After trying since the start, for the first time, the UWFi cracks the code and has itself a great shoot-style tag team match.
It is not always easy.
While today, nearly thirty years after the faster and more constantly strike-oriented style of BattlARTS and FUTEN blew the code wide open and made it easier, it seems obvious, it was not always the case. The slower more peaks and valleys style of earlier shoot-style made it harder in the sort of longer tags that were often attempted in the first year of the UWFi so far, and an emphasis on reality removing the classical heat segment and hot tag formula did them no favors either in terms of pacing.
This suggests though that the key all along was simply throwing the best guys in there, along with the most promising newcomer, getting a little anger involved, and hoping for the best.
All planets just so happen to line up, and it’s not only the best UWFi tag yet, but also just a genuinely great match.
Most of that just comes down to performance, as this is not a large narrative display.
Yamazaki and Nakano are who they are. Tense and a little mean, skipping bullshit pre-match handshakes, full of nasty shots and cool holds, and most of all, a ton of energy. The two most likeable guys in the company, when cast against two wunderkind clean style more promotional friendly guys, feel even realer and more likeable. There’s maybe not a desperation to everything, but there is a kind of understandable hostility there, and in a continuation of the “pro wrestling as real sports” idea taken beyond just the style of wrestling, nobody is ever so mean that you are forced to make any kind of a decision beyond the sort of guys you are naturally drawn too.
Billy Scott is also a major standout, here in his second match. As a former amateur and future Billy Robinson student (and catch wrestling instructional video coach), Scott is as great at the mat stuff as you might expect, but also way better on his feet than you might too. He’s an ideal rookie wrestler, presented as more than capable with the performance to match, but also so energetic and overzealous that he’s prone to mistakes of inexperience that give the match some juice beyond simply good action.
The same goes for Takada, who turns in his best showing of the year so far. Following a real loud and big kick across the body from Yamazaki early on, Takada wrestles angry for the rest of the match, as if he is suddenly a real person with real feelings and understandable behaviors rather than a bland corporate approved poster boy grown in a lab as he’s so often been. Yamazaki and Nakano were already two guys to regularly get more out of Takada than most, but with Takada actually bringing it and not simply being this statue, representative of a concept more than anything, the more action-centric bits of this are better than usual. Takada’s had better matches than this before, so there’s no need to get hyperbolic about it, but it’s my favorite performance of his in some time, as well as being the first in a much longer time to suggest that he might actually be able to pull this role off after all.
Combine all of that, mix up the combinations enough to make twenty eight minutes go by much quicker than usual in this style, and although it always kind of just feels like a teaser for other matches, it is always super interesting to watch, and often very exciting as well.
When tempers rise, the inexperienced Scott cannot handle it with the grace and relative caution of others, and simply charges right in. His shots have power, but without the on his feet finesse of a Kazuo Yamazaki, it is not all that difficult to top him. Yamazaki floats past and takes him into the crossface chickenwing for the win.
In something of a theme of these initial shows, and kind of all the 1991 shoot-style splinter groups post-Reborn (Redead) UWF promotions, it does not feel like the best anyone can do and feels a lot like everyone testing some stuff out, but there’s still just too much good to ignore. It’s all fun, a whole lot of it is exhilarating in its explosivity, andt when one matches up its quality to its runtime, it’s just a little too hard not to be impressed by everything that went right.
HANDWERK 