Raven vs. Kaz Hayashi, WCW Worldwide (3/20/1999)

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.

People talking about pro wrestling on the internet in the 1990s got a lot wrong.

No more than people in the 2000s or 2010s, really, but as the birth of this horrible mental terrain that we all share, a whole lot leads back there.

Canonizing and lionizing a lot of stuff that doesn’t hold up, further codifying a lot of real dumb and rigid beliefs about what “good” wrestling is along with things like “workrate” where the actual intended meaning is both flawed and also mostly unknown by the sorts of people who refer to them a lot, and a whole whole whole lot of terrible writing. These are not things solely confined there, the disk horse has never been good, but it always felt to me like a firm foundation for a whole lot of dumb and annoying things.

There are some things they got right though, like the promotion and the preservation of the memory of certain WCW B or C show matches, to the point that even people who haven’t watched literally every minute of WCW programming that exists like I have know about them, like Jushin Liger showing out against Barry Houston or Fit Finlay vs. Lorenzo, one of the best squashes of all time.

Also this match, which has been a favorite of mine since the first time I saw it probably like twenty years ago.

Raven and Kaz Hayashi have something like three minutes, four at the most, together and make as much of it as these two together seemingly could, at least for a match on WCW’s least in-canon and least important show. Which is to say that it is not all insane — although Hayashi’s missed flip dive to the floor that creates a remarkable thud is individually — nor is there any presence of the things that get matches of this length praised usually like awesome selling or what have you.

The match is just pretty cool and very fun.

It’s one of those matches where, if I were to begin listing the things I liked that happened in the match, I would just wind up recapping the entire thing, and nobody wants to read that.

Hayashi is a lunatic, Raven is Raven, and when hurled together by the beautifully negligent pencil of WCW in 1999, some low level magic breaks loose between them.

Beautiful wrestling TV.

three boy

Alexander Otsuka vs. Mitsuhiro Matsunaga, BattlARTS B-Together (11/9/1999)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from longtime friend of the program and deeply generous Ko-fi contributor @beenthrifty. 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.

At the end of Matsunaga’s time in BattlARTS, there is still unfinished business with one Alexander Otsuka.

There is a whole deal here. Matsunaga once called out BattlARTS guys when they were in the crowd while he was wrestling elsewhere, Matsunaga has a whole run in BattlARTS with some very non BattlARTS matches that I’m excited to watch one day (feel free to use your money to expedite that process), all of that. The great thing is though that this is a match that requires you to know absolutely nothing beforehand.

Mitsuhiro Matsunaga is an evil evil man who brings Otsuka and all of BattlARTS down into Hell with him, hiding weapons and lying and cheating and introducing a guttural and dirty sort of violence to an environment like this, and our perennially underappreciated young hero must fight through it and get revenge to send him packing.

In other words, he must be Stopped.

For those a little familiar with what the future holds, yes, this rocks as much as such a premise is practically guaranteed to suggest.

The beauty lies less in the successful realization of such a slam dunk narrative and far more so in how they get there, which is to say this is a BLOODY god damned match. Matsunaga gets opened a little in the immediate brawl, but after baiting Otsuka in and briefly blinding him with a fireball, Matsunaga really opens him up with a spike. Really really really opens him up. Crimson mask, drips on the mat, staining everything it touches for even half a second, the real good stuff.

Even better yet, this match becomes not just a sick bloodletting, but also goes a step further to become a What Is The Name Of This Blog classic when Matsunaga begins stabbing the hand and wrist. Not to disable a move, only a little bit to punish Otsuka for trying to get the spike for himself, and mostly just because he can. It’s the most evil part of a match with a fireball in it, adding in a more relatable sort of violence at the point where it can only be read as cruelty for cruelty’s sake. It’s what makes this and Matsunaga as a whole special. While awesome, a whole lot of people can carve someone up and base a great match just around a horribly bloodied face, but taking it a step further is what separates the real greats from everyone else. There’s a difference between hooting and hollering at the violence and earnestly wanting someone to fight back and kick ass because of what’s happening to them, and Matsunaga not only hits both, but totally nails the leap from the former to the latter.

So many Matsunaga matches feel like an atrocity masterclass, so much so that it feels hard to put one above the others, but this is up there with the very best of them.

Alexander Otsuka is also phenomenal in this.

He doesn’t get to do the sensational and memorable things like Matsunaga, but the match hinges on his performance, and works like it does in large part because of how great he is. First, as a sympathetic babyface dying and getting carved up and cut off, and secondly, when he finally gets the chance, whipping ass in revenge. He’s never the most demonstrative or anything, but there’s a real ass beating vengeful energy to everything he does, and he does it all too while also balancing a beat up and groggy kind of selling. It’s phenomenal stuff.

More quietly, the match also gets most of the little stuff right, and is mostly put together so well, especially once the fireball hits. After that, nothing happens without a point and very little happens that isn’t also cool as hell. It’s as tight and efficient as it is violent, which not only respects our time as viewers, but on a more artistic level, allows what happens to have so much more of an impact.

Otsuka finally gets the spike to get Matsunaga back with it, kicks it away again at the very end, and a Falcon Arrow sets up a Rivera Cloverleaf for the submission. Matsunaga has been stopped for now, and BattlARTS is once again safe again, for the low low price of 60% of the blood in Otsuka’s body.

God bless.

Wrestling can be great in so many ways, so it seems very silly to ever say one exact thing embodies all that it ought to be but very rarely do I enjoy something more than the things that this match offers up. Tons of blood, stabbing, hand work, a likeable young wrestler overcoming violence and cruelty, simple acts of righteous vengeance, all in front of a hot Korakuen audience. A combination of the sort of pure violence that sends the lizard brain into overdrive and fist pumping good old fashioned pro wrestling ass pro wrestling. As real as it gets, and real on multiple levels.

It isn’t perfect, but it is also nearly everything I want out of wrestling.

***1/2

Akira Maeda vs. Aleksandr Karelin, RINGS Final Capture (2/21/1999)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor SSW Gogeta. 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 Akira Maeda’s retirement match.

Maeda doesn’t just get any opponent for his finale. He gets very arguably the greatest amateur wrestler of all time, and someone who was voted as the single greatest Greco-Roman wrestler of the entire 20th century, on top of being a current Russian senator. Karelin — who many may simply know because of the popular suplex lift named after him most recognizably employed by Claudio Castagnoli aka Cesaro — is a three-time Olympic gold medalist, to keep it short. As that is not the province of this site though, he also had not lost a match since 1987 and would only ever lose again in the 2000 Olympics gold medal contest between he and Rulon Gardner, his final bout, with each call being somewhat controversial. On the other side of the margin, there are eight hundred and eighty seven victories. At the time this match happened, he had not yet been beaten in the Olympics.

Karelin’s reputation and pedigree is such that, in looking for a linked picture for this match and any further information, I discovered that over twenty years later, people are still finding out that this wasn’t real.

While not called a Different Style Fight, it is the greatest on-paper Different Style Fight ever organized.

There is no better send-off for Akira Maeda possible.

It is enough simply that the match is good.

For the ten minutes that this goes, it is never not interesting. Karelin, although very clearly never needing to, also could have easily been one of the best wrestlers ever had he stuck with it along the lines of a Volk Han. He is someone dipping a foot in the water with no intention of returning, but one can clearly see things that would have made him something special in this field too. The pure physicality is something to behold, of course, and the style plays on the motions he’s practiced and perfected, but there’s a presence and aura that comes with him too. We’re not exactly talking 2008 Floyd Mayweather in terms of other sport athletes who are perfect for pro wrestling, but when one watches this, the ease with which Karelin does everything makes it very very easy to suddenly get an overactive imagination.

The match is obviously not great, of course.

On top of being ten minutes, it is clearly one in which Karelin will only really do so much, and is very protected, but I think in moments, that also works to the match’s benefit — or at least to the benefit of the larger moment — as much as it stops it from being an obviously great Great Match.

Far more importantly than being great, the match just feels good.

In his final moments as a wrestler, Akira Maeda faces literally possibly the greatest amateur wrestler to ever live, one of the great athletes of the century period, and he goes the distance. Maeda never has him reeling or in real trouble, it feels like a miracle for him to land a few kicks let alone briefly grab a rear naked choke like he does, but way more importantly, he doesn’t lose. Akira Maeda faces down Aleksandr Karelin for exactly ten minutes, and it is the ultimate example (perhaps only topped by another 1999 RINGS match) of a draw that feels like a win.

Pro wrestling, at least on this occasion, may not be the very strongest, but if Maeda can go the distance with Karelin, it’s hard to say it isn’t as strong as anything else.

True to form, Akira Maeda goes out in the truest feeling way possible to who he spent his career as. Lasting the time limit in a legitimate seeming fight with one of the great real fighters ever, in a match genuine enough that it still manages to do that beautiful beautiful thing wrestling can do over two decades and counting later, which is making people wonder for even just a second if that was real or not.

When it’s all over, the greatest tribute yet to the career of Akira Maeda airs, in a beautiful tribute video set to the Sid Vicious cover of “My Way”.

One of the great retirements in professional wrestling history.

The Hardy Boyz vs. Edge & Christian, WWF No Mercy (10/17/1999)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from longtime friend of the program @beenthifty. 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 the fifth match in the Terri Invitational Tournament (GET IT???), for $100,000 and the managerial services of Terri Runnels, and was also a ladder match.

Obviously, yes, this is not in 2024 (and beyond) what it was in 1999.

Speaking as someone who was a nine year old when this match happened — and thus uniquely situated to be both in awe of everything wrestling had to offer at the time and thus blinded by nostalgia in many respect as well as being able to speak to this in terms of what other ladder matches and/or other stunt shows wee offering up — it has been topped many times over. Not just by what these teams would do five more times together (four with the Dudleys, and once just in a better ladder match eleven months later), but by what other wrestlers and teams have spent the following quarter century and counting doing in the wake of this match.

If one is interested in such things, this match is a genuine historical artifact.

Razor Ramon vs. Shawn Michaels happened five and a half years before this, but it feels like it happened a decade before this. To isolate it even more so, there’s a Rock vs. Triple H ladder match thirteen and a half months before this that the company makes a big deal out of because of who those two became and that I do genuinely think is very good, and that feels just as much like it happened a decade in the past compared to this. It is the genesis of the modern ladder match, in terms of utilizing multiple ladders, and the sorts of things to be done with them.

All of that has very little to do with why this is great though.

For as much fun as it can be and for as rewarding as it can be to look at a match again for the first time in a while and find new layers, that is not the case here. There is not a narrative depth to be found here. These teams and wrestlers eventually all become very skilled at injecting those sorts of things into these major gimmick matches, but this first time out, it is a pure fireworks show. The loudest sounds and the brightest lights that these four can conjure up, that is what this match has to offer.

This match whips ass because it whips ass.

A difference between a match like this — an old ass fireworks display that holds up — and the many that don’t though comes where it always does, in the slightly more thoughtful construction of the thing.

While the match is full of spectacular concepts and horrifying landings, very little happens in this that doesn’t at least make some sort of sense. Not everything is absolutely about getting up the ladder to win, but the big prop spots that happen are all very well plotted and metered out. There’s a very very very fine line to walk in matches like these, where you accept that some bits are guy trying to do greater damage so they can climb unimpeded but also where you know, on an individual gut level if something slips too far into just doing cool stuff, and it’s a little different for everyone, but this is a match that feels like it has it right enough not to hold against four hyper ambitious young wrestlers. Everything always moves forward, and that movement always seems geared towards trying to win in a very appealing sort of way.

Following multiple ladders toppling over, Jeff Hardy knocks Edge off the last one left, and yanks the sack of money down with such force that he takes arguably the biggest bump of the match simply yanking it down, creating his star in a moment that feels so on the nose that it loop back around to being totally and completely perfect.

A better poster might say some shit like, “the second best match of the show next to Jeff Jarrett vs. Chyna”, but while I do love that match, it’s just a little too hard to deny a fireworks show this good with the staying power that this has.

***1/6

Las Cachorras Orientales (Etsuko Mita/Mima Shimoda) vs. Nostradamus (Akira Hokuto/Mayumi Ozaki), GAEA Yokohama Double Destiny (9/15/1999)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from the most generous and prolific Ko-fi contributor of all, Kai. 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. 

In which Akira Hokuto’s dream team meets her one-time former back up, now having more than come into their own during Hokuto’s time away from the sport. There is a little more to it, I’m sure. A short pre-match video thankfully included on the GAEA youtube upload shows Mita and Shimoda turning on Hokuto via chair shot, so one at least has a general idea of where things stand.

The match also does not make it all that complex either.

It’s both a positive and a negative.

Negative in that it feels like there is much more here than we totally got.

Some of that is not on the match itself as a whole. Etsuko Mita and Mima Shimoda were never the most mechanically perfect wrestlers to ever live, it’s why their best and most famous work came not only as a tag team, but as a tag team whose most enduring work lied in plunder brawls and big gimmick matches. This is very much the former, almost always involving chairs and having the benefit of blood, but it is not the world’s smoothest match. Nothing all that horrible goes wrong and at sixteen minutes, the match never really suffers under the weight of this for too long, but there’s a kind of b-show match feeling to this that I can’t get away from. Not the biggest or best weapon stuff they’re capable of, not the best action it feels like they’re capable of, and it also feels like these are not the best individual performances any of these four are capable of either.

Looking at it in terms of what they’re going for though, it is also a pretty simple idea.

Hokuto has not been back for long, and this feels like a simple sort of feel-good thing. The cheating heels draw blood and beat the asses of Hokuto and another all-timer, before then suffering the consequences and then getting their asses beat. This isn’t a match that aims for anything more than evoking that feeling, and while I wish it was more ambitious given the talent involved, it is also a match that totally and completely achieves this clear goal.

The positive in all of this is that it does still rule.

While not everything one might imagine in their mind’s eye, it is still fifteen minutes of big moves, chair shots, and blood. While not as perfectly organized or executed as one might obviously hope for, it is still a match that succeeds through its spirit. There is a very mean feeling to just about everything that happens in it that does a great deal to compensate for all that it isn’t, and given that it’s only sixteen minutes, it never becomes anything too upsetting.

Simply put, it is a very fun time.

After the chairs finally backfire on LCO and they get the beating returned, Hokuto beats Shimoda emphatically with the Northern Lights Driver.

Less than one might hope for or imagine, but hardly a match withouts its charms.

Steve Austin vs. The Rock, WWF Backlash (4/25/1999)

This was a commission, this one coming from a contributor well known to many of you, the Barrylad. 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 or something you only want me to see/write about because it sucks, 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 a No Holds Barred match for Austin’s WWF Championship, along with Shane McMahon as the special guest referee.

Famously and previously, these two main evented WrestleMania XV (THE RAGIN’ CLIMAX) the month before, and in this rematch, the WWF/WWE first establishes the idea of an immediate or near immediate WrestleMania rematch, as seen many many times in the years since. This has at least the narrative momentum of the stolen Smoking Skull Title being in The Rock’s possession to not feel entirely, along with the fact that since their WrestleMania match was less a match and more a means to an end — a ritual to be gone through to get to the real climax of Austin regaining the title and standing over Vince McMahon — meaning that, more than most, this particular WrestleMania rematch has so much to offer.

Once more, it is total bullshit.

Shane McMahon as the referee, Shane vs. Vince drama in the background, the stipulation that Austin cannot hit Shane, the slow (for 1999) bubbling of The Rock’s coming and obvious-in-retrospect face turn coming down the pike when he handles Austin evenly for like three quarters of the match without cheating attached. It’s another one of these Attitude Era matches that manages to balance a billion things, half of which ought not to be possible to co-exist, and yet they all do.

Which is to say, once again, that I mean that in the nicest possible way, because we can all use some good bullshit sometimes.

This match is a mess, and I mean that in the best way.

At best, maybe fifteen to twenty percent of it happens in the ring, and it is absolutely one hundred percent to the match’s benefit.

Rock and Austin have the exact right mix to make a match that is, minimum, eighty percent brawling in the aisle and by the stage and at ringside work, which is to say that everything looks great, and they are not at all afraid. There are a bunch moments, particularly by the entrance set and — as this is 1999 and they haven’t totally taken the production leap yet — on the concrete floor that a bunch of other WWF main eventers in the future either would not take or would be forbidden to take, but that Austin and Rock do. Not only slams or suplexes, but these gnarly full force clothesline bumps or hurls into the entrance set made of fencing and steel truss that they constantly eat shit on. They not only have a great sense of how to make the most of this time by always hurling each other into the closest possible hard surface at a time when that meant fencing or unprotected steel barricades or hard equipment cases, but Austin also goes above and beyond by constantly climbing on this stuff and leaping off with a punch or a clothesline or something. It’s a small shift, admittedly, but the interaction with the surroundings has a way of making everything feel that much more genuine on a minute level, even if the larger thing is so much bigger than all of that.

The bullshit of it all is also phenomenal.

It isn’t Austin and Foley eleven months earlier, for sure, but as it also manages to keep the outside the wrestling nonsense of something like Rock/HHH a year later out of the way until the very end, it also lets it land so much more cleanly. A little chunk at the end, all packed together, has the effect of landing so much better to me than in a match filled with it, even if said match has it all handled perfectly.

When the match does come back inside, following two separate announce table spots in succession (again, somehow, they make this work), Shane McMahon misses a shot with the official (non-Smoking Skull) title to hit The Rock, before calling back to the initial Survivor Series 1998 turn by refusing the count. As part of the ugh, Vince McMahon fake Higher Power face turn (never ever examine this, it makes no sense when you consider it at large for over two seconds), he comes out to brain his son with the Smoking Skull belt.

Stone Cold hits Rock with the Stunner, and as payback for the last few weeks, follows up with the title across the face for the win.

Yet again, it is absolutely a match that you can criticize. It is not perfect. The Rock is absolutely not a great wrestler yet, and even though this covers up for him by asking for little more than punches, competency, and some courageous bumping, if one is inclined to hate, they can find the material. Likewise, similar to their WrestleMania match even if to a much lesser degree, one could argue that for all of the fantastic brawling, they are filling space until major story beats, and I would not argue in the slightest.

All the same, it is good enough and fun enough that I simply do not care.

More accurately, it is so good and so fun and so blessed through the virtues of yet another performance by one of the greatest of all time and the magical balancing act of one of the rare times where 1999 WWF booking not only works but is held back enough to allow for a match to be truly great that I am again simply overwhelmed by it all. Not everything that works makes perfect sense, and I have enjoyed enough phenomenally stupid action movies to know that sometimes, language falls short in the face of some shit that just absolutely fucking rocks.

The sort of phenomenal bullshit that explains the WWF’s midas touch from 1998-2001 better than any words ever could.

***1/3

 

Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Yoshihisa Yamamoto, RINGS RISE IV (6/24/1999)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Dan Vacura. 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. 

I’m not totally in the boat with people calling this the best shoot-style match ever or anything, but if you were to say that to me, I wouldn’t argue too strongly against it, because I also really love this match.

A whole lot.

Part of that is because of the mechanical brilliance of it, the incredible holds and the struggle in transition and the million nasty and awesome strikes, all of that. It’s not perfect, even though some of the drier portion have a point that pays off and even though some of Yamamoto’s lighter body punches in the first half still have a healthy smack to them, and it can become somewhat repetitive due to the approach, but it’s also never not interesting.

It’s what you expect from one of the greatest wrestlers of all time in Kiyoshi Tamura given a good opponent. He’s one of the few wrestlers who I think someone can call a genuine magician or a sorcerer out there without it feeling like hyperbole. He isn’t pulling new techniques out of the air like Volk Han, but everything is so fast and smooth and perfect. In the realm of pro adjacent wrestling, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone scramble around as fast or as well as Tamura, both in this match and otherwise. Yamamoto, while not quite on that level, contributes a whole lot too, not just in terms of what he can do — hanging on the mat and offering up some great palms and punches and kicks of his own standing up — but way more importantly, in terms of what he is.

Like a lot of matches in this style that I love, it’s that that really elevates it for me. Not just something to tie all of these wonderful techniques together to make it into something even greater, but specifically how they choose to do that.

One of my favorite things in all of wrestling is when an unsuspecting or unlikely wrestler rises up to do something. That doesn’t always mean the underdog, so much as it does the underappreciated or less heralded. Your Tomohiro Ishiis, your Ashura Haras, your Kazuo Yamazakis, your Bobby Eatons if you need an American there (Japan tends to do this much better), and the like. Something about it clicks with me like few other wrestling stories on a personal level, especially the more heated it gets, and this is a match that is not only real heated, but offers up a wonderful figure in that vein in Yoshihisa Yamamoto, who has not achieved all that much.

That’s not to say that Yoshihisa Yamamoto is a nobody, toiling out there.

He’s not a bum. A month before this, he beat Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, a guy who had beaten Tamura in January 1999 and who would go on to beat god damned Fedor two years later (even if it was with by stoppage due to an illegal elbow). He’s beaten Volk Han before, taken Akira Maeda pretty far in a tournament final, and in his last match against Tamura under a year earlier, losing in nineteen minutes. Yamamoto is a guy who made his debut on the eighth RINGS show (of nearly one hundred) in 1992 and whose entire career is in the promotion, working up from opening match draws to this.

It’s just that he isn’t Kiyoshi Tamura.

Kiyoshi Tamura, on top of being a phenom who was great immediately upon debut in a talent sense and a Budokan headliner for UWFi within four or five years of his debut, has been the best wrestler in RINGS since he came in, and the clear top guy since he beat Akira Maeda in 1997, if not earlier. He’s not only the most talented, but as the results show, he is the best. RINGS is helpful enough to display their records during the introductions, and while there are always stories within those numbers, Yamamoto sports 38-23-3 to Tamura’s 27-8-2 is pretty striking. Tamura only came to RINGS in 1996, hence the lower number of fights, but it’s still a winning percentage comparison of 59% to Tamura’s 72%, and it’s hard to get around that, especially when two of those twenty-seven have come against Yamamoto himself.

To the match’s benefit, it’s that simple.

Yamamoto tries his best, and Tamura has next to no respect for him or his efforts, until the wonderful moment comes when Yamamoto scares it into him.

Before the match even begins, they establish it, first with one of the most disrespectful pre-match looks I’ve ever seen, as if Yamamoto is wasting his time even coming out for this, before then slapping him instead of a handshake. It’s some of the best tone establishing I can recall seeing in a shoot-style match before laying the bell, making the match immediately more interesting than it was, were you to go in a little blinder, and establishing a clear foundation independent of any facts, records, or results you can look up, and doing so before anything really even happens.

He’s is one of the most mechanically perfect wrestlers of all time, but in this match, Kiyoshi Tamura delivers one of the greatest pure antagonist performances of the decade too. Not just the looks or the actions, but how he carries himself constantly, up until the moment when a shift really happens, along with sense of indignation underneath everything in the explosion that follows.

A big part of that is also how he works as the control group — how the idea of Kiyoshi Tamura as the perfect wrestler functions in the match — to make Yamamoto’s effort that much more impressive.

Tamura’s scrambles are as effective as usual, but in the first half, it never really gets him anywhere. Yamamoto stays on top as best he can, and while he cannot scramble at anywhere near the speed that Tamura can, he always gets out. Even when Tamura goes for things right near the ropes to try and bait him into a break, Yamamoto never falls for it, just like he never falls for anything else. Yamamoto doesn’t necessarily feel like an equal, he’s a guy so clearly on edge (losing a yellow card for grounded punches to the body even) and focusing as hard as he can on having the best match of his life while classic ace figure Tamura simply wrestles, but he’s having the best match of his life all the same. It’s made especially clear when it’s Tamura, and not Yamamoto, who gets driven to the ropes first.

After that, with a little respect put into him, the match becomes a lot more serious for Tamura, who not only turns it on in the way you often see real sports superstars do coming out of halftime after a surprising performance by an underdog team, but also forces the match more off of the ground and begins throwing shots.

Beautifully, Yamamoto also gets the better of him at that in the third quarter of the match, dropping Tamura down for a longer count than Tamura does to him, which is the moment when this match takes a leap from being great to being something real special.

With not only some healthy respect earned in the first half, but now a little fear beaten into him as well, Tamura not only wakes up completely, but becomes an absolute demon. Yamamoto can go on the mat, but lacks anything with the ferocity of some of the heel hooks and cross armbreakers that Tamura goes for in the last five minutes. He can strike, and as the match showed, has real power when Tamura doesn’t approach him as seriously as he ought to, but at full power, Tamura is faster, more accurate, and has a wider range to him.

In the greatest twist of all though, it doesn’t work.

Not even close.

Kiyoshi Tamura came too late to a place that Yoshihisa Yamamoto was all match.

He never gets rocked all that badly, despite the flurry and despite (or perhaps because of) the desperation Tamura is swinging with, and with time running out, he also manages to stuff Tamura’s attempt on the mat, getting up in a leglock, and then avoiding what looks to be an attempt to position himself to set up the double wristlock that beat him in their last match. Twenty minutes elapses and time runs out.

The Ace can’t beat him, and Yoshihisa Yamamoto goes the distance. The clock strikes midnight, except this time it means that Cinderella gets to hold onto that beautiful gown and those glass slippers in perpetuity.

RINGS would become a regular shoot-style promotion shortly after this, after a long time straddling a fence. This is the last professional wrestling match on Yamamoto’s cagematch profile, the main event of the second to last RINGS show that I gather would have been considered a professional wrestling event and not pure MMA. I think it’s beautiful that, at least in this genre, this is how it ends for a guy like Yamamoto. This being realer wrestling than most wrestling, it is maybe not totally believable for him to rise to the very top himself, but on his third try against the best in the world, getting to a draw not only feels like an achievement, but given how the draw itself went, like the best that Yoshihisa Yamamoto could ever reasonably do in his career.

Moral victories are bullshit, except for when they’re not, and Yamamoto absolutely got himself one here in his last chance to ever do it.

Yamamoto goes out with the rare draw that feels like a victory.

Again, this is what wrestling ought to be.

When you have the ability to manipulate the outcomes of real sporting events to create greater drama, this is what it ought to look like. A style that feels real, wrestlers who feel genuine both as fighters and as the people they’re portraying, building off of past history as well as a clear enough story that I think anyone can get, assembled brilliantly and executed perfectly, building to a dramatic and powerful ending, the result of which is not only the action you wish you got all the time from the real stuff, but the feeling as well.

This is what it looks like when the magic we wish we saw elsewhere lives in the ring.

It’s not one of those immediately accessible shoot-style matches, but if you ever even get an inkling that this might be for you, this match is waiting to knock you on your ass.

***3/4 – ****

Aja Kong/Mayumi Ozaki vs. Meiko Satomura/Sonoko Kato, GAEA G-Panic Special: 4th Anniversary Show (4/4/1999)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Dan Vacura. 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 a non-title match, despite the Kong and Ozaki dream team being the AAAW Tag Team Champions at the time of this show.

It’s lucky for them.

What this match goes for is petty routine. All-time great veteran heels elevate promising newer wrestlers, an underdog match where our burgeoning young heroes gradually get more and more before breaking through, anchored by a particular pairing featuring someone who will obviously be the next face of the promotion. You have seen it before, even if it didn’t tick off every single one of those specific boxes, you have loved it before in one form or another, and a few of them have even been better than this one. The classics are the classics for a reason.

Still, it’s a complete and total success, even by those terms.

The major thing that works to their benefit is how astonishingly well put together this is.

Not just in terms of joshi tags, which tend to rarely be my favorite matches, but just the entirety of wrestling. They get pretty much all of the major motions right, in terms of getting right to the mean stuff, gradually teasing out more and more with the hope spots becoming longer and more emphatic and the cut offs gradually going from being these gigantic exclamation points to going to older school stuff like yanking the illegal woman off the apron to break up a tag, the timing on the tags themselves and how it takes a few for one to really be “hot”, the breakdown, and all of that. They also really nail the more minor elements too, with the big names not only getting in control quick, but honestly eating them alive for the first half or first two thirds, to the point that I’m not positive Sonoko Kato got in more than five offensive moves in the entire match. Beyond that, the cut offs tend to come in really interesting ways, usually through Kong or Ozaki breaking up a standard tag spot, and making the kids really earn it.

Performance wise, it’s also remarkable.

The primary focus is on Aja Kong and Meiko Satomura, who are both great. While not my first time seeing her as a young wrestler, full of spirit and energy and fighting from underneath, she’s maybe even better at it than she is on the other side twenty years later. More specifically, there’s a transition in this match where she really kind of grows up by the end of it to become, if not a star immediately, very much one of those who become that, her Halliburton in the IST or Steph’s 50 at the Garden or Kevin Love’s 30/30 in his rookie season, and she handles the transition so gracefully. And Aja Kong is maybe even better, doing something close to the opposite. Kong opens this match refusing to sell anything, in a way that works for the match as this ultimate expression of cruelness, hammered home by the fact that she’s eventually forced to against her will. It’s the little things, yet again, that make this work where it might not for lesser wrestlers. The facial expressions, making it plain that this is a choice Aja Kong the character made to be as rude as possible to the kids, but also the way she gets up quicker after moves than she might normally, to really rub it in as this mark of disrespect. It’s perfect veteran heel wrestling, most of all because of the way she eats shit at the end.

While not the focus to the extent of Kong or Satomura, Mayumi Ozaki is the third all-time great in this match with an awesome performance. Always, on the periphery at the very least, Ozaki is there taunting up a storm at all times. When there is a cheap shot to be taken, Mayumi Ozaki is there. When the match gives her the spotlight to bully Meiko on the Big Ramp while Aja Kong drags Sonoko Kato’s poor hapless ass through the crowd for a different level of ass beating, Ozaki is there with her sensational bombs. Essentially, in a match that is about Meiko and Kong doing some tremendous serious wrestling business, their spin on an old classic, Mayumi Ozaki is also there to be cruel in an entirely different way and make this match fun on top of how great it is, and like her partner, it’s something that’s made so much better by the fact that she’s punished at the end too.

It’s not perfect, of course.

Meiko’s repeated Death Valley Drivers at the end — while they make the point — become a little much with six or seven of them, a problem made a little worse by the comeback itself being so short relative to the other parts, that you wish there was a little more to it than just the one heavy shot repeated over and over again. There are also a few wasted moments where the dream team targets Kato’s bandaged up left leg, and while it never goes far enough to be a match ruiner, it’s still a chunk of this that stands out from the rest as inessential, which in and of itself, stands out when every other part of the match does feel necessary, even occasionally to the match’s detriment when one imagines even more.

These are minor problems though, minor enough that they’re less real genuine problems I have with this match, and instead why I think it’s “only” really really great, instead of being a borderline masterpiece, essentially being a victim of how great 90% of it is, that that 10% — the repetition, the sparseness at times, not being totally airtight — stand out more than they might in a lesser match.

It’s not a lesser match though, and proof of that comes in the end.

Following a failed attempt to turn it violent and split them apart once they finally get moving, the dream team falls apart. You can think it through and chalk it up to speed and the element of surprised, constantly ducked and dodged to set up miscommunication, and with Meiko outmaneuvering Aja Kong and then draining her with one of the most dramatic sleeper spots in the period in between like Johnny Weaver and Samoa Joe before unloading the arsenal on her, and that’s not wrong. You can also read the clear moral lesson to it, which is that mean spirited bullying, where winning comes second to humiliation in its many forms, is destined to fail in the face of pure heart and ambition. Alternatively, you can accept both at the same time, the physical being as correct as the spiritual, achieving the balance that so much great professional wrestling does.

With two Death Valley Drivers in a row, Kong finally goes down.

Meiko Satomura beats Aja Kong for (almost definitely) the first time, setting up not only one of the best matches of the year months later for the title, but also one of the greatest rivalries of the next quarter century as well.

A match worthy of all it sets up.

***1/4

Diamond Dallas Page vs. Sting, WCW Monday Nitro (4/26/1999)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Guthrie. 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 DDP’s WCW World Heavyweight Title.

I love this match.

What feels easy is to touch upon, again, that old WCW Super Fight style — two gigantic acts opposite each other, every motion a gigantic swing for the fences and an attempt to win at every possible moment — but that is not so much the case here.

A little over a year prior, in their March 1998 Monday Nitro WCW World Heavyweight Title match (feel free to hit the ko-fi), it was. The People’s Champion against the face of the company, his first title match, the U.S. Champion against the World Champion for the first time in years and years and years as this final sign of WCW’s victory over the NWO and those who had cooperated, it was a wonderful thing.

This is not so much that.

Not entirely anyways.

In terms of the general principle, big swings and a sort of flow that feels more genuine, there’s something there still, but the approach is different, both narratively and also a little bit stylistically too.

Page having become a bad guy after finally winning the World Heavyweight Title — in an ill advised move that genuinely only ever served Kevin Nash as he tried to book himself as WCW’s top babyface — means that that is not the case. The WCW sort of a match demands two babyfaces most of the time (non 2000-2001 Scott Steiner division) to work, and while this does not do that, it does something much less common.

Along with things like Scott Steiner vs. DDP in 2001, or the like, this is one of the rare late period WCW matches of any importance that also feels like a classic sort of Attitude Era walk and brawl. Nobody is reinventing the wheel here, especially when their fight in the aisle feels far more at home on USA than on TNT, but there is a certain spirit to it that feels on home on both, in the nicest possible way. The chaotic energy of the time in parts of the match and also its booking, but also always very much that wonderful kind of old WCW match, just with some classic good and evil bullshit thrown in now too.

On top of the obvious and easy stuff, a heel champion running and cheating and Out Hero beating his ass, there’s also a little more depth to it too. Sting acolyte DDP wanting to live up to him but lacking the skill and athleticism and forced to rely on an intelligence and craftiness that occasionally becomes very dirty when he still can’t surpass Sting, it has a way of giving the match another edge besides the basic, and enhancing the also great purely physical stuff.

Page finds his way in these moments, the match making him more legitimate than his booking as champion seems like it’s supposed to, as because Sting never really falls for the bullshit and cheap tricks, he’s forced to get in control honestly. In the later stages, he not only lasts something like twice as long against Sting as he did thirteen months prior, but does a lot better in terms of countering him and breaking out new offense to again push past how prepared Sting is.

The problem is that for all the improvements, these two still are who they are.

Page is still a little too stubborn and in his own head, made worse by the fact that Sting is still Sting. DDP messes it up when he refuses to stop going for the Diamond Cutter in one moment, even as Sting grabs the ropes, allowing for the exact same finish as before, only now a little more drawn out. What was, a year prior, a win for Sting because of pure experience now becomes more of an outright loss for Page because of his own pigheadedness.

Off of the Scorpion Death Drop, Sting gets him yet again.

Sting wins the belt for the final time, robbed later in the night when Page wins the title back in a four way (still not beating Sting), but isolated to just this individual match and moment, it’s still so triumphant.

One of the last truly truly great WCW matches.

***1/4

 

Aja Kong vs Meiko Satomura, GAEA Yokohama Double Destiny (9/15/1999)

Commissions continue, this time from frequent contributor, Kai. 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. 

This was for Kong’s AAAW Title.

It is not actually their first match together, meeting in a ten minute match in 1998, but for Meiko as a top-level singles wrestler stepping up not only to really challenge Aja for the crown for the first time, but to challenge for the AAAW Title for the first time period, it may as well be their first match together. 

I found it to be a very interesting match.

Primarily because, at least relative to the majority of their work together that I’ve seen, it is not Aja Kong vs. Meiko Satomura as I think of it. Maybe not as you think of it either.

Not just to say it is not a near-perfect-for-what-it-is titanic struggle between two established pillars of the genre at a point when both were already established as all-time greats, but that it is Meiko at the very beginning of that process, someone looking up at Aja Kong and climbing her way up the mountain, rather than a clash between two women already not only standing there, but incredibly comfortable with that terrain. There’s a lot to be said for their 2000s matches, probably (a great thing to commission reviews of!), showing the growth of Meiko into someone on that level, with Meiko’s big win over Akira Hokuto in 2001 reading as the official coronation, but if that is the case, this match feels like the start of that period of growth. Meiko first getting her gear and starting that steep climb, as it were.

Part of that process is, I guess, that this is far from perfect.

There is some 90s joshi-ism on display here that I do not love. The moment-to-moment selling is not the greatest, and while they had an obvious and clear enough narrative that you didn’t need this to have a real stringent focus, it is very much a match that would have benefited from a little more precision. There are a few moments where they gesture towards even more interesting directions with a leg or an arm of Kong, and nothing really comes of it. Meiko is also not yet the striker she will grow into.

At the same time, most of that is either small and inoffensive enough that it doesn’t matter all that much or it fits so well into the larger narrative of the match — such as Meiko’s inability to stick with Kong’s arm or leg past a moment or two because of her difficulty sustaining the big bombs — that it winds up bailing them out.

Construction wise, the match does just enough right. It drifts, as these things tended to do this decade (and in general), but they take care to build up the big things fairly well, and the match is home to some great teases and payoffs. Not just Uraken ducks or catches and then payoffs at the end or a dive cut off once and hit on another try, but something like Meiko not getting the sunset flip bomb counter to the Aja avalanche-style back drop the first time and adjusting to a German instead, but hitting it the second time. They also get the more delicate things correct too, like finding a moment that feels close enough to exactly correct to end the match at what feels like its natural peak. 

The match is also a narrative delight.

It’s an obvious hit — young superstar in the making who everyone knows has It taking their first swing at the company’s top title, held by a dominating powerhouse — but as a match like this shows and like a million others before and after would show as well, these stories and matches that tell them are routine for a reason. They work, and they work more reliably and arguably better than almost anything else.

Kong is repeatedly challenged by the spirit and talent, but never really seems genuinely troubled. Over the match’s some twenty plus minutes, Aja Kong goes from lightly shoving her around and grinding her down to having to break out almost all of her biggest and best offense, there is clear progress shown by the young Satomura, but Aja never once appears to be at a loss, or unsure of how to proceed. It’s not just the expressions, as mentioned earlier, but in her body language. There’s something that I really love about that, which you don’t often see in these matches. Your Ric Flair types, or even in more modern times, your Bryan Danielsons or Nigel McGuinnesses or Chris Heros when tasked with making guys in defeat, tend to overexaggerate and make these shocked faces that don’t always seem genuine, but you get very little of that from Kong in this match.

Meiko Satomura goes from being a waste of Kong’s time to, in the last quarter of the match, being a genuine problem, but she is never a problem Aja Kong cannot solve and maybe more importantly, she is never a problem that Aja Kong feels capable of solving, and most importantly, that Aja does not feel like she will eventually solve. There is always a confidence there, even in moments of surprise, that helps so much.

In other words, the point of the match is Meiko making it as far as she does her first time, and you don’t need to do more than that. Make the one point, and it has a much stronger impact than trying to make two or three.

With a million matches throughout wrestling history like this, what makes this one work as well as it does is what always makes the truly great matches like this work as well as they do.

It’s the performances.

Kong is the obvious leader of the match, and delivers both another classic Aja performance, and also something less obvious, in a great way. You get the casual meanness, the escalation, everything you want from Kong against a lower ranked opponent, but the specific way she reacts to Meiko is my favorite thing about this match, and what really makes it work. Aja looks almost bored early on, occasionally annoyed, but by the end, that grows into something else. It’s a gradual thing too. So much of why Meiko’s progression here works as well as it does is because we’re not the only ones experiencing it, Aja Kong is experiencing it too. The transition, the growth, the change is always what matters the most, and Kong shows that even better than the nuts and bolts of the match do.

Satomura is the less important part in theory, but she is also so specifically great in her role that it elevates the match in the same way Aja’s performance does. Forget some not great elbows, everything else rocks. The energy you expect later on is a major part of why this works, a perfect contrast to Kong being relatively nonplussed at the start. Her selling here is also incredible, and the best thing she does in this match. Particularly, late in the match, Meiko does an unbelievable job at displaying the physical and mental cost of the match. Even after she hits offense, she looks exhausted, and unable to do the things she seems like she wants to do, and it is one of the most sympathetic performances ever in a match like this.

Few matches like this seem to take into account what this match does, that someone in their first World Title match against the best in the world is at least a little bit out of their element and that there is a toll there, being on this stage and in this moment for the first time. You see it in real sports all the time, virtually any time a young and/or newer team makes it to their first championship series or game, and you do not see it nearly enough in pro wrestling.

The difference here — and this is again one of those times where pro wrestling takes advantage of what it always should take advantage of, the ability to manipulate these scenarios from real athletics to create dramatic and sympathetic moments — is that unlike many of these teams and/or individual players, the moment is not too big for Meiko Satomura.

She does not shrink in the closing moments, and in fact, grows closer than ever as she seems to adjust and get more and more of a feeling for it.

It’s just that for Aja Kong, there is no adjustment.

While Meiko fights and struggles to get there, Aja is waiting, and when the perfect moment finally presents itself, she catches Meiko flush with the Uraken. It’s not the first time it’s been hit tonight — another small thing to elevate Meiko successfully in defeat — but it’s the first time it’s hit the way it usually is and that Aja Kong wants it to be, and it keeps the title around her waist yet again.

A hell of a match, two remarkable performances, and yet another stellar chunk of professional wrestling with one of the most reliable aims in wrestling history.

Not what it would be, and still worlds better than most things that presently were.

***1/2