The Miz recently did a Q&A on his TikTok account, fielding questions from fans about a wide range of topics.
During it, the former WWE Champion revealed that it was Dean Malenko who came up with his iconic Skull Crushing Finale.
“How did I come up with my finisher? So, if you remember, I used to wear shorts, and I was a tag team Superstar, and one time, the one time I wore trunks, literally from then on I was wearing trunks for the rest of my life, like the rest of my career, like it was just happening.
“So once that switch happened to trunks, I had to find a new finisher, and a new character, and a new kind of just, be more serious. So, I went with Dean Malenko and Arn Anderson and every live event, every television, Monday Night Raw, like we would literally be like, just racking our brains on different finishers. I had that had the knee DDT, which everyone thought was a half DDT, So they were like, ‘No.’
“Then I had the knee lift into the neck breaker, which was my former one, and I called it a Reality Check. And they were like, ‘That’s just not a finisher’ and then I re-upped it and I said, ‘Well, what if I do it into one move and I do it on my knee into a neckbreaker?’ There they still ‘That’s not enough.’
And one day Dean was like, ‘Why don’t you try and do like a full nelson and sweep a front of his leg and see if that works. And we did it and everyone seemed to like it. I liked it because I could do it pretty much on everybody. And so that is how the Skull Crushing Finale was created.”
Quotes via Inside The Ropes