is a rana, so Ramírez's pin became the huracanrana, now usually spelled hurricanrana. When the move reached American rings, Scott Steiner's version kept the flip but drove the opponent into the mat instead of pinning them, and it got a pun for a name: the Frankensteiner. Same leap, different ending, different word.

Names like these are fossils. They record who carried a move to a new audience, which is often someone other than whoever did it first.

The German suplex has the strangest trail. It is tied to Karl Gotch, who was born in Antwerp in 1924 and learned catch-as-catch-can wrestling at Billy Riley's gym in Wigan, in the north of England, a room later known as the Snake Pit. He wrestled in Europe as Karl Krauser. After he crossed the Atlantic around 1959, an Ohio promoter renamed him after Frank Gotch, the old American champion.

Gotch himself called his bridging suplex the "atomic suplex". How it came to be called German isn't well documented. Wikipedia says Japanese promoters dropped "atomic" because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the only source it cites, a profile of Gotch, mentions the atomic name without giving that reason, and we found nothing else that does.

Japan is where Gotch mattered most. He was known there as Kamisama, "God", and he trained a generation of New Japan stars, Satoru Sayama among them. Antonio Inoki adopted Gotch's German suplex hold in 1969, and in 1981 Sayama became Tiger Mask, a character taken from a 1968 manga. Follow the names and a single line runs from a gym in Wigan, through a Belgian with a borrowed American surname, to a cartoon tiger in Tokyo.

§How did a Japanese scorpion hold end up at the centre of the Montreal Screwjob?

By passing through three names and several owners, and gathering meaning at every step. It is worth walking through in order, because it shows how a move's value accumulates while its shape barely changes.

1. Japan, as the sasori-gatame. Riki Choshu is credited as the first to popularise the "scorpion hold". Some accounts say Karl Gotch invented it and passed it to Choshu; the record is thin.
2. America, as the Scorpion Deathlock. The English name kept the scorpion, and the hold became Sting's signature.
3. The WWF, as the Sharpshooter. Before Bret Hart's first big singles push, the office wanted him to have a submission finish. Hart didn't know how to apply it, so Konnan taught him, and Hart, by his own account, gave it the name that stuck.
4. WrestleMania 13, 23 March 1997. In a submission match, Hart put the Sharpshooter on a bleeding Steve Austin, who refused to quit and passed out instead. The crowd turned on Hart and toward Austin, and WWE still calls it the move that made Austin a household name. The hold now meant Bret Hart's weapon, and the thing Austin would rather pass out than submit to.
5. Montreal, 9 November 1997. Seven months later, the same hold was used on Hart himself to take his title without his consent. Now it meant betrayal.
6. Afterwards. Hart's niece Natalya uses what WWE calls the family Sharpshooter. Now it means inheritance.

Three names, at least five famous users, one hold. What changed at each step was the history the audience brought to it, and that is why Montreal landed so hard. Everyone watching Michaels apply that particular hold knew what it meant to turn it on its owner.

§Why is the Stunner the signature move of its era when the other man does the flying?

Because the Stunner is mostly a stage for the person receiving it. Mechanically it is modest: Austin grabs the opponent's head over his shoulder and drops to a sitting position, so their jaw appears to snap against him. What makes it spectacular is what the receiver does next.

Its family tree is tangled. Austin credits Hayes, but Mikey Whipwreck, whom Austin had wrestled in ECW in 1995, was already using a similar move he called the Whipper-Snapper. Randy Orton's RKO was also modified from Johnny Ace's Ace Crusher, so two of WWE's best-known finishers share a grandparent on the Japanese circuit.

Austin added a setup, a kick to the stomach that doubles the opponent over. He wanted something like Jake Roberts's short clothesline before the DDT, a cue the audience could learn. The kick told the whole arena what was coming, which is exactly what a setup is for.

The receiver finished the job. The Rock sold the Stunner by launching himself upward, spinning and flopping around the ring, and in 2017 he revealed that he and Austin used to bet cases of beer on how wild his reactions could get. Austin has said the Rock took it best of anyone, that the overselling made their matches at WrestleManias 15, 17 and 19 feel enormous, and that the Rock sometimes bounced off the ropes and landed back on him.

Here is the long-tail lesson hiding in the most famous move of the late 1990s. A finisher's value is set largely by the people willing to be destroyed by it. One of Austin's most famous Stunners was the one he gave the company's chairman, Vince McMahon, on Raw on 22 September 1997, and its power came from who was falling.

§Why did WWE restrict the piledriver?

Because the design that keeps the head off the mat leaves no margin when it fails, and in 1997 it failed on the company's biggest rising star.

At SummerSlam on 3 August 1997, Owen Hart gave Austin a piledriver with Austin's head too low. Austin's arms and legs went numb. Instead of the planned finish, a Stunner, he managed a weak roll-up several minutes early.

WWE's own retrospective describes a broken neck and temporary paralysis, and says he needed help to leave the ring. The Wrestling Observer's report that week was milder: he was released from hospital that night with an apparent "stinger". Austin kept wrestling for years, but the injury shaped the rest of his career.

By July 2000 the company had banned the piledriver unless a wrestler had special permission, saying too many people were being hurt. In a 2007 interview with congressional investigators, the WWE executive Stephanie McMahon said only two wrestlers were then allowed to use it, "two of the stronger guys". The Undertaker's Tombstone, the kneeling version, stayed his finisher until he retired. The rule seems to have softened since: in late 2024, Kevin Owens piledrove Randy Orton and Cody Rhodes on television, and both were written into the story as spinal injuries.

Other bans have other reasons. WWE barred chair shots to the head in 2010. The company said it was about working conditions; Vice also points to Linda McMahon's entry into politics and to growing awareness of brain injury after the death of Chris Benoit. Seth Rollins's Curb Stomp was taken away the day after he won his first world title at WrestleMania 31 in 2015; Rollins believes someone got cold feet about the look and the name after a morning-TV appearance. He used the Pedigree instead, and got his move back in 2018 under a softer name, the Stomp.

And one famous ban was the story itself. In Memphis in 1982, Jerry Lawler's piledriver was illegal, so when he used it on the comedian Andy Kaufman, Lawler was disqualified. Kaufman spent three days in hospital and wore a neck brace on television for months. The whole thing was staged, and the ban was part of the staging: a forbidden weapon draws more outrage than a legal one.

So "banned" covers three different mechanisms: physics (the piledriver), image (the Curb Stomp, the FU) and plot (Memphis). Each one changes what a move means on the rare nights it does appear.

§Why would a wrestler use their best move only seven times?

Because a finisher is a currency, and every kickout spends some of it.

Kobashi debuted the Burning Hammer on 24 October 1998, in a tag match against Mitsuharu Misawa. By fans' count he used it about seven times in all, the last in March 2006, and nobody ever kicked out. When Kobashi lifted someone for it, the match was over, and the crowd knew it.

Now look at the opposite economy. At WrestleMania XXX on 6 April 2014, the Undertaker, 21–0 at WrestleMania, faced Brock Lesnar.

According to WWE's own recap, Lesnar hit his F-5 and the Undertaker kicked out. Lesnar hit a second F-5; another near fall. The Undertaker hit his Tombstone; Lesnar kicked out. The third F-5 ended the Streak, and the crowd sat stunned.

Put the numbers side by side. That night Lesnar's F-5 finished one match in three attempts, and the Tombstone none in one. Kobashi's Burning Hammer finished seven in seven.

The WrestleMania match converted its finishers into gasps, each kickout buying a moment of disbelief, with a 21-match unbeaten run at stake. That trade only works if the same moves still end matches most of the time; kick out of a finisher every week and it stops meaning anything.

Kobashi hoarded and WWE spent, and both were managing the same thing. A finisher's power is the audience's belief in it, and that belief is a budget.