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This was a Barbed Wire Board & Barbed Wire Baseball Bat Bunkhouse Deathmatch.
It’s the IWA Japan offer match on the famous Weekly Pro Wrestling BRIDGE OF DREAMS show. The famous pro wrestling magazine organized a gigantic Dome show with all the notable promotions of the era throwing a match in. Most were great, but I imagine if you’re reading this, you know that the NJPW guys didn’t quite produce their greatest outing and also that it’s never been released in any sort of official format.
Luckily, you’re reading this in the 2020s and unofficial video of it has been widely available for quite some time now.
It’s pretty great.
There are like ten or twenty different things here worth capturing in GIFs, but I think you should just watch the match for yourself instead.
Really, the match is just packed nearly full of real cool stuff. Terry Funk bleeding up a storm, the classic Foley vs. Funk stuff, Headhunters diving off the top onto Nakamaki lying on the Big Ramp, all sorts of stuff off the top or the apron to the floor near the end, Headhunter dives, a few real sick barbed wire board spots, all sorts of other assorted lunacy. Cactus Jack and The Headhunters getting to team up in a match based around sheer lunacy in the mid 1990s feels a little bit unfair, like Gary Busey and John C. McGinley sharing the screen as different types of psychopaths in SURVIVING THE GAME (1994) and constantly outdoing each other. It’s a wonderful type of thing to see, different sorts of freaks at the peaks of their powers going insane in front of the world.
You can criticize some things, it’s disorganized as hell, there are definitely a few real down portions of this that do hinder them somewhat when they start to build a lot of momentum, but I like that. I don’t want a match like this to really have a flow or to follow a formula. With people like this, stumbling upon any real sense of normalcy would feel deeply wrong. While it holds the match back somewhat, and while it could maybe be tighter, it’s otherwise just about perfect as is.
If you’re going to run a big sort of chaotic mess, this is how you do it. If you’re going to have a match that is simply a compilation of cool shit, it helps to do shit this cool. Not exactly some secret artifact, a road map to a land forgotten by time, but the sort of wild, violent, and reckless mess that I miss seeing performed with the sort of skill and charm that was on display here.
Big, dumb, and wonderful.
HANDWERK 