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This was a quarterfinal match in the 1998 G1 Climax.
(Wasn’t always round robin and a month long, kids. The format changed a whole lot across those first ten or so tournaments, and this is one of my favorite versions of it, a simple three day sixteen man regular bracket tournament.)
Of all the Hashimoto vs. Tenryu meetings in the past and the few yet to come, I imagine this is the one most people are most familiar with. Certainly, it’s proven to be the one with the most crossover success. While I prefer all three of their 1993-94 matches to this one, being longer and more substantive and a greater show of the deeper talents of two of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time, it’s not at all hard to see why this is the one with such an enduring mass appeal.
The sort of match you can throw in front of someone and, assuming they are the sort of person open to a new experience and who won’t just manufacture a reason not to like something new, probably have some success with. There’s no New Japan vs. WAR undercurrent to this one, virtually nothing you have to explain. You can simply present this as is, and I think just about anyone can immediately understand it. Wrestling is wrestling, drop into the middle of something as universal and as accessible as this matc
Shinya Hashimoto and Genichiro Tenryu, real arguably the two greatest ass kickers of the last decade, meet up in a match that is solely about who can kick the most ass.
On a surface level, you know exactly why this is great.
Tenryu and Hashimoto hit really really hard, and it is a thrill. This match is mostly chops, punches, and kicks, and these are two of the better choppers and kickers every, with Tenryu being the only punch expert in this match probably only because it wasn’t ever something Hashimoto devoted himself towards all that frequently (which I like and find incredibly charming, Hashimoto being this very old fashioned and honorable kind of fighter suggests he, in fact, shouldn’t throw that many punches when a legal strike will do). There is an audible crack and visible connection with each single blow, creating a display of physicality and simpler violence that is magnetic in a distinct way that only this sort of a thing can ever really be.
Underneath that, this is great for the smaller and softer reasons why the best matches like this always succeed.
Most important to the success of a match like this is the stuff in between those big exchanges, how they’re reacted to, the pauses, the valleys in between the peaks, the way things are laid out, and all of that, and Hashimoto and Tenryu are unsurprisingly great at that. Each sell and tumble is not only great individually, but they collect themselves into something greater than that, a stellar example of slow-building cumulative selling and exhaustion. Each tumble down and fight up takes a little more effort and each real real heavy blow has more and more of an effect. Tenryu and Hashimoto do the thing that separates the great ones like this from everything else, which there is a real sense of struggle built up in this match. It is not just the idea that they hate each other and don’t want to lose to each other, but it’s also that a match like this is hard and grueling and, over time, extracts a real toll.
What this match does so well — and what it rarely gets credit for — is being an exhausting match, in the most complementary way.
One small thing this match does especially well, in this realm, is the way that it employs Genichiro Tenryu’s signature punch. As much as Tenryu’s repeated punch casts him as someone for Our Hero to overcome, a rougher and dirtier move used to cut Hashimoto off and that he eventually pushes through, it is also used SO well as this illustration of something else about this match that makes it stand out, which is that things have changed between these two, and Tenryu needs to do this to keep up.
It’s a nasty and a violent fight, to be sure, but there’s also a desperation to it.
Hashimoto shows the exhaustion, sells a real urgency at all times in the back half or so, but really, most of that feeling comes from Tenryu, yet again turning in another all-time great world weary veteran performance. That’s not a judgment on Hashimoto either, as the match works better explicitly because most of it comes from Tenryu. He tires more easily than Hashimoto, the years since their last meaning having reversed the roles, now with Hashimoto at the top of his game and Tenryu as the one trying to keep up, and Tenryu is so great at expressing this idea without it ever feeling like the match is shouting it at you. It’s Tenryu who has a little harder time getting up, it’s Tenryu who takes bigger risks, and above else, it’s Tenryu who needs to step outside himself and who needs to have everything go right. It’s a classic narrative device in Japanese wrestling, the idea that the transition of power — or more often than not, the idea that the transition has already happened — from one generation to the next in long-term repeat pairings is told in these moments, who needs a perfect game to succeed and who doesn’t and who needs to go bigger and who doesn’t, and it works as well here as it does anywhere else.
Tenryu being Tenryu, insistent and stubborn as all hell, the big chance is what eventually costs him.
Fighting outside of himself with nothing going right enough for him to truly succeed long term, Tenryu’s leap off the top gets him wheel kicked in the brain on the way down, and he’s opened up for the Hashimoto bombs like never before in the match. One DDT doesn’t quite do the truck, but Tenryu no longer has the fight he did for the first eleven or twelve minutes of the match. Hashimoto powers through the resistance, and a second DDT gets him the win.
It’s not an especially bombastic ending, like you often get in big bombfests like this, but I think that’s where this match has always been secretly just a little different than its reputation suggests. An all-time great slugfest, yes, but it’s so much more than that. It’s measured and assured, and a story about old foes in a new setting. That spectacle and bombast is for other matches, and instead, I find that one of the all-time great ass kickers simply running out of road against the current baddest man alive has so much more depth to it than simply ending on the biggest bomb, loudest strike, or coolest move.
This isn’t the absolute number one best match between two of the best wrestlers ever, but a simpler kind of perfect little self contained story on top of the usual brutality, which is why it has the reputation that it does. I think, with these two, it comes down to preference, and while this isn’t mine quite so much as the others, I completely get it. On top of all the things people always talk about here, there is such a charm to this one that makes it simply too hard to deny.
Another one for the “please study it before you do it” file.
HANDWERK 