AEW's Athena Reveals Origins Of Devastating O-Face Finisher

At ROH Supercard of Honor, Athena amazed fans when she delivered a devastating O-Face to Maya World from the off top of a ladder. Admittedly, though, "The Forever Champion" was once afraid to even scale the top rope to hit it.

Speaking with "Fightful," Athena detailed the origins of her finishing move, more commonly known as a diving corkscrew stunner. "I actually did not create my finisher," she said. "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. He was getting ready to retire and I go, 'What are you going to do with that move, my guy?' 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.'"

With Johnson's help, Athena spent two months practicing the O-Face, with physical agony and misses naturally arising during the process. Still, Athena powered through the pain to eventually perfect it from the second rope of the wrestling ring.

A push from her former trainer Booker T later led to the move's elevation to the top rope. In fact, Booker volunteered to be the first victim of Athena's top-rope O-Face.

"I remember getting with Booker T. He was like, 'Hey, you got to do this off the top. It's going to look so much better from the top,” Athena recalled, noting her initial apprehension to boost the move due to her fear of heights. As evidenced by her performance at Supercard of Honor, that fear has since subsided.

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit "Fightful" with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.