The vertebreaker is a piledriver that is hard to describe and insanely dangerous. By bending your opponent over, then hooking your arms into his like some kind of human Jigsaw trap, you lift him so that he is held on your back, but inverted. After that, it's down you go right on the top of your head. This move is currently banned in WWE unless you agree to sign a waiver agreeing that you know it might paralyze you.
If you were following Gregory Helms back in WCW, he used the vertebreaker, and it's the finisher of longtime cult wrestling favorite Christopher Daniels. The move's originator though, is Megumi Kudo, who called it the Kudome Valentine. A lot of people believed that Kudo got to the top based on her looks, and she is, like, whoah, but she trained hard and rose through the ranks at Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling, home to some of the most hardcore matches you'll ever see. She was known to wrestle with the ropes replaced with barbed wire, and her retire match was a, we're not making this up, "no ropes, 200V, double hell, double barbed wire barricade, double landmine, glass crush death match."
The goal of this article was to call attention to the innovators behind moves that stars here in the West have made famous despite the fact that they are all pretty much the work of incredible Japanese ladies. Truth be told, the only person we have ever seen using most of the moves you'll see in the above video is King from the Tekken video game series.
Toyota was a rival of Etsuko Mita, and personality-wise she was pretty dull and not in the least charismatic. When it came to speaking the language of pain, though, Toyota was a combination Oscar Wilde and Ultimate Warrior. None of the brilliant moves she developed make even the slightest bit of sense, and every one of them belongs in the "This might kill you" category. She's still going strong at 40, so make sure you show this article to anyone who bandies around the inventiveness of Kanyon, Tommy Dreamer, Taz, or any of the other men who don't have the right to scrub their blood out of Manami Toyota's sports bra.
