Kazushi Sakuraba vs. Carlos Newton, PRIDE 3 (6/24/1998)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Eric T. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.

Something oft-forgotten in the commission system is that I am more than happy to expand beyond professional wrestling, and for the second time (but thanks to Eric’s lovely commission, not the last), I am delighted to talk about a shoot fight, especially one that is so often praised as one of the best purely scientific and/or technical fights in PRIDE history.

Usually, it is not super easy.

This site — and my writing as a whole — being largely pro wrestling oriented means that certain aspects of anything are always going to be what I gravitate towards first in my writing. Narratives that emerge, styles and performances, the drama of it all as one package and individual moments along the way that contribute to these things, or better illustrate specifically what I mean. It can be harder, when the aim is not at all to create a cohesive overall package and simply to win an actual fight, to approach that.

Fortunately, as an unofficially agreed upon grappling fight, Sakuraba and Newton have a match that is very easy to discuss on these terms.

With zero offense meant to either, had this fight had different logos everywhere and not had Bas Rutten and Stephen Quadros on the call, it would be very easy to simply interpret this as a very high level shoot style contest.

PRIDE’s matchmaking shares some credit for this as well, as Sakuraba faces his first Gracie student en route to his ultimate legacy and destiny around the turn of the century, but it’s also more than just that. The grappling is unbelievably impressive, but — again, despite the claims of many of the dumbest people alive (Sherdog forums posters), not planned or in an exhibition format — something that also sort of accidentally follows a real narrative flow.

Each very skillfully avoids major holds early on, so much so that the escapes are still genuinely stunning over a quarter century later, and the middle like eighty percent of the match is a fight back into something. Tempers flare, when Newton struggles with the magnitude of a pre-superstar Sakuraba by throwing kicks and few hands, but the spirit is largely the same, and shows not only a kind of progression one would want out of a worked bout but also a steady escalation, before the pace picks back up at the end.

The same sort of escapes that worked earlier on do not work the same, and Sakuraba snatches an ankle hold and legbar virtually out of thin air to win.

It is a genuinely phenomenal match. It perhaps lacks the Big Fight Feel of a Fedor main event or the pure bombast of Frye/Takayama or the Sakuraba/Gracie matches it would lead to, but the science on display is genuinely unbelievable. It would be the best grappling fight of the year if it happened in whatever year it is that you read this. I get the same feeling watching this again that I did watching young Kiyoshi Tamura tape, or decades in the future, like I did watching Thatcher-era EVOLVE. Grappling that feels ahead of everything else around it, in which like every third or fourth thing not only feels new, but also like the coolest thing I have ever seen before.

If it was a genuine work, rather than just turning out to be so beautiful of a fight that one is capable of viewing it that way, it would be among the better matches of the year.

Diamond Dallas Page vs. Chris Benoit vs. Raven, WCW Uncensored (3/15/1998)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Ri Ri. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.

This was a Falls Count Anywhere match for Page’s WCW U.S. Heavyweight Title.

It’s a beauty.

By 1998, it feels too late to call this the first great or even really great three way or triple threat match, but with very little reservation (maybe the Barely Legal three way, maybe this Douglas/Sabu/Dreamer three way from November 1997 that I liked a whole lot), this feels like the best ever three way match up through this exact point in history, and probably for another few years.

The trick is that by the nature of the sort of match this is as well as who it is that’s having that sort of a match, they avoid so many of the usual problems inherent in this sort of a match.

A lot of the times in matches like these, people vanish for a long time in order to create long one on one sections, or you get a lot of convoluted three man spots. The former can be avoided with things so big or wild that you can buy someone being out for a longer time, and the latter with a good sense or feeling for what the right amount is, but neither is an issue here. Benoit, Raven, and DDP are the types of wrestlers at this point (although years later, Benoit will have one of the great fireworks three ways of the era against Angle and Mysterio) not to bother with a lot of complex multi-man spots, but instead spend the majority of the match doing the thing almost nobody does. Enabled by the brawling inherent in this sort of a match, the three are nearly attached to each other for like 80% of the match, and so — save one moment which makes total sense, Page thrown twice through that 1990s WCW lit up logo cube board by the entrance — nobody ever disappears from this match, meaning that it never stops making sense.

What I like so much about this match, which goes hand in hand with that, is how messy it all is.

Raven, Page, and Benoit lean into the chaos of a match like this, as well as the chaos of what a more realistic three way maybe ought to look like, and it’s a wonderful thing. Nobody ever controls, nobody can ever even get a nearfall without a save until (a) the few minutes when Page is out by the entrance, and (b) the very end, and very little ever actually goes right. Whenever someone turns away to try to set anything up, they almost immediately pay for it, and the only ideas that come to perfect fruition are the ones where two of the three work together, so the third cannot disrupt. On a construction level, it’s also so impressive, as the match never stops moving, and every new direction makes sense, is set up perfectly by what precedes it, and escalates the match even further.

More helpful yet is that on top of all that mess, pretty much everything that happens is just as impossibly awesome as it is smart.

Every major moment in the match walks the line in between cool and brutal, again fitting the feeling of the match perfectly. All time bump freak Benoit is absolutely on one, but each of the three is wild and motivated enough that it’s impossible to say anyone was the match’s biggest lunatic. It’s packed full of hard shots, gross landings, inventive prop work, and does it all while maintaining a bunch of different balancing acts, as well as constantly getting bigger and better, up to saving its very best spot for the end.

Benoit fakes Raven out on a double team at the end, but before he can take him off the top through a table, Page knocks Benoit off the top, and takes Raven off the top onto the table — very importantly just kind of toppling it over in the best example of this match’s genuine feeling messiness — and gets the win.

It’s a match that is, objectively, dumb as hell, but in that wonderful pro wrestling way, also achieves so much. On top of simply giving out a great match, the DDP/Raven feud continues, Benoit gets to gain something by not losing and looking about as tough as DDP throughout the match, and on a narrative level, Page being exactly both lucky and smart enough to take advantage of Raven getting a little too smart for himself and finally dipping his head out over his skis is both fitting and the sort of finish that just feels great. It’s a masterpiece of execution and performance just as much as it is booking, one of the increasingly rare times in WCW in which the machine not only works like it’s supposed to, but that it works at all.

Not the highest point that late 1990s WCW would ever reach, but as great of an example of just how and why this company ruled as much as it did. Smart and messy and exciting all at once, totally impossible to look away from.

There’s been little like it since.

***1/2

 

 

Taz vs. Bam Bam Bigelow, ECW Living Dangerously (3/1/1998)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from frequent contributor and the most generous contributor of all of them, Kai. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Taz’s ECW World Television Title.

If you’ve been reading this site for any significant length of time, you know that I have a supreme affinity for a certain sort of big match that largely hit its zenith in the 1990s.

Generally, I mean the sort of a punchy big title match that feels like a prize fight. It isn’t a hard set of criteria, of course, as I’ve said before that several 2010s NXT Womens Title matches, especially the Bayley/Nia and Bayley/Asuka matches have felt like this, and those aren’t exactly Sting vs. DDP, but I know it when I feel it. While I often refer to it among friends or in initial notes as “WCW World Title style”, it isn’t just the province of WCW, so much as that WCW is where I think it happened most often, as a result of being the home to guys like Sting, Goldberg, Lex Luger, and to a lesser extent, Scott Steiner and Diamond Dallas Page, these wrestlers overflowing with presence or aura or charisma or whatever other word you might like to use, whose gifts were best served in matches under fifteen minutes. Beyond that though, the difference was that these matches walked the line that big pro wrestling ought to walk for me, in many respects. Matches that felt like legitimate competitions (in spirit if not in style, sadly there are very few shoot-style Stinger Splashes), in that every move either felt like a big swing and an attempt to win as soon as possible, but with these huge dramatic moments that, in theory, ought to be the entire point of a fake sport in the first place.

ECW is not often a place that lent itself to this sort of fighting, both by definition and just as a reality of scale, but these Taz vs. Bigelow matches in 1998 are arguably the closest that they ever came.

Mechanically speaking, they are not perfect.

The match is not assembled flawlessly, there are moments of meandering brawling outside, there’s even an unfortunate bit where Bigelow slips on some liquid (this is an ECW show so place your bets) at ringside, and the audio mixing does as many favors (the ring) as it doesn’t. If you insist on nitpicking, there are things here that I think, credibly, everyone has to acknowledge.

At the same time, fuck all of that.

Bigelow and Taz have a fight that feels fucking gigantic from start to finish. Those smaller problems, while not nothing, also all work within the framework of the thing, and make it feel a little realer, given that within the confines of the show, this is not a fight between two scientific and mechanical marvels. The things they get right, like the big spots — a T-Bone suplex off the classic ECW PPV Big Ramp into the crowd or the big finish — are not only breathtaking, but built to well and sold even better. The secret of the match, as well as what makes it feel like a major event fight on par with some others like it in larger companies, is how great the exhaustion selling is.

The big stuff obviously takes a toll, but throughout the back half, Taz and Bigelow are better than most ever at using everything in their selling arsenals, from stumbling to facial expressions to simply the way they walk to express that they have been in a genuine war, and it makes SUCH a difference in the feeling of the match, as well as enhancing all that follows, especially the finish itself.

Famously, Bigelow leaps down on Taz to counter the Tazmission, and for I think the first time in wrestling history, they go through the ring. After climbing out himself — handled perfectly, with Bam Bam initially failing to pull Taz out the first time — Bigelow drags Taz out to pin him, becoming the first to cleanly beat him in ECW since he really became Taz, perfectly setting up a rematch.

It’s wonderful stuff.

1998 being what it is, a banner year for big American professional wrestling, it’s hard to throw superlatives at it, but it’s one more example of ECW at or at least near its best. The sort of thing that, while maybe not all that as a cold match, is enhanced so much by the booking of Taz for years before this, and by the choices made, particularly a genuinely stunning finish that stands the test of time.

Not the best they can do, as to my memory I liked the Heat Wave 98 match even more, but once again, the real shit comes through, and there’s nothing quite like it.

***1/4

 

Raven vs. Goldberg, WCW Monday Nitro (4/20/1998)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor SSJW Gogeta. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Raven’s WCW U.S. Heavyweight Title.

One of my favorite things wrestling can do, as longer tenured readers have read about before, is bringing up two characters or acts on opposite sides of the aisle, in parallel to each other, and hurling them at each other. The easiest example from the last decade and change is The Shield and The Wyatt Family, but it has worked throughout wrestling history, and this match is another one of my favorite examples of that, as the undefeated juggernaut Goldberg gets thrown at brand new U.S. Champion Raven, one of the great heel scumbags of the decade at the apex of his power.

Sometimes, it is remarkably easy.

Now obviously, there are things in a larger picture sense that this match could have done better.

Raven, one of the great bullshit artists in wrestling history, should have done more with the U.S. Title than have it for a day, after the greatness of the Raven/DDP feud and his even better title win the night before at Spring Stampede. While the match still works, to a large degree, as “the bullshit fails this time”, it isn’t as effective as it could have been with a few months of successful title defense bullshit behind it, like Raven’s work in ECW. In terms of the match itself, with two guys like this, there was so much more they could have done in terms of bullshit prop work, or three to five more minutes, if not both (ideally both). Effectively, my issue with this match is mostly one with WCW itself, hurling something like this out there rather than handling it with a little bit more care.

Sometimes though, none of that matters.

Or rather, sometimes that can all still matter, and something can rule so much that it works anyways.

Goldberg and Raven get five minutes and enough help to count, in a match that matters, and the result is not only one of the great WCW segments and moments ever, but one of the best overall chunks of wrestling television ever.

The trick, like with all the great mid-level Goldberg challenges (including their less remembered rematch in October as part of the DDP/Goldberg build), is that while Goldberg is stronger and cooler and dominant, it is not easy for him. Raven gets trucked at the beginning and the end, as he ought to, but is clever enough and good enough to get to Bill like nobody has been able to except his own Flock sergeant-at-arms Perry Saturn the previous night (itself part of a larger story, itself also among WCW’s best). With the use of a chair and his own experience that lets him outmaneuver Goldberg in key moments, Raven maybe doesn’t have him, but he separates himself from the previous seventy-four Goldberg opponents as not only a physical challenge, but someone genuinely hard to get past, and thus impressive to beat.

Naturally, it does not last.

Goldberg comes back and gets him.

He runs through the rest of the Flock, hurling Kidman over the top, spearing everyone else, and running through the Horace Boulder interference spot that had won Raven the title a day earlier. In one of the great plant spots ever, fans do not allow Raven to escape after months of fleeing from trouble over the railing, and the Spear and Jackhammer finally seems him punished and beaten like never before.

At 75-0, Goldberg wins his first title.

The match is not all it can be, but what matters most is how it gets the overall spirit correct. What might have been, we’ll never know, but they still operate this thing with the exact correct idea, and as a result of both how awesome that idea is, how well WCW had handled both up to this point, and how novel it is simply hurled out there like this, it is totally unforgettable.

Perfect professional wrestling television, and as much as any angle with the NWO or Sting or DDP, as perfect an explanation as you’ll find of just why WCW was what it was.

***

 

Steve Austin vs. Dude Love, WWF Over the Edge 1998 (5/31/1998)

Commissions continue, this time from longtime friend/financial supporter of the blog, @beenthrifty. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything that you want. Usually, people just want wrestling matches, but you ought to not let that limit you if you have a mind for something more ambitious. You can purchase these things by going over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, where reviews currently go for $5 per match (or $5 per half hour started, if you want a movie or TV episode or something, so like an 80 minute movie is $15). If you have a want for something that cannot just be solved by multiplying a number by five, drop into the DMs, and we can talk.

This was, eventually, a no disqualification, no count out, and Falls Count Anywhere match for Austin’s WWF Title.

It is, above all else, one of the greatest pieces of WWF/WWE Bullshit of all time.

For the uninitiated, there’s a lot to this. Vince McMahon is the special referee, and stooges Pat Patterson and Gerald Brisco serve as the guest ring announcer and guest timekeeper respectively, with The Undertaker also coming out to keep an eye on McMahon as a last minute addition to undercut the great little detail of Vince challenging anyone to come and oversee his refereeing, knowing 99% of the roster would avoid putting themselves in jeopardy like that. On top of the great bit of making Patterson do all the talking, the match also changes rules as it goes along, first becoming no count out, then no disqualification, and finally Falls Count Anywhere once they begin to fight up the aisle. Couple that with some great prop work, blood, and multiple referee bumps, and it’s a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

You might vaguely recognize this from a million other matches like it, but save a rare few — The Rock vs. Triple H from Backlash 2000 comes to mind immediately — they all stand in the shadow of this original.

Part of that is that it’s the first.

In general, so much of 1998 WWF works in the same way. As they began to try new things, before Russo-ism really totally took hold towards the end of the year and for most of the year following, there was always a kind of older school respectability behind all of the nonsense that kept it grounded, and therefore, made it so much more effective. Here in particular, what this has going for it that so few matches in its shadow do is that the bullshit is balanced exactly right. It’s almost all in the first half, and save the well placed referee bumping near the end, it never gets in the way of the match itself. It’s an enhancement rather than, as so often would become the case, the actual thing the company is interested in presenting, with the match being a secondary accompaniment. It’s bullshit, smoke and mirrors, a cavalcade of pure nonsense, but it never forgets that this is also professional wrestling.

The other thing that this has going for it above so many imitations, on top of being the first of its kind and done before anyone could figure out how to make this sort of thing deeply obnoxious, is that at the helm, you have two of the arguably twenty to twenty five greatest pro wrestlers of all time in Steve Austin and Mick Foley.

Stone Cold and Mick Foley — beyond just this match — have a certain rare quality that few other wrestlers ever have had, and it’s the key to the success of so many Attitude Era walk and brawls.

They don’t have a perfect chemistry together exactly, but through force of talent, virtually every Austin/Foley match has a similar quality to it. They’re able to create this feeling of enormous chaos and project this idea that things have broken entirely down and are out of control like rarely seen while not actually doing anything all that insane, outside of some of the real gross stuff they do with all the old junkyard condition cars littering a classic Attitude Era set. There’s something about the way they react to things, they way they sell every little thing, and move in general outside of the ring that creates this kind of a feeling. They also have that old wrestling quality to them where every single movement seems important and like it’s being put to use to try and win this fight. Not quite the WCW Main Event feeling here, but something close, the feeling of this gargantuan struggle that could easily go in any direction, bolstered by the importance that Austin and Foley are able to inject into their every motion.

It’s the reason so many Attitude Era TV main events work so much better than they might had you simply read a recap on paper, and it’s also the reason this works to the extent that it does.

Respectfully though also, at the end, the booking is again just about perfect.

Stone Cold stops Dude’s use of weapons and the surroundings finally and creams him with a grotesque chair shot to the side of the head, only for Vince to totally abandon the pretense and refuse the count. Foley misses the set up and knocks Vince out with a chair. Patterson and Brisco both get chokeslammed through announce tables by The Undertaker for trying to be replacement referees to rob Austin, setting up another Stone Cold Stunner. The payoff then finally comes, as Stone Cold does the most Stone Cold shit ever, slapping an unconscious McMahon’s hand three times on the mat to count the pin, living up to the pre-match promise that the match would end by Vince’s hand alone.

Austin not only beats the system, and does it in the most satisfying way possible, complete with a match that not only whips a ton of ass, but thrills in a real guttural way as well.

Complete package, an unbelievable production, with incredible performances aided through creativity and craft, at the start of one of the company’s three or four greatest booking runs of all time, as all of the pieces of the machine not only work like they’re supposed to, but even more rarely, find a way to work in perfect synchronicity. In retrospect, it’s not only this great piece of booking and an incredible match, but also the start of one of my favorite angles ever, the HIGHWAY TO HELL.

Pro wrestling ass pro wrestling.

***3/4

Rooftop Fight Scene from WHO AM I? (1998)

Another commission review, this time from RB. You too can be like them and pay me to write about anything you’d like. Most people tend to pay for reviews of wrestling matches, but I am happy to talk about real fights, movie fight scenes (!!!!!!!!!), movies in general, make a list, or whatever. You can head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon to do that, just make sure I haven’t already written about it first. The going rate is $5/match, or with regards to other media, $5 for every started thirty minute chunk. If you have a more elaborate thing in mind, hit the DMs, and we can talk about that too. 

Finally, we get to do this again.

It is not the first movie fight scene someone has paid me to talk about (although unlike the other one, I doubt anyone will think I am being serious and reviewing it like I saw the tape of an actual historical match), but it is pretty clearly the best movie and/or movie fight scene that I have been fortunate enough to be paid to watch and write about.

As an admitted action movie psycho — as discussed previously on this blog — Jackie Chan is something of a blind spot for me. A relative blind spot, anyways.

Now, I’ve seen the POLICE STORY movies of course, and they’re perfect (how am I going to say an unkind word about a series where they literally get to the fireworks factory?). I’ve dipped my toes in elsewhere. CRIME STORY, YOUNG MASTER, WHEELS ON MEALS, and the like. I am no philistine. The thing is more that so many of these classics are only on streaming services in real crummy dubs and I sort of fell out of it after a while, because it’s very distracting and frankly, if you can’t be bothered to read some words, you don’t deserve the movie. I had hit most of the other classics before I got to that point, either through having more discretionary income at the time when I was doing that (thank you to Big Gretch for helping to fund me watching like 40 Seagal movies and buying every John Woo classic on imported Blu Ray in 2020 & 2021) or finding better versions of them. I’m getting back to some of that new, exploring your Thai kickboxing, Donnie Yen, pre-US Jet Li, etc. but I am always a little hesitant to put on The Classics in that format and in the way I tend to watch these movies (after a weekend night shift at the bar or simply late at night on a weekend, at 11 pm at the earliest, real night owl drunkard business), so if I have the choice between a Tubi dub of DRUNKEN MASTER or, for example, last weekend’s fare of BKO: BANGKOK KNOCKOUT in the original subtitles on the same service (naturally the subtitles are not in great quality, this is the charm of Tubi, it is the closest thing most of us have left resembling an old video store, where you never know what you are actually in for), I am going to opt for the latter.

I write ALL of that to say that (a) this is brand new to me & (b) that it is super refreshing and a real joy to see.

The scene in question from WHO AM I? (1998), available here, is nearly nine minutes long and it is BEAUTIFUL.

Jackie gets to a rooftop and two enforcers, played by Ron Smoorenburg and Kwan Yung respectively, want some disc he has or whatever. Yung is the first of the hitmen to try Our Hero, only to get beaten up, before Ron joins in, eventually escalating to a truly wild handicap fight for the last half of the scene.

(It is taking a bit too far to actually talk about this like this is a wrestling match, simply because I am writing about it on the world’s only wrestling blog, but there is some tremendous stylistic work here between the two sides, as the fight evolves. The first segment sees Yung relying on close quarters strikes, leading to Smoorenburg attacking Jackie with his longer legs when it’s his turn. Likewise, Yung is undone when, as Jackie tends to do, he uses the kid’s tie and jacket against him, leading to Smoorenburg taking off his tie and jacket before he goes after Jackie.)

The fight itself, especially once all three get involved, is not only the usual classic Chan mix of spectacle and violence and just enough goofiness to keep it a little funny but without it ever losing a sense of tension and danger, throwing in some slapstick right alongside classic death wish Jackie walking and rolling alongside the edge of this very large building, but also an unbelievable display of choreography. If I started making .gifs here, the post would be all gifs, and that way (a) it would be kind of lazy on my part & (b) you would never actually watch the scene itself. 

Not only does it always feel like a fight with forward momentum, with moment-to-moment escalation, but it is always unique. The same idea never occupies the screen for too long, whether that means in terms of the props/settings used in the fight, or where they are, or even the aim, seeing the fight over the disc eventually lead to it falling off the roof and away. They’re also very very good at utilizing every single visible part of their surroundings (as much of a credit to the camera work as the actual choreography, only showing stuff that they’re either about to utilize or that they will before the end of the scene), and doing a million things you would never think of. The inventiveness is, once again, what makes one of these real high level Jackie fight scenes stand out so much, even moreso than anything else, because everything else springs forward from that.

It’s a masterpiece, even if as has been suggested in all my research, nothing else in the film is.

Jackie wins after beating them both up with a sandbag and the sand inside, leading to a great ending bit where he’s about to run and hit a leaping sidekick into Smoorenburg’s chest for an emphatic close, only for the hitman to fall back down, leading to a great Jackie reaction, and a transition back to the next scene.

A hell of a fight, and if not one of Jackie’s absolute best, many comments I’ve seen saying it was his last all-time pantheon level fight scene feel too correct to bother arguing with.

Probably one of the best fight scenes of the year, even if the film as a whole probably isn’t quite on the level of 1998’s other masterpiece covered on this blog.

Genichiro Tenryu vs. Shinya Hashimoto, NJPW G1 Climax 1998 Day Two (8/1/1998)

This was a commissioned review from frequent contributor Eamonn. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out. 

This was a quarterfinal match in the 1998 G1 Climax.

(Wasn’t always round robin and a month long, kids. The format changed a whole lot across those first ten or so tournaments, and this is one of my favorite versions of it, a simple three day sixteen man regular bracket tournament.)

Of all the Hashimoto vs. Tenryu meetings in the past and the few yet to come, I imagine this is the one most people are most familiar with. Certainly, it’s proven to be the one with the most crossover success. While I prefer all three of their 1993-94 matches to this one, being longer and more substantive and a greater show of the deeper talents of two of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time, it’s not at all hard to see why this is the one with such an enduring mass appeal.

The sort of match you can throw in front of someone and, assuming they are the sort of person open to a new experience and who won’t just manufacture a reason not to like something new, probably have some success with. There’s no New Japan vs. WAR undercurrent to this one, virtually nothing you have to explain. You can simply present this as is, and I think just about anyone can immediately understand it. Wrestling is wrestling, drop into the middle of something as universal and as accessible as this matc

Shinya Hashimoto and Genichiro Tenryu, real arguably the two greatest ass kickers of the last decade, meet up in a match that is solely about who can kick the most ass.

On a surface level, you know exactly why this is great.

Tenryu and Hashimoto hit really really hard, and it is a thrill. This match is mostly chops, punches, and kicks, and these are two of the better choppers and kickers every, with Tenryu being the only punch expert in this match probably only because it wasn’t ever something Hashimoto devoted himself towards all that frequently (which I like and find incredibly charming, Hashimoto being this very old fashioned and honorable kind of fighter suggests he, in fact, shouldn’t throw that many punches when a legal strike will do). There is an audible crack and visible connection with each single blow, creating a display of physicality and simpler violence that is magnetic in a distinct way that only this sort of a thing can ever really be.

Underneath that, this is great for the smaller and softer reasons why the best matches like this always succeed.

Most important to the success of a match like this is the stuff in between those big exchanges, how they’re reacted to, the pauses, the valleys in between the peaks, the way things are laid out, and all of that, and Hashimoto and Tenryu are unsurprisingly great at that. Each sell and tumble is not only great individually, but they collect themselves into something greater than that, a stellar example of slow-building cumulative selling and exhaustion. Each tumble down and fight up takes a little more effort and each real real heavy blow has more and more of an effect. Tenryu and Hashimoto do the thing that separates the great ones like this from everything else, which there is a real sense of struggle built up in this match. It is not just the idea that they hate each other and don’t want to lose to each other, but it’s also that a match like this is hard and grueling and, over time, extracts a real toll.

What this match does so well — and what it rarely gets credit for — is being an exhausting match, in the most complementary way.

One small thing this match does especially well, in this realm, is the way that it employs Genichiro Tenryu’s signature punch. As much as Tenryu’s repeated punch casts him as someone for Our Hero to overcome, a rougher and dirtier move used to cut Hashimoto off and that he eventually pushes through, it is also used SO well as this illustration of something else about this match that makes it stand out, which is that things have changed between these two, and Tenryu needs to do this to keep up.

It’s a nasty and a violent fight, to be sure, but there’s also a desperation to it.

Hashimoto shows the exhaustion, sells a real urgency at all times in the back half or so, but really, most of that feeling comes from Tenryu, yet again turning in another all-time great world weary veteran performance. That’s not a judgment on Hashimoto either, as the match works better explicitly because most of it comes from Tenryu. He tires more easily than Hashimoto, the years since their last meaning having reversed the roles, now with Hashimoto at the top of his game and Tenryu as the one trying to keep up, and Tenryu is so great at expressing this idea without it ever feeling like the match is shouting it at you. It’s Tenryu who has a little harder time getting up, it’s Tenryu who takes bigger risks, and above else, it’s Tenryu who needs to step outside himself and who needs to have everything go right. It’s a classic narrative device in Japanese wrestling, the idea that the transition of power — or more often than not, the idea that the transition has already happened — from one generation to the next in long-term repeat pairings is told in these moments, who needs a perfect game to succeed and who doesn’t and who needs to go bigger and who doesn’t, and it works as well here as it does anywhere else.

Tenryu being Tenryu, insistent and stubborn as all hell, the big chance is what eventually costs him.

Fighting outside of himself with nothing going right enough for him to truly succeed long term, Tenryu’s leap off the top gets him wheel kicked in the brain on the way down, and he’s opened up for the Hashimoto bombs like never before in the match. One DDT doesn’t quite do the truck, but Tenryu no longer has the fight he did for the first eleven or twelve minutes of the match. Hashimoto powers through the resistance, and a second DDT gets him the win.

It’s not an especially bombastic ending, like you often get in big bombfests like this, but I think that’s where this match has always been secretly just a little different than its reputation suggests. An all-time great slugfest, yes, but it’s so much more than that. It’s measured and assured, and a story about old foes in a new setting. That spectacle and bombast is for other matches, and instead, I find that one of the all-time great ass kickers simply running out of road against the current baddest man alive has so much more depth to it than simply ending on the biggest bomb, loudest strike, or coolest move.

This isn’t the absolute number one best match between two of the best wrestlers ever, but a simpler kind of perfect little self contained story on top of the usual brutality, which is why it has the reputation that it does. I think, with these two, it comes down to preference, and while this isn’t mine quite so much as the others, I completely get it. On top of all the things people always talk about here, there is such a charm to this one that makes it simply too hard to deny.

Another one for the “please study it before you do it” file.

***3/4

Shinobu Kandori vs. Manami Toyota, AJW Kawasaki Crimson Struggle (8/23/1998)

More commission work, this time again from friend of the blog Tim Livingston. You can be like them and pay me to watch and review all sorts of content. Such a thing is possible first through making sure I haven’t done so on this blog already, and then by heading to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current market price is $5 per match, and if you have an ambition or aim that is more advanced than simply multiplying a number by five, feel free to hop into the DMs on either Twitter or Ko-fi, and I’m sure we can work something out. 

This was for Kandori’s WWWA Title.

I will preface what I’m going to say by stating very clearly that this was good. Very good, in fact.

Toyota’s sense of struggle against Kandori’s submissions was fun. The contrast in styles made for a few interesting moments, counters into armbars and the like. Toyota also had a real urgency to her movements in counter to Kandori’s innate ruthlesness. It’s not the sort of thing you get a whole lot of from Toyota, usually her efforts result in longer and dumber and more drawn out matches. There is a spirit to her work here that, while far far far far far from perfect, did at least something for me.

Unfortunately, it never totally seems to come together.

While there is this kind of vague outline of something, guts vs. showmanship, flying vs. technique, speed vs. grappling, I don’t think it comes together nearly as well as I would have hoped for. In a rarity for Toyota, it seems a little rushed sometimes, as if there was so much more that they could have done with it, but never got to. The go-go-go kind of style of it means that, while always exciting, I don’t think they ever wholly got into as great of a narrative flow as this match ever deserved. The result is that, while the match delivers twenty minutes plus of exciting content, I don’t think it ever quite lives up to all that it could have been, given that it is a big match collision between two of the decade’s more distinctive wrestlers. Perhaps not every dream match is meant to ever happen.

Shinobu Kandori did what she could, but there are only so many miracles available to us these days. Sometimes, Heaven is closed, and you simply have to have a Manami Toyota match.

Even if it is one of the best of those in some time, there are ceilings on  a thing like that.

***

 

Erin O’Grady vs. Vic Grimes, WWF Raw is War/Shotgun Saturday Night Taping (1/20/1998)

The last leg of the Black Friday Sale commissions now, this one being the last pick from Parm. You can pay me to watch and then write about wrestling matches too, over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match and if you have designs on something else, feel free to hit the DMs and we can talk. 

A weird oddity preserved in 1998 VHS quality, but this is good almost in spite of what it is.

It’s short and limited, but since it’s two guys trying to get jobs, it’s also a total highlight reel. The future Crash Holly shows how much more he could have been to the extent that one dreams of a far different and more prolific future for him. The same can be said about Vic Grimes. Beyond the obvious bit about how good he is at eating shit when flying downwards from great heights, there’s more here than he showed much of in any other match of his that I’ve seen. A big guy hurling his body around both on offense and defense, making Erin look super awesome on offense, and then just destroying the poor little fellow whenever he gets to do offense himself. Erin O’Grady is able to avoid Vic hurling his body around, and years early, Grimes finds himself eating shit in horrific fashion when he doesn’t have the landing surface that he thinks he’s going to.

Poor Erin is only fake Irish, so his luck runs out and he gets caught both repeating himself in coming off the top too often and repeating what he’s trying off of the top. A second flying Hurricanrana gets caught, and Vic hurls him up and into a cutter for the win. A classic 90s American wrestling story about how it’s bad to do cool moves.

Super super watchable, one for the whole family.

A match far too good for 1998 WWF undercards.

In much the same way that Timothy Thatcher is the best British wrestler of all time, in this match, Erin O’Grady looks like the best Irish wrestler ever to compete in a WWF/WWE ring.

Goldberg vs. Diamond Dallas Page, WCW Halloween Havoc 1998 (10/25/1998)

This was for Goldberg’s WCW World Heavyweight Title.

Forget how bad WCW has fucked up Goldberg since he won the title on July 6th in the main event of a show that arguably represents the peak of the company. Forget a Curt Hennig feud, being a brief cog in the Wolfpac vs. NWO feud, forget feuding with The Giant and somehow never getting to actually pin him, forget the Jericho mini feud that was a waste of his star power. Forget too that while the build up to this match was tremendous and one of the all-time great face/face builds, with each man facing common foes (Raven, Jericho, Kanyon) and eventually building friction into a go-home pull apart, it was clearly always positioned on the show underneath the Hogan/Warrior, Bret/Sting, and even Nash/Hall feuds that all also led to this show. Also forget that aside from the Raven/Jericho opener, this has been a truly horrific show from top to bottom. Angles that have no purpose on a PPV, matches better suited for the middle of a Nitro, Nitro Girls dance breaks, and every other major match on this show ending and/or being executed in a way that leaves each one wholly unsatisfying in their own unique ways. Forget that the bad stuff on this show ranges from the Steiner vs. Steiner match only being four minutes after eight months of build, Bret vs. Sting being the victim of bad timing, Nash vs. Hall being the victim of bad booking, and Hogan vs. Warrior II simply being one of the worst matches of the decade.

Forget all of it.

This is incredible and one of WCW’s all time high points, because they get every bit of this correct.

For most of the 1990s, WCW has had a certain very distinct style of major title match main event that comes to light ever now and then. It came to light with the transition from Ric Flair to Sting as the Ace or clear face of the company in 1991/2, first really seen in Sting’s title victory over Lex Luger in 1992. It’s this sort of match that’s sub fifteen minutes and has the rhythm of a prize fight more than it does a pro wrestling match. Constant momentum swings, a nontraditional flow, no waste in time, and above all, this feeling that every thing that happens is focused not only on trying to win, but trying to win in the immediate or near-immediate moment. It’s on display in many of the Sting/Vader classics, fading somewhat under the Hogan years, before seeing a clear return in 1998 with television gems like the Sting/DDP and Goldberg/Sting. In recent years, it was put to great effect in, of all things, Bayley’s NXT Womens Title reign, seeing matches sort of like this in her face/face title matches against Asuka. It’s a hard thing to describe, I think, and perhaps imperceptible if one hasn’t seen a match like it, but it’s one of the more interesting kinds of matches that there is.

Save perhaps a Hashimoto and Takada two and a half years earlier oversras, it’s a style rarely put to better use than it is here.

Two great heavyweight fighters known more for finishing moments than the bodies of their matches have a match clearly about getting to that point and nothing more. At all times, it feels like a fight with one of those crucial blows right around the corner and with each man frantically trying to get there. A struggle at all times, and when one of the principles doesn’t typically have matches with a great deal of struggle to them, it feels like the biggest deal in the world. That’s the other part of this that works so well, and it manages to work hand in hand with that WCW title fight feeling of the whole thing.

Beyond being the ideal of a certain sort of a match, it’s also a perfect story told.

While Goldberg is no longer THE most popular wrestler alive as it briefly felt he was going into his title win (obviously ceding that ground back to Steve Austin after holding that position for maybe a month, if that), I don’t think it’s obscene to suggest that at this point, Goldberg and Page were the second and third most popular wrestlers in the country, if not the world. It’s the sort of match that doesn’t happen all that often, and this time happens with a much starker difference between the characters than usual, with Page’s Working Class Hero running up against Goldberg’s rookie phenomenon, and neither sacrificing any bit of what made each so likeable in in the run-up to the match itself. Combine that with something closer than usual to the DVDVR message board ideal Pure Sports Build than usual, with an emphasis on Page scouting Goldberg like nobody had before to find a weakness, and it has a certain Feeling to it. Some matches feel bigger than others, and aside from Hollywood Hogan vs. Sting ten months prior to this, I’m not sure you can name a WCW match that feels larger and/or more important than this does.

What they lack in mechanics — and that is not an insignificant amount — is made up for by this feeling, how well they play to that one central story (a tape nerd scouting a less experienced athletic freak), and an economy of movement that is nearly unrivaled by most other matches throughout history.

In fact, everything that happens in this match relates to that idea. The premise that while Goldberg is physically unstoppable, Page feels he’s spotted a weakness, and that he can get past him through a combination of unparalleled hard work, this deficiency, and luck.

Goldberg overpowers him early on by shoving him around, but Page sends a message just as quickly by countering his shoves into arm drags. Page tries an earlier Diamond Cutter than ever before to see how The Man reacts, but he winds up beating his ass for it. Page takes a wonderful beating and gets thrown around the ring. Page is one of the best of the era at selling the cumulative exhaustion and physical strain of a real beating like Goldberg gives him, and is always able to convey through this that he’s someone waiting for something. Eventually it comes, as he can dodge the Spear and Goldberg hits the post for the first time ever when missing it. It’s a sort of spot that’s become more than routine in the twenty three plus years since the match, but that’s never meant as much as it does here and that has never been as impactful or loud as it does here. It’s not the WWE TV stock transition spot that it becomes, it’s this total maniac running full speed into the ringpost, and it’s treated that way too.

From then on, Goldberg’s arm is dead. Entirely useless. It’s some of the best arm selling that I’ve ever seen, and in a novel little bit, Page never even has to go after it. It’s the perfect payoff to Page spending six weeks saying he’s seen something in Goldberg that nobody else has, because Goldberg is now weaker than he’s ever been. They walk a perfect line here while still preserving how powerful he is. He’s able to stop DDP’s comeback and hit the Spear on his second try, but so hurt by it that he can’t end it. More than just holding it limp at his side, Goldberg perfectly nails the other aspect of the thing, which is that facially, he looks worried for the first time ever, aware for the first time in his life of the idea that his body may fail him. Bill can’t even lift Page when he tries, and the second leads to one of the most dramatic Diamond Cutter counters ever. Certainly, to one of them with the biggest reaction.

vs. Goldberg, WCW Halloween Havoc 1998 (10/25/1998) pic.twitter.com/6Ode0fCwy2

— killer spelled backwards (@ElHijoDelSimon) October 28, 2021

Page is, tragically, just too badly hurt to immediately cover. It’s the only time during the duration of The Streak in which Goldberg seems defeated. Expanding that to Goldberg’s entire tenure, even post-Streak and into his forays elsewhere (W-1, AJPW, WWE), it’s one of the old times ever that Goldberg has ever seemed genuinely beaten, even in matches he didn’t lose. Page makes the mistake of grabbing Goldberg as he gets up though, and the champion blocks a lift into his own, directly into the Jackhammer to win.

You could never accuse Goldberg of a lack of urgency, but in few other matches has he ever been more immediately aware of a need to end the match as he is here. It’s the perfect response to anyone saying Goldberg matches could only ever be one thing, because there seems no stronger statement of a move and its originator’s power than to say it could have and almost did beat Goldberg in 1998.

Goldberg stays alive, but for the first time yet and one of the only times ever, a “barely” belongs in that sentence as well.

It’s a stylistic masterpiece, a perfect story, and an ideal sort of a heavyweight fight all in one.

All said, perhaps the last time that WCW got something entirely right from start to finish.

***3/4