Wrestling Move of the Week: Screwdriver
Brian Cage hitting his version of the Screwdriver on Braxton Sutter.
Move Name: Screwdriver
Created/innovated by: Jushin Liger
Notable users of move: Scott Steiner, Brian Cage
Notable variations of the move: None, although the most recent notable user of the move has his own name for the maneuver - the “Drill Claw”.
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There are professional wrestling maneuvers that are ultimately so dangerous, so easy to botch, so reliant on the person executing the maneuver to be strong enough to properly distribute your weight, that they become unicorns in a sense. And by “unicorns” I mean “moves that look cool and devastating but are so damn dangerous that the vast majority of wrestlers decide they aren’t worth adding to their repertoire”. One such move is the legendary Screwdriver, a piledriver variation that is so dangerous that only a handful of wrestlers have ever dared use it as their primary finishing maneuver.
The Screwdriver, more affectionately known as the Steiner Screwdriver or the SSD for short, is a vertical suplex piledriver. To execute this maneuver a wrestler applies a front facelock to their opponent and hooks the opponent's near arm over their shoulder, lifting them into a vertical suplex position. The wrestler executing the maneuver then turns their opponent 180°, forcing their opponent into the belly-to-belly piledriver position, then drop down into a sitting position, dropping their opponent on their head. The results? Well, jaw-dropping and high risk to say the least.
The video you just watched is a compilation of Screwdrivers being executed by the person who made the move famous (infamous?) around the world, Scott Steiner. Steiner learned the maneuver during a tour of Japan from pro wrestling legend Jushin Liger in the late 80s. Steiner, who at the time was teaming with his brother Rick and taking the tag team wrestling world by storm as The Steiner Brothers, loved the maneuver because his natural strength lent itself well to making the maneuver as awe-inspiring as it is. I mean, if you look at the execution of the Screwdriver, the primary component of effectively nailing that maneuver and not killing someone is the strength of the person executing the move. The person executing the Screwdriver has to drop their opponent juuuust right, as dropping them without legitimately catching them during the descent could lead to a stinger, a neck fracture, spinal injuries, a broken neck, paralysis, and possibly death. Thing is, as you can see from the video clip above, Scott Steiner was reckless as all hell and it seems that the safety of his opponents didn’t always factor into his decision to drive them into the canvas. And it’s not just Scott; the move itself is a reckless and risky concept with such a high margin of error that the move is probably the ultimate example of a wrestling move “unicorn and the real reason the Screwdriver isn’t used as openly as the litany of other piledriver variations in professional wrestling history. No in-ring performer with even a shred of humanity wants to harm their opponent, regardless of how “cool” a move looks, and the Screwdriver is overall too dangerous.
The most recent user of the maneuver is Brian Cage, who has dubbed his version of the move the “Drill Claw”. Cage is a lot safer in his execution of the Screwdriver, holding his opponents on the descent instead of letting them free-fall head first.
If you look at the way Cage executes the Screwdriver you can see that even though he factors in the safety of his opponent a lot more than Scott Steiner ever did that the margin for error is still very high. Brian is strong enough to support his opponents on the way down but one miscalculation and he has to live with unintentionally harming one of his colleagues in the ring, possibly permanently.
The Screwdriver is one of the most jaw-dropping maneuvers in pro wrestling history. It makes you want to pop as a spectator because it looks insane. But it’s also one of those moves that make me cringe for the recipient and the person executing it. And if a maneuver makes me feel that way as a wrestling fan I can only imagine what’s going on for the competitors in the ring. Some moves just ain’t worth the risk y’all.