WWE Hall of Famer Booker T has reaffirmed his stance in the ongoing “finisher spam” debate, telling listeners of the Hall of Fame podcast that his view of modern wrestling will not change despite pushback from AEW’s Ricochet.
The discussion began on an earlier episode of the podcast, when Booker and co-host Brad Gilmore criticized the trend of wrestlers hitting their finishing moves several times in a single match without securing a pin. The pair pointed to Brock Lesnar’s win over Oba Femi at Clash in Italy, in which Lesnar landed multiple F5s, as an example. Ricochet responded on social media, defending the practice as a way to add suspense and joking that critics were unfamiliar with the anime series Dragon Ball Z.
On the latest episode of the Hall of Fame podcast, Booker addressed the reply. He said he was not seeking a confrontation and read Ricochet’s comments as an opinion rather than a counterattack. “I wasn’t looking for a fight with Ricochet or anything like that,” Booker said. “I think Ricochet was just stating his opinion.” He added that he is familiar with Dragon Ball Z and plays the franchise’s video games.
Booker then restated his position plainly. “My opinion is not going to change, not one bit, as far as the way I see professional wrestling now,” he said.
He framed his argument around pacing, saying a card should build to a crescendo rather than peak early. “I’m not going to put the first match out there and say, ‘Hey, guys, go out there. I need you guys doing dives over the top, I need you guys doing chair shots, I need you guys bringing the trash can out and kicking out everything,’ because we still got a main event,” he said.
To illustrate the point, Booker recounted a conversation with a young wrestler he trains who dismissed the WrestleMania 42 match between CM Punk and Roman Reigns. “He said, ‘Hey, boss, the CM Punk match versus Roman, what’d you think about it?’ I go, ‘Man, what a hell of a match, top 10 matches, WrestleMania of all times,’ and he looks at me. He goes, ‘but they didn’t do anything.’ I say, ‘That’s what you need to try to find,'” Booker said.
Booker acknowledged that younger wrestlers see the business differently than he does. “These young guys today, they see this business totally different in a lot of ways than I do,” he said. He said he respects Ricochet’s perspective even while disagreeing with it, and that he intends to keep teaching restraint to the talent he works with, leaving it to each performer to decide whether to apply it. “You just don’t need to do it every night with every move, that’s the only thing I’m seeing,” he said.
