The last one.
It is, by far, the shortest at ten minutes, and due to this and the lower key approach taken, what feels like the most forgotten Maeda vs. Takada match, even among people who like this match up and series way more than I do.
For sure, it isn’t great.
Primarily, that’s because of the length. This — and the August 1990 show before it — is one full of shorter matches in which the length inhibits the majority of them in one way or another (some wrestlers are not good enough to get something great out of ten minutes, but sometimes, the match is very clearly also one that’s more restrained). Maeda and Takada are not usually the wrestlers to find themselves in great sprints, especially in this promotion and especially against each other, and so this is not really a match with any real chance to be great. It’s a good match with some great moments, but one that also very clearly feels like the most restrained effort against each other.
Like the others though, there’s still something about it I like a lot.
Most of that, again, comes down to what the UWF has done with these two over the last two and a half years, narratively speaking. As a result of giving them the longest running (if not best) rivalry and story in the company, everything always has some foundation to it, giving them deeper reasons for doing things than any other match up has, save for the ones each man also had with Kazuo Yamazaki. Every match always feels like a reaction to the last one that they had, but as so many of them have built up, one cannot help but also notice longer-term trends, like how Takada tends to win when he can stay up and throw quicker strikes, whereas Maeda always succeeds on the ground, and when both men wrestle with some urgency in the pursuit of these things, there’s something to it.
Following up the meeting in June, both are more aggressive than usual as the respect from years past has broken down into something so competitive that there isn’t much room for it when the bell rings, but after losing to Maeda again, Takada is as aggressive as Maeda was then. The scraps feel more hostile than usual, the matwork is again much more hard fought than it was two years ago, and be it intention or just how they decided to wrestle this match, the two sides work together perfectly, hand in glove, to make this another interesting match, when it very easily could not have been.
In the end, Takada slips up again, now in a whole new way.
Following another big catch of a Maeda kick, he goes not for the half crab that failed in June, but the original ankle hold that beat Maeda in January. Maeda is Maeda because he adjusts though, and uses the dogged pursuit to pull him in bent over, before breaking out the rolling cross armbreaker for the win.
Not a great match, but an ultra satisfying accidental conclusion to the story. Even if — given the surprising death of the UWF before the end of the year — they never fight again, it’s the sort of match that achieves a lot, and does a lot for the status of both men. Maeda is still the master, and although (in narrative only, god knows) Takada has his own claims to being the best, there is still more to him and things still left to prove, sort of accidentally setting up the foundational elements of both RINGS and the UWFi.
This is not a blog that tells lies, so I won’t tell you this is more than it is, but at the very least, it’s more than I expected it to be.
HANDWERK 