Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Best Moves Ever: The Flying Elbow Drop

I hate when Michael Cole overuses the term "vintage". Most of the time he uses the term, it doesn't fit. It usually elicits a quiet hate, but I get audibly pissed when he calls Shawn Michaels' elbow drop from the top "vintage HBK". It's not that I don't like HBK using the move; moves get passed on generationally all the time, but while it's become vintage Shawn Michaels, to me, it will always, always, ALWAYS be associated with one man, perhaps the most underappreciated wrestler of all time, the Macho Man Randy Savage.

By all rights, an elbow drilling someone in the chest should finish a man 100% of the time, if not be threatening to kill him. A lot of old-school finishers today might look weak in comparison, even if in the context of the times and the guy doing it, they still hold up (the perfect example is Hogan's leg drop). But the TR elbow? That always looked like death. Savage may have been the picture of crazy on the mic and in the ring, but for a brief moment in time, whenever he ascended the turnbuckles, spread his arms akimbo and leapt, driving the elbow into the chest of whomever was unlucky enough to receive it, he looked like the most graceful human being in the arena. Here's clip of him doing the move to Shawn Michaels in what can only be described in the most a propos way to present it: