This was a nail boards, light tubes, and cage death match for Takeda’s BJW Deathmatch Heavyweight Title.
As has been noted previously on this blog, with virtually any deathmatch in the last ten years or so that has really impressed me on any level, it is very hard once you have reached a certain point as a deathmatch fan to really be blown away by anything. It can be frustrating at times — and never was that more the case than with the large scale online reaction to Masashi Takeda’s 2018 — but not everyone has been watching deathmatches for a decade plus, or whatever. When you see so many things done over and over and over, it loses something, and innovation in this field is rarer and rarer the longer it exists as a subgenre. More than in probably any other style of wrestling, the uncommon can become common real fast.
Masashi Takeda and Takumi Tsukamoto do not have an especially inventive match together here.
However, there are certain things that will just always be cool as hell.
Several of them happen in this very match.
Things like wild bumping on a bed of nails, big moves off the apron onto a barbed wire mesh fence (somehow this is the cage? I don’t know, man, sometimes you gotta just lean into it.), cutting someone’s face open with the broken side of a light tube, stabbing someone in the face with an open pair of scissors, that sort of stuff is always going to work for me on some level, even when none of it is new.
It is never just about what happens, of course.
Composition matters a whole lot too. To count the amount of deathmatches with a few incredible spots that, at large, are not great overall matches, you would probably need more hands than exist at any of the shows these matches take place on, and maybe that exist in the world. It happens a whole lot more than the inverse. This is not a match that is necessarily a marvel of construction, and it has the same problem at the end as a lot of big BJW deathmatches, which is that the big stuff comes before the actual end, so the final minutes come after the actual climax of the thing, but by and large, they get the things right that they need to. The spots build up, the energy increases, and they (mostly) escalate as well as possible. It makes sense, more or less. Cool shit assembled in such a way to get near maximum value out of said cool shit.
Primarily what helps this match’s cool shit matter more though — and what makes so many of his matches like this work better than those of his peers — is just how fun it is to watch Masashi Takeda.
He has an energy to him, an aura or a presence if you’d prefer a classical buzzword, that few other deathmatch workers in the world at this point have. The hack bit is to talk about how Takeda is an Actual Great Wrestler (revolting, anyone who says things like this shouldn’t be allowed to watch deathmatches, your brain is soft and your spirit is weak), but the real thing is that he just has something. He has the thing most of the real pop-off-your-screen stars have, the sort of ability to make things feel important, to elevate almost every piece of material he interacts with, and to overuse a phrase on this site once again, the ability to simple wrestle big. Everything he does has a little extra to it, there’s a manic energy he puts into almost everything, and the result is that the sorts of spots that have become routine through repetition feel interesting and big, if not quite fresh.
Tsukamoto is far from a bad wrestler, he is mechanically solid, has a certain energy to him too, and is certainly no piece of luggage in this match, but as with all but the very best Takeda deathmatches (2018 spoilers), this is the Takeda Show, and he is simply this month’s guest.
Masashi keeps a hold on the belt with the Reverse U Crash after a series of nearfalls following all the big gimmicks getting used.
Probably not even a top five or ten Takeda deathmatch in 2018, but weirdly, it’s the one I would rather people watched first, rather than one of the big hits. For what it lacks in next-level insanity and bombast, it makes up for in being pitch perfect at establishing a kind of baseline for the rest of the year.
HANDWERK 