Commissions continue again, this one coming from one of my favorite old MV Zone guys, ddevil. 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/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, 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.
After writing about one of my favorite old MV Zone videos, the “Wild World” finale with these two, when talking about the final Misawa vs. Kawada match, it was a genuine pleasure to hear from one of my all-time favorite wrestling music video creators in ddevil, offering up this match. Genuinely, outside of the fact that I can actually make money talking about professional wrestling, hearing from people whose work I have admired for years and that seemingly being a two way street is one of the coolest things about this entire endeavor.
Fittingly, this is also one of my favorite matches of all time.
Very little of that has to do with the physical content of this as a wrestling match.
That isn’t to say this is bad, because I think just about anyone can watch this and see the greatness in it.
All four are tremendous.
KENTA and Kawada are probably the story here, as the only pairing with true antagonistic feelings between them. KENTA, being the only one in this match with no real sentimental tie to anything happening outside of professional respect for the portrait hanging over the entrance, cannot help but take shots at the only one he hasn’t fought a million times and who he most resembles, stylistically. Kawada, in the other best performance of the match next to KENTA’s ultra spirited showing, looks as offended as possible, and they spend the match running at each other whenever possible, elevating the match above mere emotion and feel-good sentient into being super super interesting on another level. Akiyama and Taue are asked to do less — Taue as the sympathetic old man of the bunch and Akiyama kind of just as this control group, the one of the bunch in his prime and semi-dignified in a match that feels always on the border of losing that — but they are also both fantastic, and give the match all that it asks of them and then some.
The match is also as well put together as you might imagine from four all-time talents. The early sparks, dueling control work, hot tags, the escalation of both the offense and the anger between KENTA and Kawada, all of that. Even on a micro level, things the younger KENTA avoids before later falling victim to when Our Heroes really commit themselves to it.
It is not a match that succeeds entirely because of these things, but it is clearly a match put together with some level of intelligence.
What works about this match is, fucking OF COURSE, everything else.
In the first week of October 2009, I moved from Chicagoland to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not at all by choice, however much I love it now. I had moved out of my mom’s a few months earlier to live with a cousin in Chicago proper, then a windowless basement apartment of my own after that, but when that wasn’t working out anymore, I found out my mother had moved back, and my uncle had a small apartment ready for me. I took an Amtrak over, got there later in the night and found what I believed to be the door to my apartment locked with no key waiting as I had been told of, and spent the night sleeping in the second floor landing of a staircase before I moved in the next day, using a duffel bag full of clothes as a pillow.
This was not the first wrestling I watched in that new home — it was a bullshit Smackdown eight main event that night, the go home to Hell in a Cell 2009 that I think was Cena/Undertaker/DX vs. Orton/Punk/Cody/Ted Jr. — but it was the first really great and/or affecting match I watched in my new home, and I guess, at least with a match like this, that is the sort of thing one remembers.
At least it is when a match so clearly revolves around the mental state of one of your all-time favorites.
For whatever reason, when I first laid eyes on Toshiaki Kawada in the summer of 2006, hunting down the All Japan classics and finding 6/9/95 first, there was something about Dangerous K that drew me in. The meanness and brutality are exciting, but what got me was the way he looked at people and carried himself, and how even in moments where he was objectively being cruel and unfair, you could always see his side of it all. Many wrestlers have gone crazier with them, but few have gotten as much out of facial expressions and eye movements and body language like Kawada has. I personally believe that Kawada is the greatest facial seller in pro wrestling history. This is maybe not the absolute best example of that, in the way that his 1993-6 work, when he was at the peak of his powers as the greatest wrestler alive, was, but it works in the same way.
Truly, I have never seen a wrestler wrestle with the feeling of a weight on them like I do here with Toshiaki Kawada.
Spending the last twenty years, minimum, measuring himself against his childhood friend, to both great emotional turmoil and complex suffering and even occasionally real victory, Kawada suddenly finds himself without any of that. There’s a weight to every single thing he does in this match, from the spirited cut-offs to his explosive moments against KENTA. He always feels like the most put-upon wrestler of all time, especially in the moments where they cut to the Misawa portrait, with Kawada now literally wrestling in the shadow that he did escape, but also never quite let out of his sight. With few exceptions, such as Mark Briscoe following the passing of his brother or Eddie Kingston’s famous “the best man at my wedding” promo, grief has never poured through the screen in quite the same way, in large part because it is treated entirely as a purely professional thing. I immediately recognize it. Not so much in the same way I did at the time, seeing Kawada holding his face tighter than usual, but in a way I understand more nearly fifteen years later, and having suffered some loss and having to work through it.
Almost impossibly, on the fourth or fifth time I watch this, the first in at least a decade, I somehow leave this match thinking more of Toshiaki Kawada than ever before. It is not one of the greatest performances of all time, as this match is not quite so ambitious, but it is one of the more affecting matches of all time.
It doesn’t make the match better mechanically.
Taue pins KENTA with the Ore Ga Taue to win, and the match is a kind of classic NOAH young vs. old sort of thing, one of the enduring formulas for a reason.
In some small part, I like it more like this. Kawada gains nothing from a win, and more simply from the moment itself, going through it with Taue, in sight of Akiyama in the match to be stopped yet again and Kenta Kobashi on commentary. Kawada, even as tampered down and buttoned up as this match seems to be at times, cannot entirely hide from what is obviously there, and in as much as what was real enhanced the work of one of the greatest stories in the history of professional wrestling, what is here now makes the aftermath into one of the more unforgettable matches ever.
Like the feud that this is an epilogue for, some of the most powerful and affecting pro wrestling possible.
HANDWERK 