Wrestling: Ranking the top 10 finishing moves in history
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3. Tombstone Piledriver
Piledrivers!
Who doesn’t love a good old-fashioned piledriver?
Every single version of the piledriver is the perpetrator dropping the victim on his head and every single one of them is awesome.
First of all, all the different variations of this move are legitimately scary to watch, to the point where if I had even the slightest suspicion that pro-wrestling was not a work, I’d be personally suing wrestling promotions for broadcasting live murder.
Seriously, if I’m ever forced to take a wrestling move at gunpoint, I’ll take 5 Attitude Adjustments on thumbtacks before I agree to be dropped on my head with a piledriver. Well, okay maybe not thumbtacks, maybe through the announcers’ desk.
We rarely see piledrivers in WWE nowadays, other than the odd Canadian Destroyer here and there, and understandably so since the biggest star in the company, Stone Cold Steve Austin, was almost killed because of one.
However, there is so much wrestling outside of WWE, and those guys are nuts enough to do these extremely dangerous spots in extremely dangerous settings.
You could argue that piledrivers, like every other move are overused in today’s environment, and that is true, especially for the Canadian Destroyer. However, piledrivers are almost always impactful and are considered lethal.
There’s a straight-up sitting piledriver that Minoru Suzuki has, there’s a brilliant belly-to-back variant that we see used by “Hangman” Adam Page and Trent? of AEW. Then there’s the devastating package piledriver that the Lucha Bros have as their finisher and that Kevin Owens has teased hundreds of times but has never actually hit.
The greatest piledriver, of course, is the Tombstone Piledriver, just like the Undertaker is history’s greatest character.
There are good finishers that match a wrestler’s character. Well, there’s no better match made in heaven, or hell in this case, than the Undertaker and his Tombstone Piledriver. Well, that and another match that you’ll see ahead in this list.
The visuals of the Tombstone that look like Undertaker’s logo, the pinning predicament afterwords with the victim’s arms crossed, that creepy eye and tongue thing that Taker does before the move, everything screams dead man walking.
This move has been the setpiece for some legendary encounters of the phenom, and the fact that he has moves in his arsenal like the Chokeslam, the Last Ride, Hell’s Gate, etc. and he chooses the Tombstone as his ultimate finisher just adds more prestige to the move.
Very few people have kicked out of the Tombstone and it always means something big when they do.
No matter how old Taker gets and I do hope he gets to enjoy his retirement but one thing’s for sure, fans will never not pop for the Tombstone.
To all the Okadas and the Young Bucks of the world, you guys are great but the Tombstone will always belong to the Phenom.