Commissions continue, this time from frequent contributor Eamonn. You too can be like them and pay me to write about anything you’d like. Most people tend to pay for reviews of wrestling matches, but I am happy to talk about real fights, movie fight scenes, movies in general, make a list, or whatever. You can head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon to do that, just make sure I haven’t already written about it first. The going rate is $5/match, or with regards to other media, $5 for every started thirty minute chunk. If you have a more elaborate thing in mind, hit the DMs, and we can talk about that too.
This was an elimination match.
I love this match.
Love it.
Not entirely for the quality of the match, although it is a very great match, but more so because of the fondness I hold for it coming along at the time it did.
For me, and I imagine at least a few others in my age bracket and who experience their growth as a wrestling fan in a similar way (WCW/WWF -> WWE -> TNA -> ROH -> other indies/Japan/old stuff/etc.), this was the first major shoot style match I ever saw. I had access to the Ditch sites for years before this, so it wasn’t like I had no awareness of wrestling like this, but it was far less accessible to a young mind than all of the other older Japanese wrestling I felt like I needed to catch up on. However, when this happened, it received widespread acclaim like no other match in the style had during the time since I had started paying more attention to those things a year or two earlier, and so I watched it and it absolutely kicked my ass (did I also push back because I didn’t think it was the most perfect match of all time? yes. sometimes people are who they are.) in a way that a match or a new style of wrestling had not kicked my ass in quite a while.
Baby’s first shoot style and all of that.
After that, I got more and more into then-current day BattlARTS, tracked the guys elsewhere, dug into older BattlARTS, along with RINGS and UWFi and UWF and PWFG and U-Style and whatever else was out there. It’s hard to say one match changed how I thought or anything quite so dramatic, but it certainly opened me up to a new style of wrestling that had a large part in that process. Very few matches you watch have a before and an after to them, with regards to someone’s perceptions of any type of media and I don’t think this is quite on the same level as watching 2004 Samoa Joe or Red vs. Low Ki for the first time as an even more impressionable literal child, but it’s a pretty important match to me, and has an at least non-zero amount of responsibility, credit, and/or blame for you reading this site in the first place.
Beyond just its significance to me and the evolution of how I watched wrestling, and maybe its significance to others in that same way, it is also just a genuinely awesome wrestling match.
What this match does so well, better than maybe any shoot-style tag team match ever, is spending the time not only in interesting and different ways, but in genuinely functional ways. If you know how to watch shoot-style, early stages of a match are rarely ever just feeling out or lower end riffing segments like the untrained or newer eye might falsely claim, but they rarely have the function that the earlier portions of this match have. Throughout the first ten or fifteen minutes, everything that happens is done with the point of establishing a sense of hierarchy and the three roles on each team (leader, supporting cast, young wrestler), and how they relate to the opponents, and more than that, establishing a foundation for everything else to build upon.
The kids (Super Tiger II & Munenori Sawa) constantly trying to land big disrespectful shots on opponents and getting taken down time and time again makes it feel like an accomplishment when that doesn’t happen. The kids having their moments easily broken up by saves makes it feel like a bigger deal when Otsuka repeatedly blocks save attempts, which then also makes it feel like its own individual achievement when they’re finally able to gang up on and isolate him. Likewise, when Sawa is taken out first, it makes it just a little more impressive when Super Tiger II isn’t the one taken out next, circumventing the usual way a match like this might go to help him out just a little. The success of the Ikeda trio working together also makes it much more impressive when Otsuka is finally able to break through it around the middle of the match to get himself free and eliminate Otsuka.
Above all of that, the best piece of build up, teasing and payoff work, comes where you always wanted it to, with the slow build and eventual delivery yet again of the best match up in company history.
Daisuke Ikeda and Yuki Ishikawa barely touch in the first third, only get to it a little in the middle, and then get the last five to ten minutes entirely by themselves, and it is as great as it always was (mostly). This is not to say it wouldn’t have always been incredibly good and that it would not always have whipped miles and miles worth of ass (if you laid ass down on the ground rather than in a pile, as it is often suggested to be), but with very little exposure in the match before then, it provides the exact spark that the match is starting to really need at that point.
One complaint about this that is fair, and that I honestly have myself (and is why I used the phrase that I did at the end of the previous paragraph), is that forty five minutes is just too long for most matches, let alone a shoot-style match, where you are just going to get a certain amount of repetition.
This particular match is better at utilizing this time than almost every other long (let’s say around twenty-five minutes or more) shoot-style match I’ve ever seen, due to the more careful first third of the match and the rotation possibilities that six men gives them even in an elimination format, and also just to properly done escalation by the two leads of the match, but there is a point here where things do start to drag and blur together just a little bit. It’s why most of the best matches in this style are not this long, and while it’s also a testament to this match for making it so long before hitting that point, it’s still something they have to deal with when doing what they did, the other side of their phenomenal ambition (no capitalization).
However, also fuck all of that.
When Ishikawa finally dispatches with Super Tiger II, despite Ikeda’s attempts to prolong the kid’s doomed effort just to wear Ishikawa down more, and the two finally go at it uninterrupted, none of that matters. The clock in my mind, the one that had felt the duration of the match and the fatigue of a long match in this style, resets to zero the first time Ikeda punches Ishikawa as hard as possible in the face. I resume hooting and hollering, as loud now in the comfort of my nice apartment as I was in my horrible windowless basement apartment the first time I saw it. They blast each other with everything, add in so many gross and insulting little touches most people would never even think of, and once again, it is one of the greatest pleasures wrestling has to offer.
Forty five minutes runs out without a winner, but that’s fine.
You don’t watch Ikeda and Ishikawa to see who wins or how. You watch Ikeda vs. Ishikawa to see the fight, to see one of the great match ups in wrestling history one more time than you had before, and to see the spectacular array of violence they inflict upon each other. This is no disappointment in that regard, for they have never once disappointed in that regard. It is every beat as mean, violent, realistic, and gripping as it always had been and as it would be for at least the next eleven and a half years.
No monkey show here.
A gateway match more than one of my all-time favorites anymore, but I think that is the best utility this match could have. I don’t know if it should be anybody’s first shoot-style exposure given that there are matches half as long that can give you an even better hard sell on the style than this, but in my experience, an outstanding advertisement for one of the best styles of wrestling that there is and very possibly the best promotion of all time.
HANDWERK 