Triple H Talks About The Origins Of The Pedigree & Giving Seth Rollins His Blessing To Use The Move

One of the most recognizable and iconic finishing maneuvers of the last 20 years is Triple H’s Pedegree.

In a new short feature shared on Twitter, Triple H shares the origins of the maneuver, saying that it is something he adapted from his original trainer, Killer Kowalski, “It’s interesting, the Pedigree, for me started actually when I was training with Killer Kowalski,” he began. “Kowalski used to do it a spot where he’d put a guy’s head between his knees and he would jump up and just kind of jar their neck. It just dawned on me that if he kept going straight down to his knees, it was like a sort of a version of a piledriver. And as I looked at it, I thought, well, if you held the guy’s arms, it would be very clearly a piledriver, so it started out as that in my mind, I’ve always thought that it was something very unique that I had never seen done before, it sort of slowly evolved in to me hooking the arms behind the guy’s back and then jumping up and having them, you know, come down full body face first.”

In 2015, Seth Rollins began using the maneuver when there was a brief ban on his Stomp finisher. This was done with Hunter’s full blessing, “I was like, ‘if you think that benefits you, please do. Like, I would be honored.’ And, you know, and it worked for him for a while. So, yeah, I was happy for him to do it. You know there’s moments in your career where there are things like they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So that for me, if he felt like it was meaningful to him, I was glad he could use it and get something out of it.”

These days, Triple H is mostly behind the scenes producing the NXT brand, which you can see every Wednesday night at 8 PM on USA.