Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Shinsuke Nakamura, NJPW G1 Climax Special 2011 (9/19/2011)

This was for Tanahashi’s IWGP Heavyweight Title, with Shinsuke Nakamura using the title shot gained from his G1 Climax victory.

To this point in their history, this is the best match they’ve ever had together. While it’s put together better than their last two or three and while it manages to feel a little grander than it has in a while and like much more of a titanic struggle, it’s largely an accident that this becomes as great as it does. Very early on, Nakamura explodes on Tanahashi with a series of slaps and elbows, and winds up knocking Tanahashi’s front tooth out.

It’s not a bloody match and Nakamura doesn’t begin working the mouth or anything, sadly, but it’s this very real and undeniable visual to tell you that this is more serious between the two than it’s ever been, Tanahashi is in more trouble than he’s ever been, and it does so much for the match. I love the guy, but Tanahashi matches before his Former Ace period could sometimes lack a certain grit. When he’s constantly holding his mouth in pain and when you consistently look at the screen and see him completely missing a front tooth, it’s hard to get away from that. It’s this visible sign of real and actual damage that the production never lets you forget about, and the result is that this all feels just a little bit realer, and thusly, just a little bit more important.

Nakamura might stay away from the mouth so as to be a good sport, but he’s aggressive, violent, and mean spirited here generally in a way that he wasn’t in May. He loosely targets the right arm of Tanahashi, following the champion’s new ability to hang elbow for elbow with Nakamura, and it slows that attack down. Tanahashi is a gutsy babyface and he tries, but he’s also a smart enough wrestler to back off when it doesn’t work, both because it doesn’t make as much sense, and also because it puts the strategy over as an effective deterrent, instead of simply a thing that happened. For his part, Tanahashi attempts his usual, but it never really works out. Nakamura sells the knee well enough in the brief moments that Tanahashi can grab onto it or kick it out of the air, but it’s never very long, and it’s always done out of either desperation or anger, and never a lasting thing.

The escalation over the course of twenty or so minutes is pitch perfect. Nakamura goes after the arm more effectively first to stop the elbows and secondly to slow any damage being done to the leg he needs to win this match. Tanahashi is forced to go to the air more and step further out of his comfort zone. Nakamura responds with his own bigger offense, often still targeting the arm in some way. Tanahashi’s selling is exemplary, yet again. When he throws his elbows and a few slaps more frequently in the back third of the match, it means just a little bit more because he was forced to do it less earlier on. It’s fine enough to sell something when you use it, it’s good and logical and all of that. The far better option though is to sell the damage by not using it instead, and the best option is to then fold that back in on itself by going back to it, in spite of the pain, because there is no other choice. The roads collapse and the only way out is through. It’s the behavior of a generational level babyface.

Like any great rivalry, the things that worked once stop working as time goes on. Things Tanahashi did in May are countered here. Things Nakamura has come up with since then no longer work. Tanahashi is able to avoid the Boma Ye entirely, be it by sacrificing his hurt arm to block it (complete with a gorgeous sell after) to throw Nakamura off before dodging entirely, or cutting him off beforehand. Nakamura can block a Sling Blade or the High Fly Flow Crossbody, but Tanahashi is a smarter wrestler and is eventually able to find his way into these things, when science triumphs over brute force. In his despair, Nakamura tries to dig back for the Landslide, but while it works against the newer crop because they haven’t scouted it, it absolutely does nothing against Tanahashi. He turns it into a modification of the Sling Blade, before unloading with an especially great looking running Sling Blade from the corner, not unlike Nakamura’s set up for the Boma Ye. Tanahashi then adapts his usual winning combination into two High Fly Flows to the back, but adding in a tight cradle on the cover to keep the title.

If there’s a Tanahashi vs. Nakamura match that’s fallen through the cracks, this is it. It’s not as good as their middle of the decade work together, but it’s a gigantic leap forward after a series of matches going into this that never quite seemed to live up to their potential. By this point, they are both close enough to the final/peak versions of themselves that this feels like a bigger deal than it ever has and a bigger deal than any IWGP Title match in the last several years, very possibly back to Nagata and Tanahashi four years prior. It’s everything you’d like out of a clash of the titans sort of match with these two, complete with one especially good selling performance, and accidental real violence to give it a special kind of feeling.

It’s Tanahashi’s biggest win to this point too, I believe, as he ejects Shinsuke Nakamura from what’s now his title picture for the last time and does so in a match that seems determined to say once and for all that science and careful thought matters more than Nakamura’s petty rage and pure spite. Nothing ever really ends until Nakamura is gone, but this is up there with their best work together because it’s a match that not only summarizes who they are, but who they are to each other and their entire history together. Beyond simply an uplifting babyface victory, once and for all between these two, it’s said that there’s more to it than innate skill, that the things you do in a match should actually matter.

It’s hard not to love a match that respects my time, patience, and thought processes as much as this match did. Thankfully, they didn’t make that hard on me at all. Nobody ever talks about this one, but it did a lot for me and if you’re reading this, it might do a lot for you too.

***3/4