The Lost Art of The Submission

Where has the submission gone? I've racked my brain for a while now, and the only submission finishers I can think of in the WWE right now are Ric Flair's Figure-Four and John Cena's STFU (unless you count Mark Henry's bear hug as being legitimate). A submission maneuver is a great way to end a match. Where have all of them gone?...

The Ankle Lock...The Crippler Crossface...The Sharpshooter...all of them are among the most exciting and versatile finishers in the history of the business. These finishers were used by only the best technical wrestlers in wrestling in order to highlight that specific characteristic: technically sound. Does this mean we no longer have any good technical wrestlers? Certainly not, the business has just changed!

WWE buys into the idea that a match is better ended with a pin than with a tap-out. They assume that a high-impact move is the best way to finish off a match. Here is a perfect example: CM Punk. If you recall, for his first several months in ECW CM Punk used the Anaconda Vice to make his opponents tap. Now, someone in WWE is having him use the Go-To-Sleep as his finisher. It's a cool move, but giving Punk a submission finisher really separated him from the rest of the wrestlers.

John Cena and Ric Flair are the only main-eventers that use submissions as finishers now. Flair's use of the Figure-Four only persists because he has used it his whole career. John Cena has used the STFU to win the main event at Wrestlemania for the past two years. The STFU is a very awkward submission. Cena often struggles to apply it and it comes out looking crappy. Why not let guys like Punk at least use the Anaconda Vice?

What happened to the submissions? You tell me.

Drew Arnold, writing for The Irish Whip