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It’s a very rare feeling — not just as a wrestling fan, but as a human being — to experience the greatest ever version of something, or at least, what feels to you like the greatest ever version of something, especially for the first time. Those are occasions you remember, if not so much in terms of where you were or the exact date upon which it happened, the act of experiencing them and the feeling it gave you.
There are not a lot of wrestling matches that leave me in awe after the fact.
Not to toot my own horn, but when you watch a lot of wrestling, it is a harder and harde effect to achieve. It very rarely happens now (although, writing this in 2024, the year of Demus vs. Mad Dog, it is not impossible), but even ten or so years ago, when I first binge watched ECW when I was in college, it was not an especially easy thing to do.
Steve Corino vs. Yoshihiro Tajiri left me in awe, and every time I have watched it since, it has continued to do so.
I believe that, throughout the entire history of professional wrestling, there has never been a greater version of a former lackey getting revenge upon his former boss than in this match.
Part of that comes from everything before it.
Yoshihiro Tajiri had previously done what nobody else in The Network could do by winning the ECW World Television Title, only for that apparatus to also turn on him to gift it to Rhino, in the ultimate kind of expression of the idea that for everyone else, the people Tajiri represents, some things will be taken away from you the moment you have them because they are meant for a handpicked favored few. Of course, far more important than the context of ECW history, The Network, or Corino and Tajiri together, it’s the pre-match microphone work from Corino that gives this so much of the flavor that it has, in which Corino not only calls Tajiri an old-timey World War II era light slur beginning with a J, but upon a rebuke to an offer to rejoin him as an underling, drops in a “slant-eyed bastard” as well, before being immediately kicked as hard as possible in the face.
That’s so much of what I love about this match, I think.
Not only that it is this moment of revenge for a put-upon great and that this has been building for nearly a year, but also that it is one of the great morality tales in the history of professional wrestling.
In a medium that so often rewards cruelty towards everyone else, whatever group that might come to mind when you read that, this is both arguably among the most direct and inarguably among the most brutal cases of revenge for that ever caught on film. Wrestling is not short upon matches revolving around punishments for transgressions, but they’re usually bigger and more dramatic in scope, and I think there’s such a thrill in someone simply being this exact type of an asshole and being given one of the most horrific beating ever captured on film for it.
Part of it is also that, just as a match, it is one of the sickest and coolest and tightest matches of all time.
Every single thing to happen in this match rocks.
Corino and Tajiri pack this thing to the brim and then some with things to love. Not only all of Tajiri’s hard strikes — and this is a match with very possibly a few of his hardest kicks ever and what I believe is the most violent Karate Rush ever caught on film — but every bit of Corino offense is fantastic, every Tajiri attack feels like attempt on the life of Steve Corino, it also gets constantly meaner with every moment. It is, sneakily, one of the more hostile matches ever as well, with Tajiri taking more and more offense to every moment Corino sticks around, and feeling as if he’s constantly punishing him even further for refusing to stay down after all of the shit he’s pulled.
The other thing I love about this match is that — much like another all-time classic to also happen on May 14th including two wrestlers who are SO Corino-coded in different ways — it is one of the best ever examples of elevating and legitimizing a bullshit heel in defeat while never once making it obvious that this is what’s happening.
Obviously, yes, Steve Corino bleeds a whole lot, genuinely one of the more gruesome and impressive crimson masks of the 21st century let alone the year, and survives a lot after that, but more important is what he does for himself. His manager Jack Victory (high spot) is barely involved, and for the first time, what Corino has, he gets by himself. The match is smart enough to present him as an opportunist, lucky enough to be in good situations like in front of a table Tajiri set up in a moment when Tajiri gets slightly overzealous, but also always smart enough to make the most of everything. It’s the genius of a match like this done right, one that never yells at you that this wrestler is Great or that this wrestler is tough, but one that lays the seeds of admiration in small ways so that they can be harvested later while still feeling organic (in one of the best ECW segments in its final years, in which Corino of all people, is the first to interrupt the Justin Credible catchphrase and call it the lamest thing in the world to a huge pop).
What Corino gets in this match is all fairly basic, but because of the genuinely grotesque combination of what Tajiri’s done to him in terms of offense as well as the deep red covering his face and all that bleached hair, it’s all impressive. More than that, it is never so impressive that it turns the focus away from what is rightfully happening him towards what he’s fighting, and it is never so much — in terms of what he does nor what he recovers from nor how — that it feels as though he doesn’t deserve this.
That’s the magic here.
For all he gains in this match by taking this stunning beating, it is also always one that feels earned, and that also feels great.
Be it Corino’s luck, Corino’s toughness, or Corino’s mind, it all runs into a wall at the end, and that wall is Yoshihiro Tajiri. Corino cannot overcome the staggering amount of blood loss nor just how badly Tajiri wants to beat his ass, and steps in it further and further. Leaning on the edge of the table, he is perfectly set up for the best Tajiri kick of all time across his face, perfectly lined up on this surface.
Tajiri follows up by double stomping him through said table — and not just breaking it in half, but with the long edges still in tact somewhat, meaning he has literally put him through it — and gains the greatest feeling victory of his career.
Genuinely, it is one of my favorite matches of all time.
Some of that is, to be fair, the fact that when I first watched it, it had less the reputation as an all-timer and more so just as a late ECW highlight. I know I was never the first one to talk about this match like THIS, but as the years have gone on and more people have come around to this as one of the best ever, there’s a certain pride I’ve gained in being there earlier. The other part, independent of that and way way way way stronger than that, is that it constantly fills me with so much joy, and has become one of those matches I watch over and over again. I don’t do that a whole lot, it’s really like this and the FEAR main event and few select others, and like those, this has never once lost its charm to me.
I think it is the best version of this idea ever, the greatest coward heel legitimization ever, one of the great bloodbaths ever, one of the best matches ever in the history of one of the coolest wrestling promotions of all time, and, above all, one of those matches that I can and have and would recommend to anyone, no matter to what extent you are a fan.
Yoshihiro Tajiri vs. Steve Corino is professional wrestling to me, and few matches have ever felt better, both on the first time and on maybe, I don’t know, the twentieth.
The only reason I’m not 100% positive this is the best match in ECW history, is because four months earlier, it’s possible Tajiri had an even better one.
HANDWERK 