Wrestling’s own version of the 1990s Big Red Wall, mother fucking Gary Albright, steps into UWFi for the first time, and the result is, barring some pure one-minute style trucking that isn’t really the style of the UWFi at present moment, one of the great beatings and squashes yet in this project.
It’s made all that much better by the fact that it happens to Yoji Anjoh, one of the all time least likeable immediately viscerally upsetting twerp ass goons of his day and time.
Barring the release, thirty years later, of footage of the time Rickson Gracie beat the shit out of Yoji Anjoh in a closed-door fight when Anjo came to Los Angeles to fight him instead of Takada (owing to Anjo’s supposed reputation as the toughest wrestler in the UWFi), it is likely up there with the most satisfying beatings that he ever took.
For seven and a half minutes, Anjoh tries and gets nothing. Kicks are checked, throws are so impossible there’s barely even an attempt, and on the rare occasions that he can grab a hold when the match goes horizontal, he can’t get any further than a simple grab. Albright smothers him to an extent that is delightfully embarrassing, blocking and cutting off everything, and then completely obliterating him after that. It’s one of those great dominations, not only awesome but interesting, pummeling him into the Earth slowly, before then suddenly so so so much faster.
The joy of the match isn’t just Albright’s stunning physicality so much as how he and the match uses it, creating a real suffocating effect from start to finish that, by the end, raises a real question of how anyone is supposed to beat him.
It’s also just a god damned BLAST, a match as enjoyable on a lizard brain kind of oooh’ing and ahhhh’ing at pure physical carnage level as it is as an emotional catharsis, seeing someone who annoys you on a gut level being rendered into dust and then knocked clean out.
After the second of his absolute God Damner level German Suplexes, Albright simply leans back from a frantic kick, before cornering and demolishing Anjoh with an elbow that also doubles as a body block. The ten count is a formality, and Yoji Anjoh is never even close to getting off the mat by the time the referee makes it to ten.
Gary Albright debuts, wastes no time, and not only bulldozes someone of stature, but makes a phenomenal show out of it all too, immediately putting himself up there with Yamazaki, Tatsuo Nakano, and baby Tamura as one of the best and most must-see wrestlers in the entire promotion.
Hardly the best anyone can do, but at the same time, unbelievably fun and an almost perfect debut match within this sort of system.
90s Nebraska really did have it all.
HANDWERK 