There’s no denying that The Miz has come a long way throughout his WWE career. At one point he wasn’t allowed to change in the locker room, but nowadays he’s a WWE veteran with numerous championships on his resume. The Miz has won his fair share of matches and he’s managed to put away many opponents with the Skull Crushing Finale.
The Miz explained how the Skull Crushing Finale came to be in a video posted to his TikTok account, and he revealed that it was actually former WWE Light Heavyweight Champion Dean Malenko who came up with the move.
“How did I come up with my finisher? So, if you remember, I used to wear shorts, and I was a tag team Superstar, and one time, the one time I wore trunks, literally from then on I was wearing trunks for the rest of my life, like the rest of my career, like it was just happening.
“So once that switch happened to trunks, I had to find a new finisher, and a new character, and a new kind of just, be more serious. So, I went with Dean Malenko and Arn Anderson and every live event, every television, Monday Night Raw, like we would literally be like, just racking our brains on different finishers. I had that had the knee DDT, which everyone thought was a half DDT, So they were like, ‘No.’
“Then I had the knee lift into the neck breaker, which was my former one, and I called it a Reality Check. And they were like, ‘That’s just not a finisher’ and then I re-upped it and I said, ‘Well, what if I do it into one move and I do it on my knee into a neckbreaker?’ There they still ‘That’s not enough.’
And one day Dean was like, ‘Why don’t you try and do like a full nelson and sweep a front of his leg and see if that works. And we did it and everyone seemed to like it. I liked it because I could do it pretty much on everybody. And so that is how the Skull Crushing Finale was created.”
H/T Inside The Ropes
