“Who’s house? … Swerve’s House!”
Former AEW World Champion Swerve Strickland, who uses his House Call finisher to win the majority of his matches, recalled during a recent interview how Paul “Triple H” Levesque and Shawn Michaels told him not to use it as a finishing move while he was in WWE.
“When I first started doing (the House Call) in NXT, I would hit it, but some people would duck and it would [skims top of head],” Swerve recalled during an appearance on the ‘No-Contest Wrestling’ podcast with O’Shea Jackson and TJ Jefferson. “Triple H was like, ‘Don’t use it as a finish. I like it, but don’t use it as a finish.’ Shawn (Michaels) would agree with him, ‘Yeah, it’s a not finish. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t.’ People are ducking from it. If you duck from it, of course I’m going to miss. You of all people, Shawn, you do a superkick. He’s like, ‘It’s not a finish.'”
Strickland continued, “I struggled finding a new finish for a while in NXT. Finn came back, so I couldn’t do the Swerve Stomp. I’m a big fan of Naruki Doi. He does the Naruki Driver. Shoutout to SATs, Storm Cradle Driver is the original. I saw that and I was using it on Leon Ruff. ‘I can hit that.’ Bronson Reed came up and I was like ‘Ughhh, how do I do this?’ It came time to win the North American Title, this is like a year apart, Bronson is the North American Champion, Shawn is like, ‘We were coming up with creative for the finish. Can you do that kick for the finish?’ You gotta be kidding me. I had to circle a whole year of Shawn being like, ‘Now you can do what you want.'”
(H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.)
