What Is A Finisher?

Don't get mad at The Revival for not finishing the match with this
Photo Credit: WWE.com

Monday night, The Revival paid tribute to the late, great Jim Neidhart by doing the Hart Attack during their three-way match for the RAW Tag Team Championships against the B-Team and the Deleters of Worlds. In addition to being the most tasteful tribute to Neidhart that night (you can always count on the talent to do right by talent even when management turns a surprise death into gristle for the wheel of angles), it was perhaps the most appropriate tribute. The best tag team on the RAW brand paid tribute to one of the greatest tag team wrestlers ever using his signature move. Most people were happy about it. Bubba Ray Dudley is not most people however. He responded to WWE's tweet about the spot with this bit of indignant bullshit:

Of course, Dudley could have been carrying on a longstanding grudge he seems to have with The Revival, seeing as he publicly dressed the Scott Dawson for, y'know, tweeting in-character like a cocksure antagonist would. Dudley seems to be the kind of loathsome piece of shit who gatekeeps old traditions and then labels someone as marked for life because of one perceived transgression. I mean, it's not like he came up in a promotion that reveled in the fact that it was there to commit transgressions against the wrestling establishment, and that he only got over because he just spat out the cheapest of cheap heat that leaned heavily on misogyny among other things at a time when everyone else was leaving for the Big Two. Oh wait, that's totally what happened.

But even ignoring the bad faith from the Dudley camp, his sentiment speaks to a larger one about the sanctity of various moves in absolute. You see the same thing from people even more respectable than the racist, self-proclaimed ombudsman Dudley. Steve Austin, for example, made it a hobby horse on his podcast about the DDT's demotion from match finisher to transition move. You see a lot of people who came up during an older time, more dyed in the wool, bemoaning how the sacred finishers of their past don't finish matches anymore.

Hell, even some of the newer school fall into this trap. I catch myself getting mad at visually impressive and devastating-looking moves not finishing matches sometimes. Specifically, I remember getting so mad that an avalanche air raid crash in the Michael Elgin/Davey Richards 2012 Battle of Los Angeles match wasn't the finish. I mean, the air raid crash by itself is a finisher for so many wrestlers, so off the top, it should be death, right? Well, no, they went on for like at least five minutes afterwards doing their golems-exchanging-moves sequence until Elgin mercifully won with his finish. I was so mad at the time, but I was also wrong.

The Hart Attack Monday night, most DDTs, and that top-rope air raid crash all have one thing in common; they're not the finishers of the people using them. Finishing moves aren't preordained or static based on the move. They are what they are because the wrestler or promotion has established them as things that finish a match. It seems like a recursive definition at first, sure. However, a good story gives you an idea of where it's going to end, or if it has a swerve ending, it has reason behind it. A wrestling match is no different. You should have a good idea of the ways that the match could end going into it, and that set shouldn't include more than a few options.

Audiences need training to react the way that you as a wrestler or a booker want them to. A set finishing move goes a long way towards that training, and any deviation either means shock (i.e. a flash pin or a non-pinfall/submission ending) or it has been explicitly built up either in promos or in the match's psychology. Think of it as a standing version of Chekhov's Gun. No matter how visually impressive, presenting of brutality, or personally special a move is to a given bystander, it's not going to finish a match under normal circumstances without the proper setting. Now, I could see a devastating-looking, risky-to-perform move being used as a nuke in a special situation (and to be completely honest, an avalanche air raid crash with those two wrestlers in Reseda wasn't necessarily a nuke or a special situation) ending a match. However, it's all about the right kind of storytelling.

The Hart Attack in the middle of a match on RAW that the team wasn't even slated to win, however, is not something to get up in arms about not finishing a match. It shows that the mentality needs to change, not the way the wrestlers are working. Moves are not sacred cows that need to be encased in Lucite and protected. Styles change. Impact evolves. Power creep is real. The story supersedes whatever you think of a move, and it goes for the Hart Attack, the DDT, whatever move happens to be used that doesn't give a satisfactory ending. The truth of the matter is if a match doesn't end in a guy hitting his finisher, then that is the thing that should be questioned, not the other way around. Anything else would be bad narrative structure, unless of course, the narrative provided a reason for the finisher not to be used. Again though, wrestling is storytelling, and the best stories don't really leave much out, whether explicitly stated or embedded in subtext.

And a propos of nothing else, I hope that the next time The Revival is in a match, they use 3D early on in the match, and it only gets a one-count. Bubba Ray Dudley fucking sucks, and he's the last person in the world I'd want to take advice from in terms of how to conduct oneself in the ring. But again, that's neither here nor there...