Athena Says Booker T Encouraged Her To Start Doing O-Face Finisher From The Top Rope

Booker T helped Athena out with her finisher.

Athena’s O-Face finisher is widely considered to be one of the best moves in all of wrestling. In a new interview with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp, the ‘Fallen Goddess’ revealed the original creator of the move.

“So this is the wild part and I feel like I don’t say it a lot. I actually did not create my finisher. I’m very open about that because the person that created my finisher, I’m still to this day, very close friends with. He ended up retiring and getting married and has cats and dogs and everything like that. But his name is Jiggle-O James Johnson, which is why it’s called the O-Face. You can kind of connect some dots, but he was getting ready to retire. I go, ‘What are you gonna do with that move, my guy?’ What are you gonna do with that?’”

Continuing on, Athena revealed that she was not good at the move for months. Things changed when Booker T encouraged her to do it from the top rope.

“So because of the precision of it, you have to have immense body control to do the corkscrew. So he was like, ‘I’ll teach it to you, but if it looks bad, you’re not doing it.’ So like after like two months of like just painful agony and misses and hitting my side and missing a person, even when I first started doing the move, I did it off the second, ‘cause I’m terrified of heights, terrified of heights. Just a long process of that and I think for like my first two years of me doing the move, I did it off the second rope ‘cause I was so afraid. I remember getting with Booker T and he was like, ‘Hey, you gotta do this off the top. You gotta do this. It’s gonna look so much better from the top.’ I don’t think he even remembers this. He was the first one to take it off the top row. He was like, ‘You get up there or all of us are running to Minute Maid Stadium.’ I was like, ‘Oh,’ and like the entire class like, ‘You better get on that top rope.’ So like Booker’s like, ‘I’ll take it,’ and he was like, ‘See, was that a problem?’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ But it’s really cool to have a move like that and I’ve seen so many different iterations of it. I think one of my favorite things to do is see people try to do it and fail now. I think that’s like actually one of my  favorite things. Maybe that makes me a callous human being. I’m like, ‘You can try it. Go on ahead.’”

Athena went on to recall Asuka taking the finisher during one of their NXT TakeOver matches.

“Probably Asuka, to be honest with you. Yeah, probably Asuka. I can’t remember which championship match it was. I think it was the last one we did and she took it. I was like, ‘Oh, I got her. I got her on that one.’ But honestly, the mechanics of the move, it’s mostly on me to do all the heavy turning, lifting and that type of jam. But I just remember just feeling it that day. I knew I got her. I was like, ‘Ooh.’”

To round out the topic, Athena talked about one instance where she got hurt doing the move.

“I’ve been doing this move for probably a whole teenager at this point in time. I haven’t really felt any effects of it. I will say that. I don’t do it as often. But when you can just beat someone by hitting them in the face, like, why do you need to bring out the super finisher, if that makes sense? But I will say this, the only time I’ve ever gotten hurt. I hit the O-Face in a ring that was not the best—and I won’t say where, ‘cause we all love to support each other—but the board popped out and so I landed on the board that popped out and I bruised my tailbone pretty bad, but that’s the only time it’s ever bothered me. But consistently during the move, I don’t know, never really had it. I think maybe I’ve done one off a ladder a couple of times. Like that didn’t really bother me. So I don’t know. It’s weird, I guess. I haven’t really experienced any pain or anything from it and I know that that’s something that I’m like, ‘The moment I do, we got to pass on the torch to somebody else and somebody else has to learn how to do it.’ But me doing that move for that long, I really haven’t experienced it to be honest with you.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Athena talked about managing The Usos during the early part of their careers. Check out her full comments by clicking here.

Fans can check out Fightful’s full interview with Athena in the video linked at the top of this article.