This was for Mochizuki’s Open the Dream Gate Title.
A few months ago, some time in November or December 2022 (writing this on 2/17/2023), I stumbled upon the movie GO (1999). For whatever reason, be it a good time watching it half drunk, the cast including a bunch of people I like a lot (Olyphant, Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, William Fichtner), it is a movie I have seen like four times in the last three or four months. I say all of that to say that hyperfixations are weird.
Most of the time, we do not choose the things we love.
For whatever reason, some time around 2015 or 2016, Kzy just grabbed onto me as one of my absolute favorite wrestlers in the world, and years later, it was incredibly cool to see him finally challenge for the Dream Gate. Even half a decade removed from this, now sort of armed with the knowledge that Kzy has become the next Akira Tozawa, really maybe the best wrestler in the entire company, but doomed to be a sort of People’s Champion who never wins the big one, I don’t care.
Kzy is my favorite wrestler in the promotion, and it is cool as hell to see him finally get a chance like this.
It is especially cool to see it go as well as this did, and by that, I mean that it is one of the very finest Dragon Gate singles matches — only topped by a few of this with far more history at their disposal than this, and one other aberration — of the entire decade.
The match is maybe not the number one best version of what it could be, this pure underdog title challenge, but I don’t care. Kzy’s control segment coming after Mochizuki’s feels just a little backwards. In fact, you could cut Kzy’s control segment entirely out of this and lose nothing, as it’s still a pure underdog kind of a match. Even when he’s briefly in control though, he never really feels in control. I am a Detroit Pistons fan (cannot imagine why I am drawn to the grittier underdog, such as the Bad Boy Natural Vibes), and so I know what it looks like when a less talented and/or less experienced side of a contest briefly takes control of the thing before the all-times wake up, and I guess that’s why I don’t care all that much in the end.
At its core, the meat of this thing is just too great.
Kzy is too likeable, Mochizuki is just a little too mean and domineering, and they build something together that is simply just too sturdy, too effective, and too satisfying to properly be denied.
Mochizuki does his best impression of a far better wrestler and Ace, and spends the match instead going after Kzy’s body. It is mean and nasty, less holds than stunningly brutal kicks and shots to the body, and arguably, that is even more effective. The bullying route rather than the stately prestige champion one. If the match’s goal is to legitimize Kzy — and half a decade later, it sure feels like it is — then this feels like the easiest way to do so. Not only give him a load of sympathy, but have him fight through it and beat ass anyways.
The match develops in the best way a big Dragon Gate epic ever can.
Kzy briefly targets the neck, and perfectly matches Mochizuki’s approach of attacking just the right part of the body to give this match a little depth and not feel like anyone is wasting time before they really flip the switch. When they do flip it in the back half, it’s out of this world great. A million really good nearfalls, and a few great ones. If they never quite get to that point of allowing me to believe in that oh so powerful well, maybe in regards to Kzy’s chances, they at least allow him the next best thing, which is not only to really push a pillar of the promotion/system in Mochizuki by surviving all of his biggest offense, but also by really pushing him to a point beyond that while delivering all of the offensive hits himself.
Mochizuki does not win by knockout or through any true impactful pinfall, but instead, Dragon Gate does the right thing for once and elevates Kzy through defeat in the way they haven’t done for anyone in a Dream Gate match maybe all decade. Kzy survives it all, counters it all, and fights evenly, right up until Mochizuki just barely rolls through the Tornado Clutch into a crucifix pin to win.
It’s the ideal, more or less. A Dream Gate match that is under twenty five minutes, without anything that feels like clear and obvious filler, that tells a clear and concise story, and that on top of that, genuinely accomplishes something. It is imperfect, I do not believe it is the best Dream Gate match of the decade, I don’t think it quite touches either the YAMATO/Yoshino or Yoshino/T-Hawk matches from late 2013, but it is a mother fucker nonetheless. It feels rude to one of my favorite wrestlers to say it has some great task before it, it does not feel like a real challenge to say the match’s goal is to ’make’ Kzy, he is such a naturally likeable wrestler that it feels like is is hardly any goal at all, like it is my goal as a bartender to sell (1) beer (people are going to want it regardless of anything I personally do), but they do such a stellar job of making the obvious that much more so.
Near perfect for what it is.
On top of being Mochizuki’s career match (and probably also Kzy’s, but this is about delivering the hot take, Kzy isn’t half of an alarmingly overrated Dream Gate match), it’s the last Dream Gate title match on this level for years and years (and counting). It sounds like an insult, but truly, I probably only need one hand to count the number of Dream Gate matches as great as this, and I might just have a few spare ones anyways.
HANDWERK 