Does the Hidden Blade Look Too Good to Be Worked?

Does the Hidden Blade look too good to be a staged move?
Photo Credit: NJPW1972.com

Bret Hart once said that the thing he was proudest of during his career was that he never hurt anyone. Part of that is luck, yes. Even in the olden days with lower risks, fewer dates, and lesser impact, people still got hurt doing wrestling. Whether or not it was easier to work several matches without an injury happening in them, to you or your opponent, it is still a point of pride for a wrestler to be able to say they never saw an opponent get hurt in a match. I don't want to say that attitude has eroded completely, because if wrestlers didn't protect each other, it would be MMA in there. However, you see it with a preponderance in dives in WWE with less than half the roster being able to catch their opponents correctly. You see it with wrestlers bragging about the marks they leave on others with their chops or how they're so macho on how red their chests get from being chopped. Everything has to look stiff nowadays. The desire to make everything look as real as possible (in an age where more and more people are in on the joke than when Hart was active) significantly decreases the margin of error for keeping you or your opponent from getting hurt. This isn't to say that all dangerous looking moves are bad; I'd venture to say that most of them are okay with moderation and a company that doesn't run its roster into the ground ('sup, WWE).

That being said, some moves are bad ideas from get-go one, and some people shouldn't be trusted doing big high risk moves (or in the case of big, dangerous dives, taking them, looking at you, Mike Mizanin). As one might expect, Will Ospreay doing the Hidden Blade forearm to the head and neck of his opponent is an intersection of both. The move debuted at WrestleKingdom this year when he clocked Kota Ibushi from behind with it, and he used it again at King of Pro Wrestling yesterday, this time in sliding fashion while facing El Phantasmo. Both times, it looked dangerously stiff to the point where it felt like it would be the ultimate in wrestling gamesmanship if he was able to work it to the point where the contact with El-P was minimal. Do I believe he didn't rock Phantasmo's or Ibushi's domes with his elbow? I'm skeptical to say the least.

The converse is moves that hit a little are better to look at and I get it, people don't want to watch strikes with the accuracy of Shane McMahon punches. I like a snug wrestling match too, but the difference between snug and stiff and shoot are pronounced. Stiff is probably where most people, myself included, think the coolest shit lands, and Ospreay is nothing but a rampant self-promoter in that everything he does in service of making himself look cool. He's shown a stunning lack of self-awareness at various points during his career, so what's a little fast and hard elbow to the head among friends (or in the case of Ibushi, to someone who clearly doesn't care about his own self-preservation)? It's all part of the game to him.

But what happens when the game ends up leaving someone with CTE? Now, I know what the counter is; everything in wrestling nowadays could give CTE if done wrong. That being said, I've never seen any move done where I feel like it's an injury waiting to happen, not even when Tetsuya Naito and Kota Ibushi did Stupid Wrestler Tricks on the apron earlier this year. That was a move that usually goes well and just went off the rails in that instance. It happens, but you can make sure it doesn't happen again with better planning. You may find me concern trolling or being biased against a wrestler for whom I have a known distaste, but I can't see any scenario where that fucking Hidden Blade doesn't land as hard as it would if he were doing it in a MMA bout. I could be wrong, and for the sakes of the people who take that move, I hope I am.

But overall, I hope that more wrestlers take Hart's words seriously. Yeah, you can fuck up a spot if it means saving a guy's health or life. The longest life cycle that the hullabaloo from that "botch" will last is however long it takes the furor from Botchamania to die down if it happens to appear there. I mean, no one really gave Ryback shit for going out of position to catch Kalisto on a dive gone awry in the former's final WWE match ever. If anything, he was lauded for making sure Kalisto didn't end up in the hospital or worse. Ospreay's not the only guy who needs to clean up his act. Like I said above, three-quarters of the WWE roster suck at catching people doing dives, and WWE mandates that everyone except like Big Show and Otis do dives anymore. That being said, that Hidden Blade is gonna give someone a grade one concussion one day because every time I see Ospreay do it, it's like I'm watching land the last blow to someone in UFC. I don't trust him with it, which is fine. I'm some idiot with a blog and a bad reputation on Twitter, right? That being said, I hope he doesn't betray the trust of anyone he does that move to.