The Miz Reveals How His Skull Crushing Finale Finisher Was Created
It took a long time for The Miz to finally land on an ideal finisher.
Like many wrestlers, The Miz cycled through different finishers over the years. When he was a rookie and tag team wrestler, he used a variation of a neckbreaker which he called “the Reality Check”. It worked for a few years, but he knew he needed something better.
But he didn’t find his current finisher, the Skull Crushing Finale, on his own. Speaking on TikTok, Miz explained that it was through collaborating with Arn Anderson and Dean Malenko – both agents/producers backstage in WWE – who helped him find the move.
“So I went with Dean Malenko and Arn Anderson, and every live event, every television, Monday Night Raw, like, we would literally be just racking our brains on different finishers.
He first came up with the knee DDT, which everyone thought was a half-DDT, so no. Then the knee lift into the neckbreaker, which was my former one, which I called the Reality Check, and they’re like, ‘That’s just not a finisher.’
Then I re-upped it, what if I doing it into one move? That didn’t work for him either. Then one day, Dean was like, ‘Why don’t you try and do a full nelson and sweep the front of his legs and see if that works.’ And we did it and everyone seemed to like it. I liked it because I could pretty much do it on everybody, and so that is how the Skull Crushing Finale was created.”
The first time The Miz used the Skull Crushing Finale on TV was on August 10th, 2009. Miz wrestled under a mask as the Calgary Kid and won a contract on a pole match, and then used his new finisher on Eugene.
h/t 411Mania for the transcription