Cageside Fave Five: 'Say Uncle!' - best submissions in the business

The Crossface!!! People ignore anything Benoit related for obvious reasons, but the guy was awesome

5. Dragon Sleeper – Always loved this move.

4. Tazmission/ Kata-Ha-Jime – Always loved Taz and now that I practice Judo, and know how to actually apply the strangle, it makes it all the better.

3. Chikara Special – Mike Quackenbush is the man. ’Nuff said.

2. Rings of Saturn – I was a big Perry Saturn mark. It’s not even particularly devastating, but it’s unique.

1. Texas Cloverleaf – My all time favorite submission. Not sure why, either. I have just always marked out when it was locked in.

One thing really gets on my nerves with the figure four leg lock: Pro wrestlers often forget what the move is supposed to be.

I figured out the figure four as a teenager while clowning around with a fellow pro wrestling fan. I put the move on him, not even sure how it was supposed to work, and he screamed in pain that it was hurting the knee of the straight leg.

So, mystery solved: The move is a knee bar where the leg being attacked is placed under the other leg, which is used as a fulcrum. The bent leg should be higher than the knee, and the straight leg is hyperextended by pushing it upwards against the bent leg. It works, it hurts like hell with even mild pressure, and, contrary to the post above, there is no escaping it. Once the person applying it has everything in position and starts pushing up, the pain would be unbearable and the victim’s leg would be injured very quickly if they didn’t give up.

The nature of the move was confirmed for me by watching serious pro wrestlers doing the move. They would in fact (pretend to) push up on the straight leg while applying the hold.

(Real fighting uses the knee bar, but in a much simpler form. Generally you’re not going to get the chance to tie someone’s legs up like that, so usually a simple grapevine is used.)

Now for what drives me crazy.

A lot of wrestlers, even the great Ric Flair, don’t seem to understand what the move is doing. They seem to think the bent leg is the leg being attacked. Again, I played with this move with friends, and there was never the slightest discomfort in the bent leg.

So you see wrestlers attack the right leg of an opponent repeatedly, then attempt to finish them off by applying the figure four with the right leg bent. Wrong. You also see the figure four applied by a wrestler who just sits back on his arms and squeezes with his legs while his opponent writhes around. Wrong. You have to push up on the straight leg for it to really work. Even though there is sometimes pain without doing that, you’d definitely push up if you were trying to submit someone.

But the biggest mistake of all is putting in on such that the bent leg is placed below the knee. That makes no sense and does nothing at all.

Then we have the goofy convention of the figure four being reversed by flipping over (think Ric Flair, flipped over, arching his back, his golden mane drenched in blood as he screams in pain). This doesn’t actually do much. It might make it marginally more difficult to hyperextend the leg, but it’s highly unlikely it would be enough to stop the move from being a finisher. It certainly wouldn’t cause the person applying the hold to be in pain.

But I guess that’s pro wrestling. Things may start off based on reality, but over time conventions develop. Thus we get figure fours attacking the bent leg, flipping it over being a reversal, and things like wrestlers spending time to set up a table to throw someone through when just tossing them on the floor would take less time and hurt much more…

I have to love the surfboard submission hold. It just looks so cool, yet so underutilized in pro wrestling. Does anyone know a currently active wrestler who had a surfboard submission as their finisher?

Simple, but effective. I’ll never forget making one of my friends cry by applying that submission hold on him. Granted, we were in the 2nd grade, but it still felt cool to make him cry.