A month after being fucked out of a match against Maeda in his best effort yet as a result of blood stoppage, despite having Maeda down in a hold at the time at which the referee called for the match to end, Yamazaki gets his rematch, also coming off an even more emphatic win over Takada than before.
The result is arguably the best UWF match yet.
Yamazaki and Maeda only have fourteen minutes together — really thirteen and a half — this time, but they pack more into that than any Maeda match in the UWF yet, and more than any Yamazaki match save for the other contender for the best UWF match yet.
Part of that is, again, raw mechanics. Maeda does better against Yamazaki than any other UWF opponent to date (weird how this keeps happening?) in terms of every moment having value but also having real force and effort put into it, every strike exchange and/or flurry feels huge, and they mine a ton of drama from a match that, in terms of simply what happens, goes shorter and does less than many other reborn UWF main events.
Again though, the other part is that, secretly, the second iteration of the UWF is home to some of the best in-match and longer-term (relatively speaking, of course, this isn’t like Kawada in the 90s) narrative work, and this match is one of the larger beneficiaries yet.
There’s no real special approach here. Unlike the Yamazaki/Takada series. the approaches do not always follow each other perfectly, or at least not as perfectly. As this is not a back and forth series, so much as Yamazaki trying a lot of stuff and Maeda learning in different ways to take him more seriously and Kazuo also adjusting to that, it is almost never going to give you the big payoff. In another world, where Maeda never splits off, it might have, but that isn’t the one we live in, so what we have with these two is a remarkable series of an underdog against a top guy, with a ton of different variations. This time, they’re closer than ever, and tenser than ever as a result. Yamazaki has the self-belief by now not to need to call Maeda out like he did on the first UWF show and Maeda has the respect after last time, when Yamazaki was dead even with him until a shaky call.
What works so well about this is simply the feeling.
I won’t say it feels more important than the Maeda/Takada matches, as a clash between the king and heir apparent always has something to it, but with how Yamazaki has been treated in comparison to Takada recently, along with the last Maeda/Yamazaki match, the position of Maeda feels in peril in a way it never really has in the UWF before, between recent history, but also because of the tentative way Maeda acts, Yamazaki at this point feels like the realest threat to the unofficial crown that Akira Maeda has had yet in the UWF.
To their credit, the match also constantly works to that.
Obviously, yes, one notes the hesitation that Maeda simply does not have for anyone else, but the match is also full of little things that other people do not get. For the first time, not only does Maeda kind of get stuffed going for something early when not only are his kicks all avoided as well as his takedown attempts blocked, but it’s specifically Yamazaki who stuffs him. That’s the theme throughout the match. Nobody is shouting it at you, it is on you to watch the run of the promotion and get why this stuff matters (alternately you can read me explaining it, but I always thought of these as guides alongside the matches), but the transition over twelve months from the Yamazaki who spent their first match demanding Maeda’s full attention and respect to the guy who got it and got run over in a rematch to someone who’s maybe looked like the actual heir apparent given Takada’s troubles to now this is so rewarding, and at every moment, this match is just as rewarding.
Yamazaki spends something like 75% of this match just fucking HAVING HIM.
It is such a delight.
That is not to say Maeda is ever close to eaten up. When the strikes begin to fly, Maeda gets as good as he gives. The match seems to suggest — in a great example of how to handle the Ace in a thing like this — that while Yamazaki is faster and specializes more in kicks, Maeda has greater power and doesn’t need the same pinpoint accuracy to get the same results, and it’s a great and super interesting way of evening the thing out. Doubly so in the closing moments of the match, as Yamazaki does what he wasn’t able to do in the fall of 1988 and pushes past the onslaught to drop Takada in a more emphatic way than ever.
Another great development has to do with the downs/rope breaks system of the UWF in a way these two never got to before, with Yamazaki pushing Takada to the point of only having one left, in the sort of familiar setting than let Takada beat him in what in retrospect feels like an absolute fluke. Like his match earlier in May against Takada, Yamazaki came by it honestly rather than how Takada has repeatedly seemed like he was trying to game the system, but because of a familiar situation, Maeda feels panicked in a way that anyone watching this stuff in order can immediately understand, and that also makes sense on a no context level (not that wrestling ever ought to be consumed like that).
Tragically, and also wonderfully, the only reason Yamazaki doesn’t win here is because Maeda was already embarrassed like this once, and has a proper fear of a loss like this.
Maeda does what he expressly never did against Kazuo Yamazaki before, kicking the plant leg out cruelly after catching a kick in the exact sort of undignified move he’s avoided in the UWF until now, and when Yamazaki gets out of a German Suplex into an armbar, Maeda goes into the deepest Triangle Choke of his life, and chokes out Yamazaki for the win.
Yamazaki loses, but for someone in his spot, who feels like he was never supposed to even get to the point where Maeda beating him was a question — let alone beating him like he has the last two times now — it feels real real close to a win at the same time. It’s the first choke out in the UWF, the classical babyface act of not giving up and alternately making Akira Maeda of all people desperate enough to go there, the combination of the two being the sort of thing that only further bolsters one of professional wrestling’s all-time great working class heroes.
Taken as a whole, the match itself is one of the great UWF achievements. Something that probably rules watched entirely on its own, but like so many great games or fights in real sports, is enhanced by recent history, with the sort of rich text that gives almost everything another layer or twenty. The exact sort of thing one might conjure up in their heads when presented with the concept of the most realistic sort of wrestling, except now with the ability to control what happens and when. Along with that first Takada/Yamazaki match under this umbrella, the sort of match that justifies just about the entire enterprise.
One of the best matches in the careers of two of the better wrestlers of all time.
HANDWERK 