Over the last few days, I’ve been watching a lot of Hulk Hogan leg drops, in honor of his recent victory over Gawker. Now, I’m still excited and happy over his victory over that shitty network of sites, but eventually I got to a point where I’d begun moving on, and watching all these montages of Hulk Hogan leg drops got me thinking about ultimately, the leg drop is kind of a dumb move.
Basically, a wrestler leaps up in the air and drapes their popliteal over their opponent’s head. It’s basically like clotheslining someone, with your leg, and probably with less momentum, since they’re already flat on mat, and gravity probably can’t provide the same force as person(s) running at each other.
Sure, Hulk Hogan made the move famous, but there’s no denying that when you take the Hulkster factor out of the equation, it’s still a pretty mundane and lackluster maneuver.
Watching the previously linked montage, it’s actually a depressing chronology of the passing of time, as viewers can literally witness the aging of Hulk Hogan, as he was dropping legs on guys as old as the Andre the Giant, when he was hitting the ropes, jumping up nearly three feet, and dropping the leg a pretty good distance, to when he was wrestling Goldberg, was already over the hill, and basically leaning against the ropes before kind of falling onto Goldberg leg first, all the way to his Wrestlemania match with Vince McMahon himself, where he’s getting no air and dropping the worst leg drops in the history of mankind.
Even the best leg drops were dependent on variables outside of the performer themselves; the tension of the mat, to give a good, loud, hearty sound when the leg came crashing down, to the opponent’s willingness to sell; not necessarily as over-the-top as Shawn Michaels or The Rock, but guys like Big Boss Man and Ric Flair took them as if they were shot with a sawed off at close range.
The worst part about Hogan making the leg drop so famous, is that entire generations of wrestlers consider it a move to add to their arsenal, because Hulk Hogan made the leg drop a known wrestling maneuver. More current performers like Fandango did one off the top rope, and Becky Lynch has a sequence in which she does three leg drops in a row.
And yet even worse, as much of the leg drop is a lame move, it’s absolutely a move that’s physically terrible to perform. Hulk Hogan himself has come out and explained that he’s basically got a permanently crooked spine, from decades of dropping the big leg, and yet wrestlers of today are still using them. As lame as it would sound to add the leg drop to the list with the piledriver as moves that should be done sparingly, and only with approval, for the safety and future health of wrestlers, it absolutely should be.
Hulkamania will in fact live forever, but imagine how much greater it could have been if Hogan had a better move than the leg drop?
