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This was for Kobashi’s GHC Heavyweight Title.
Something about professional wrestling that, in one way or another and at one point in a fan life cycle or another, everyone eventually loves is the idea that professional wrestling can be just about anything. There is no one totally correct way to approach it. So long as it is done well, I personally have a hard time saying there’s too much that it straight up cannot be. A bunch of avenues can be explored that, while they are not my favorites, I like to think I have the ability within me to appreciate on some level.
In saying all of that though, this is one of the things that wrestling ought to be.
Two colossal larger than life destroyers, colliding at the peaks of their powers, with a lot more on the line than the title itself. Yoshihiro Takayama walks into this match in the midst of a two plus year run from May/June 2002 through August 2004 that saw him not just beat, but carve up, virtually every major heavyweight in Japan. Kenta Kobashi stands as the highest profile one yet, himself in the midst of his own peak at the same time, and in the middle of one of the greatest title runs in the history of wrestling. It’s a rare match, especially for a then still healthy scene in Japan, in which — speaking in a kayfabe sense — it feels as though the winner has a rare, genuine, and with apologies to Triple Crown Champion Kawada, largely inarguable claim to being the best wrestler in the country.
Somehow, the match lives up to all that.
It’s a match that works in two ways, I think.
The first is simply as a titanic struggle. It would be a lie to call this a pure clash of the titans style match or to add it to the Toho Studios Pro Wrestling oeuvre in full because it gets a little too GHC Title Match for that (nobody does limbwork in a kaiju fight, you know?), but that immense feeling is always there. Every move feels like a big deal, basic momentum shifts feel like world enders let alone everything in the back half of the match, everything gradually becomes bigger and more dramatic while also being sold and executed with both greater force and desperation, and it feels like a genuine significant event, just as much as it does a wrestling match. It isn’t a simple match exactly, but it does feel like one that understands the atmosphere and environment provided not only by Budokan Hall but by the moment of this specific meeting, and that doesn’t waste much time because of that.
Kenta Kobashi vs. Yoshihiro Takayama in 2004 already feels like one of the biggest matches in the world, there isn’t a lot of table setting or foundational work that has to be done, you know?
It is also just classic pro wrestling.
For as much as this is this collision between two seemingly unstoppable forces, it’s also a match between a (occasionally grating) symbol of good in Kobashi and a guy in Yoshihiro Takayama who, at his core, is just a fucking prick. Takayama isn’t cheating or yelling at the crowd or even taunting too much, but everything he does feels so rude. Even the cut offs before he really gets going with a focal point like he does in the middle, there’s an insult that feels included with all of it. It’s one of the great casual jerk performances of the era, communicating so much with minimal gestures and pure body language, so much so that even someone never in love with Kobashi like myself feels just a little bit good when Kobashi overcomes and gets his ass.
Perhaps the most impressive thing though is that this match is as great as it is while also being the kind of match, at least in sections, that always annoys me so much.
Midway through the match, they make the decision to also have Takayama attack the right arm of Kenta Kobashi. Many readers know that few other choices in wrestling frustrate me like this, the attack on a limb someone needs — and is going to use anyways — to do their offense. It rarely works, and the result is often just poor selling that needlessly complicates things. It always feels a little selfish, and reflects as poorly on the perpetrator as on the other guy, forcing something that makes them look good at the expense of the match. There are what feels like hundreds of matches like this, that would be so much better with a choice to simply work the other side, never forcing wrestlers who are not especially smart nor skilled as limb sellers into awkward positions like this. It’s often the point at which, when watching, a match breaks faith with me, this sign that the match is now going to become worse, no matter how well intentioned it might be or how much sense, in kayfabe, the attack might make.
In this match though, it works.
Kobashi and Takayama handle it with so much greater care and balance than most to ever try something like this. Some of that is due to selling, to be fair. It isn’t perfect, Kobashi never quite is, but there’s enough to count. I often find Kobashi to be cloying and phony when it comes to his emotional selling, but in terms of working with an injury, he can be one of the best. In this match, on top of a “what else is he going to do?” Kojima style situation, he takes the steps that so many others fail to take to establish why he has to keep using the right arm, on top of just that his biggest offense requires it. He tries to chop with the left arm and to throw headbutts, but cannot stand up to the firepower of Takayama like that. Adding onto that, the match also never has Takayama go to it for these long stretches, so much as using it to open Kobashi up for the big stuff when Takayama seems concerned he’s slowly losing a bomb trading display. It would be incorrect to say it was only targeted once or twice, but it isn’t everything to Takayama, and combined with how Kobashi handles it, that matters.
The match also ties these things together about as well as anyone could expect.
Following the hurt arm both opening Kobashi up for big attacks earlier than he would have been had Takayama done otherwise and diminishing the power of his best stuff, Takayama has these gigantic clean shots that feel like the most peril Kobashi’s title was maybe ever in. However, his impure heart cannot succeed, and Kobashi guts through it. The Lariats cannot beat Takayama, but they can set him up, and for the first time in a very long time, Kobashi wins with the Moonsault.
Part epic, part limb ass nerd bait, part morality tale, it’s a match that arguably bites off a little too much, but it’s a match that finishes what it starts anyways.
There’s a beautiful story here, hidden under all the highlights and bombast, I think. Takayama, when faced with someone near his size, panics under pressure in a way Kobashi never really does. It’s small, and in theory, the smart thing to do in targeting the arm and making things easier, but in trying to take a weapon from Kobashi, he loses by revealing that there is something to be feared, rather than having the faith in his own bombs to overcome. It’s one of the purest expressions of NOAH ideology ever, carried out perfectly by two of the best to ever stand on the green mat. Kobashi wins perhaps not because he’s better (or if you would prefer, not just because he’s better), but because he has the power of self belief that Takayama lacks in a key moment, and in this vision of wrestling, that is what matters the most.
It’s a rare thing, seeing two of the best wrestlers of all time hit their career apexes not only at the same time, but overlapping against each other like this. You have other matches like this you can list that fit the criteria, but as with this match, that’s sort of the point. You remember them because they’re special, and you remember them because, like this match, everything between the bells likely lived up to every single enormous feeling around them.
Kobashi and Takayama deliver a gargantuan clash, living up to every bit of its billing.
***3/4
HANDWERK 