Commissions continue, this one from frequent contributor YB. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/thing or $10/hour for anything an hour or more, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
(I badly wish the old ddevil “Wild World” MV was still online, like his “What If The Storm Ends?” and “Tonight, Tonight” classics, to give a very easy explainer and to show it to newer fans, but alas, it is not. Up there with the 2015 Bayley “Lights Will Guide You” MV as some of our greatest cultural artifacts that, if you have either of them, I would love to see again.)
A thing about me maybe worth knowing is that, as a result of NOAH involvement in my gateway to a larger world in ROH, I got into Japanese wrestling in 2006 and 2007.
That might not immediately mean anything, but the Japanese wrestling internet back then was truly wild. Not like WWE vs. TNA internet or anything, but the NOAH vs. NJPW wars, I think, would blow the minds of a lot of fans who have come to the scene since. People getting called the r slur for only appreciating matches full of head drops and dangerous apron spots. People being called f slurs and other homophobic insults for either liking grappling or maybe just supporting the 2006-7 Tanahashi push, genuinely a wild time.
I say all of that to say that, when this happened, and for a few years after, most people acted like this was some tragedy.
Now, certainly, this is not Misawa and Kawada in 1993 or 1994 or (my favorite) in 1995 or 1997 or 1998. They — mostly Misawa but also undeniably Kawada too — have lost a step, at best. Misawa has lost more than a few, and since his final and arguably best Triple Crown title run, Kawada is also in the early stages (although still capable years later) of decline. They have also lost the narrative heft that helped them so much from 1992 through 1999.
And yet, I have never quite been able to do anything but like this.
To be clear, yeah, I get it.
It is probably the worst match they have together.
Robbed of the long-term narrative of Kawada’s quest to get this done or, in the last two years of Peak AJPW, to prove he could do it more than once, it is sort of just a wrestling match, at the time when both needed narrative assistance most of all.
All the same, it is so petty.
Kawada and Misawa (mostly Kawada) have a lovely sort of old man petty kind of a match. I would compare it to the last Hero/Kingston match, except that the did so much more with the same idea. All the same, it is a lot like that match, in a lesser way (no blame to Kawada here, who at all points brought the hate that Misawa seemed incapable of). Misawa, to what extent he can, always at least seems troubled, either by having to really get after it for the first time in years, or simply being against this mother fucker again. Toshiaki Kawada, who to me, is the third greatest wrestler of all time at worst (Tenryu, Bryan), does all he can at this point to elevate it beyond the purely physical. Hateful reactions, elbows loud and visually impressive enough to match the Misawa ones, which are really all he can still offer, those other facial expressions where he runs the gamut from annoyed to prideful to every other feeling along the way between being dead on his feet to defiant no sellig.
Misawa wins — as he was always going to — with a motherfucker of a running elbow.
The point is far less the result, and a little less the body, and far more so the feeling. Although they cannot follow Kobashi vs. Sasaki, or even KENTA vs. Kanemaru or MiSu/Marufuji vs. Akiyama/Hashi, but the spirit moves on. It is hateful and mean and at least a little but uncooperative, in all the best way.
Kawada and Misawa have one last match, and it goes as they almost all do. Kawada makes it great, and then Misawa wins, because someone somewhere wrote down that that was what was supposed to happen.
Should you want the real finale, the Holy Demon Army vs. Akiyama/KENTA is out there (both in terms of viewers who want to reckon with how Kawada beautifully and tragically handles a world without his lifelong comparison point, but also those who simply want to see the greatest match at the end of this all), not only waiting for you, but waiting for you to pay me to write about.
All the same, I’ve always liked this match in spite of every Yeah But that exists, and hopefully, I’m happy to see more people join me here.
HANDWERK 