Watching wrestling can be funny.
You watch enough of something, and you get used to certain rhythms and directions, and it goes with any style once you’ve seen enough to get it. So, usually, if I see a match in which the first third or first half offers little of interest, and it doesn’t involve a wrestler I like a whole whole lot, I will back away from it. There are only so many hours in the day, there is so much other wrestling — let alone other stuff — out there, and I am usually right about these things. The old saying is that if half of a thing is bad, then it’s probably bad, and while nothing like that is ever true one hundred percent of the time, it’s truer far more often than it isn’t.
Early on, this match was trending that way.
Nobuhiko Takada puts his boring ass soul on display in front of the world, becoming the first since Nakano’s major breakout ten months prior to offer up a match beginning with dry grappling and stifling his talents, including himself later in 1989 as well, where he genuinely did seem to get it. This isn’t to say it’s ever bad, but more so one of those drier Takada matches where he stays on the ground despite being much worse there than he is on his feet, the sort of match he has that doesn’t really ever interest or excite me all that much.
Fortunately, as Tatsuo Nakano has become one of those wrestlers that I like a whole lot, I kept with it, and a switch suddenly flipped about halfway through the match.
Tatsuo Nakano finally gets to be Tatsuo Nakano, forces the fight to one based on its feet, and the match suddenly becomes awesome.
Nakano explodes with the meanest and most desperate combinations of strikes possible. He’s the rare guy like this who, as I watch him, feels like he runs into these strike flurries not at all sure of what he’s going to do from moment to moment. Not in the sense that every other one is phony, but that even in the realm of real fighting where people make calculated decisions quickly, Nakano feels like someone working on pure panicked instinct in a way nobody ever quite has in either real or simulated athletics. Takada work with him, much better in his element, and his whole deal enhancing the spirit and passion of every single thing Nakano does.
It’s the match this always should have been, and that every great Nakano match is.
Most interesting of all is the finish they go with, which while not new ground entirely for this UWF, which has excelled in exploring all aspects of the “it’s like if it was a real sport” concept, is again one of the best ways to really get into that.
Following dropping Nakano emphatically in a way he’s struggled to since that initial explosion, Takada goes into a semi bulldog choke semi crossface facelock and without a visible tap on screen and with Nakano’s mouth covered, the referee calls for the bell. Nakano gets up like he’s confused by it and it immediately reads like another time where the referees have just given it to the golden boy and screwed someone over. It’s not this perfect pro wrestling finish, and feels strange to do again to the guy who is supposed to be the central figure poster boy for the company now, but as a real thing, I love it. The referee once again gets a call from on high, some HIGHLY suspect decision making goes down, and Our Hero is robbed in favor of the bigger picture.
If you want to make wrestling feel like sports, it’s important to remember that sometimes, sports is also some real bullshit. `
Between this interesting idea, again, and the back half, the match just manages to work itself out for me, in spite of the very valid reasons someone else might list for it not quite being great, and I’m glad that my faith in Tatsuo Nakano was rewarded, before then also being used against me.
The match winds up being a tale of two halves. One might argue that the quiet first enhances the loud second, but there’s tons of great matches in this style to have two great halves, many involving both of these wrestlers, and what they were doing was not so wild and insane that it required that approach. Instead, we have something a little duller and then something that also ruled. In this specific situation, the stuff that ruled just happened to rule enough to overcome the problems with the first half. So it goes.
Sometimes, it’s nice to be reminded that there is no one correct way. Other times, it’s nice to see people wail on each other for a while, and much to the surprise of Nobuhiko Takada, to see people swing and grapple with some real spirit and intensity to them.
A great match, barely, but also underneath the odd construction, another great example of an imperfect match up that’s way better around ten minutes than it is around twenty.
HANDWERK 