AEW star Christian Cage recently appeared at Steel City Con, where he talked about a number of topics including the origin of his Killswitch finishing maneuver.
Cage said, “So when I was first breaking into wrestling, I used to study a lot of tapes because I’m a student of the game.” “Unlike most of the wrestlers you see today that play a wrestler, I actually am a wrestler. So… I used to study a lot of different genres of wrestling, one of those being Japanese wrestling. So it was Tommy Rogers, and he used to do a movement. It was called the Tamakaze, which is a version of the Killswitch. He did it a little bit different than I do. When I saw him do it, it was when he hooked the guy’s arms from behind and spun him around. First of all, I couldn’t figure out how he did that. So I had to slow it down. This was at times of VCRs. So I had to slow it down on a VCR and push pause multiple times to see it frame by frame to see how he turned the guy.”
“When I saw how he turned the guy and the head was in the position facing down, I was like, okay, it’s almost like a pile driver move. It can be devastating. It can be something that I can actually apply to any wrestler no matter what size they are, which is also important as a finisher in my opinion, but he ran with it. He used to run two or three steps and run and jump with it. When I looked at it, I was like, I felt like that took something away from the move. I thought it’d be more devastating if you turn somebody in that position and just drop them straight on their head. So that’s my version of it. I think it’s served me well.”
You can check out Cage’s comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
