Another hit from Norman Smiley.
Much like his match against Yamazaki in June, Smiley faces a quieter member of the UWF roster in a match that is primarily about mechanics.
That’s not to say there aren’t a few really fun touches here. Not so much character ones, as that feels wrong to say about wrestling like this, but the sorts of small shifts one notices when watching these matches close together. The obvious one is that after losing to a heavy kicker in Kazuo Yamazaki in his first match here, Smiley now shows up with kickpads on and uses his legs more for distance than he did then, but there are small things too. Maybe not the most obvious Point A to Point B things, but things that happened in his last match that come around here, like Norm trying a Reverse Fujiwara of his own at a point, or Anjoh doing the same type of arm lock that Smiley rolled out of into the hold that beat him in his last match, only for Norman to find a much more advanced counter that Anjoh has no immediate answer for. You can also find it in how the match reaches its conclusion, not so much the hold itself, but how they get there. Small things like this across the board, suggesting that on top of the obvious skill he showed before, that Norman Smiley has now begun to do the reading as well.
For the most part though, it just rocks.
Smiley and Anjoh put on a wonderful show of little techniques and cool holds. This lacks the wrestler vs. striker approach, as Yoji Anjoh is something closer to an all around fighter, although his strengths and tendencies are more towards wrestling, like Norman. Without that tension, the struggle over the direction of the match, they rely more on the smaller moments of struggle, collecting them into the sort of thing that one might not have a thousand words to write about, but that both thrills if you can enjoy the smaller shifts and adjustments and that feels like a real competition.
Combining this along with the first thing, the two parts that make this into — at its best — one of the best versions of what wrestling can be, Norman Smiley really does learn something in the end. Following an explosive belly to belly from Anjoh, it’s now Norman Smiley taking advantage of a sudden opening. Anjoh thinks he did more than he really did, dives in overzealously, only for Smiley to grab him in something like a reverse cross armbreaker, and Anjoh gives up.
Norman and Yoji do not have the most fireworks laden, strike heavy, or even mechanically tricked out match in shoot style history, but more so one for the real maniacs. It’s a match for those already converted, full of cool little touches in a lot of ways, and the sort of match that — in what now is starting to feel like the specialty of Noman Smiley — is the backbone of a show and promotion like this.
If the middle of the card on these shows is about furthering the ideology, presenting these fights and scenarios that feel like what would or ought to happen if this was to be taken as realistically as possible, than through three shows so far, nobody has done it better than Norman Smiley.
HANDWERK 