Commissions continue, this time from longtime supporter of the blog Kai. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything that you want. Usually, people just want wrestling matches, but you ought to not let that limit you if you have a mind for something more ambitious, as this post suggests. You can purchase these things by going over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, where reviews currently go for $5 per match (or $5 per half hour started, if you want a movie or TV episode or something, so like an 80 minute movie is $15). If you have a want for something that cannot just be solved by multiplying a number by five, drop into the DMs, and we can talk.
This was a light tube tower deathmatch in the finals of the 2009 Saikyo Tag League, additionally for the vacant BJW Tag Team Titles.
I’ve previously spoken about this series being one of my favorite chunks of deathmatch wrestling ever, so it’s a great one to receive.
Yet again, the difference between a deathmatch I like and a deathmatch I love (and then the deathmatches that I REALLY love) comes down to two real important elements, both of which are present here.
The first, the less interesting one (as it is a point often espoused by the most boring people in the world, either too dull or squeamish to enjoy great deathmatch wrestling, even when many better examples wind up proving them right), is that there is a certain narrative quality and a point behind everything. It’s not to say pure displays of violence aren’t great — Necro Butcher vs. Toby Klein with the VCR being hurled into someone’s face is one of my favorite deathmatches ever too and it’s nothing but cool shit — but that when things land with a little (or a lot) more weight behind them, it’s even better.
Big Japan once again succeeds with the most simple concepts imaginable.
Kodaka and Takeda, underdogs who are relatively fresh arrivals to Big Japan and who had not achieved much of anything in Big Japan prior to the start of the tournament, managed a relatively stunning upset over Big Japan’s dominant deathmatch dream team of Miyamoto and Sasaki at the end of March earlier in the tournament in a light tubes and boards deathmatch, complete with a pin over reigning BJW Deathmatch Chapion Miyamoto. In the tournament finals, they meet again and try to not only make lightning strike again in the same place (literally the same physical location) but to try and do it now when it matters the most.
To the match’s credit, they’re very very good at always staying true to the basic idea.
While it gets crazy, there’s always a form to it, basic tag team wrestling but with a bunch of glass and a few barbed wire boards and a whole lot of blood around it. The kids shine before being brutally cut off. They fight through an injury, the undersized one gets real badly beaten up, there’s a great comeback and a super dramatic finishing run. Beyond the obvious basic bullet point in a match like this, the match also adds a few great smaller touches in terms of layout and construction to make it even more interesting. Takeda suffers through receipts for earlier offense in the later stages in the way an upstart babyface might in a loss, so on top of Kodaka’s beating, a feeling of inevitaiblity comes about, only for the match to turn that around, making it all the more dramatic.
After half an hour, the match initially goes to a draw only to re-start before the final comeback, but in the moment of the draw itself, Miyamoto finally has Kodaka totally beaten dead to rights with the Fire Thunder Driver, providing a real significant gripe that helps the established guys. When Takeda and Kodaka muster it up at the end, it also manages to feel both earned and a little lucky at the same time.
Two new stars get established in the exact right way, but the beauty of the match itself is that in the process, it not only makes them look even better than they might on paper, but it’s done not only without hurting your current top guys, but in a way that manages to feel genuine despite that protection. It sounds simple enough, again nothing fancy to it, a list of things to check off, but you look at wrestling history, and there’s an elephant graveyard full of wrestlers, teams, promotions, and matches to try and not come anywhere close to what Big Japan and these four guys were able to pull off.
Nothing fancy, just classic pro wrestling ass pro wrestling storytelling. A promotion‘s dominant forces against younger upstarts and newer arrivals from outside (complete with Takeda even having STYLE-E still written on his gear), a superteam against a more focused individual unit, trying to show something was a fluke but unable to match the pure will of the team determined to prove conclusively that it wasn‘t.
That fancy stuff comes in the match itself, and that’s the second real important element.
It just whips so much ass.
Nobody here is necessarily breaking ground in terms of the insanity of what happens in the match — although Takeda bringing a barbed wire board up to the second level of Korakuen Hall for a spot by the concourse tunnel really stands out as unique — but it’s simply so well put together. Not only in terms of a lot of really cool weapon spots, but the construction of the match on a more mechanical level. The four giant tube towers are all used in great and effective ways, two for the transitions to control segments, and the other two for major nearfalls. One of them — the transition to T-Sasaki and Miyamoto in control — also just so happens to really cut open Takeda’s right shoulder bad, necessitating him going out to be bandaged up, and giving his return to the match a lot more energy to it as well. They’re also mostly very good at parsing the weapons out, and if this was a shorter match, there would be no real lull at all to speak of, which is on top of how great looking and nasty almost every major spot was.
The match is, of course, not perfect.
At thirty-five minutes and change, obviously, it is longer than it needs to be. I get the idea behind it. When repeating the result, something has to be different and the time limit draw and restart does that. But truthfully, no deathmatch needs to be thirty-five minutes, and the fifteen-ish minute difference is why I think in retrospect, I probably prefer their first match two months prior. With regards to the four actually involved in wrestling the match, Isami Kodaka is clearly not on the level of the other three wrestlers here yet, throwing a lot of bad strikes and with some of the nearfalls on him (again, a victim of having to fill thirty-five minutes) pushed on the border of believability, but in general, they found themselves repeating
When they get it right though, very little of that matters too much.
It is just too good.
The boys crowd Miyamoto at the end when Sasaki is taken out after being sandwiched between broken halves of a barbed wire board, and after a motherfucker of an Olympic Slam on a ladder, chair-assisted double knee drop off a ladder, a German Suplex, and finally a bridging Dragon Suplex, Takeda and Hidaka arrive.
Combine the two elements of the great deathmatches, and you get a more special kind of a match. Something with some of the coolest and nastiest stuff possible, maybe not super inventive, but violent and very well assembled, paired together with a classical kind of Big Japan narrative success.
Not the most famous Big Japan deathmatch of 2009, and on a level a little below the true all-time genre classics, but part of a series that ought to be remembered and mentioned far more than it feels like it is.
HANDWERK 