Masaaki Mochizuki/Don Fujii/Jimmy Kagetora vs. Over Generation (Eita/Gamma/Takehiro Yamamura), DG Gate of Passion 2017 Day Twelve (4/23/2017)

The easy thing to say here is that Takehiro Yamamura, one of wrestling’s two greatest young wrestlers alongside Takuya Nomura, does it again, and that Dragon Gate at this point is a machine mostly running on the efforts of its wunderkind.

In actuality, that is not the case!

There are six good wrestlers here, four great ones (Eita, Yamamura, Kagetora, and Don Fujii of course), and it is very easy for a match like this — your classic Dragon Gate undercard mix-em-up for ten or fifteen minutes — to fall short. They simply do not have any outright bad wrestlers there to drag everyone down, nor do they make the sorts of mistakes (trying to do limb work) that can occasionally doom matches like this despite all of the talent on hand. It is a regular strength great little match which doesn’t succeed entirely because of Yamaura’s efforts, although it’s the kid who once again brings it home at the end to certainly end the match with some real emphasis.

Virtually everything that happens in this match is good, and with a great ending run of Yamamura vs. Kagetora, it is simply a match that very casually succeeds.

Mochizuki vs. Yamamura is a delight again, of course. Eita vs. Kagetora is a really fun little much. Fujii and Gamma don’t get in too much on the serious stuff (although Fujii hurling Yamamura up and then down into the Earth with his chokeslam is a delight and a half), but they make with a few fun little bits that manage to lighten the mood here and there but without ever becoming this long-term focal point or allowing the match to become entirely about the jokes. It’s a small part of this, but a match like this really serves as a case study on how to have a few cute little bits (Gamma’s spit stuff, Gamma yelling out move names only to get cut off easily, Mochi accidentally kicking Fujii and the old partners having a brief sumo slap fight before both stopping and hitting Gamma running at them to try and take advantage, as if it was always a ruse) while still presenting a mostly serious wrestling match, as it is a tried and true thing with Dragon Gate undercard matches like this one.

As you’d expect, the back half is when things really pop off and this becomes a full on great match. Primarily, that’s because of the Yamamura run at the end, first against his old pal Mochizuki again, and then in a more extended run against Kagetora. They’re great opponents for each other, in particular because Dragon Gate always underutilizing Kagetora (save for the match that is arguably the best in company history) means nearfalls are believable in both directions, on top of the thing with every Yamamura match, where he’s still so young that non-finisher nearfalls even seem believable for him. There’s a lot of drama to the pairing as a result and it makes an already mechanically satisfying end run into something a little better than you’d usually get from a mid-tour opening match.

Yamamura gets the relatively big upset on Kagetora with the Stardust Press.

The time is over when pure formula alone is going to do the trick for the Dragon Gate roster, but all the same, this is a stellar show of just how fun, light, and easy that formula can be when the right people get plugged in at the right times, and it all comes together like this.

***

CIMA/Dragon Kid/Masaaki Mochizuki/Gamma/Don Fujii vs. Ben K/Shun Skywalker/Hyo Watanabe/Yuki Yoshioka/Katsumi Takashima, DG Fantastic Gate 2016 Day One (12/1/2016)

The Dragon Gate Class of 2016 steps up, and it is time to Meet Your Rookies.

Our young heroes take the stage against Dragon Gate’s five most tenured wrestlers and get their asses kicked.

That’s it, that’s the entire match.

And it’s perfect.

It’s one of those situations in which a well-read fan could look at this from afar and kind of figure out what it is — a little shine for the kids at the start and off a hot tag, especially with ten guys in there and not four or six, but mostly them being destroyed — but not the extent. Certainly, one could not pinpoint beforehand just how much raw energy, fire, lunacy, and outright contempt seemed to explode out of this thing from the very start.

There are loose attempts to have a match. Yoshioka gets beaten up inside the ring for a long stretch. CIMA’s arm is almost worked over by a few of the kids.

Mostly though, this is a fight.

Just a nasty sprawling god damned thing. Chairs are thrown at people, people are thrown at chairs, tables get turned over and picked up and thrown through. Everyone in this match is the worst and/or meanest spirited version of themselves possible, beyond just Mochi and Fujii being as surly and petulant in the face of youth as always. CIMA is punting people in the face like he hasn’t in years, Gamma reverts back to Muscle Outlaw’z form, hell, even fucking DRAGON KID is kind of a prick here (and for him, “kind of a prick” is like if another wrestler lit someone’s mom on fire). The great part of it all is that, for both sides, it makes sense. The old guys are pissed off at the kids genuinely really trying despite barely just getting here, the kids are mad at the old men for getting so worked up about it all. It’s a perfect circle of violence, and depending on how old you are, you can spin that bad boy in either direction.

For me, it’s an even greater delight than it was the last time I saw this, being even older myself. The future HYO tries to step up to Mochizuki, and it goes about as well as it would even six plus years into the future, only far more succinct and effective. Mochizuki simply slaps the life out of the kid, knocking the words right out of his mouth, before knocking him out clean with a Rolling Sole Butt for the win.

Not just another great Dragon Gate tag in a year full of them, but full stop one of the nastiest and most different Dragon Gate tags in some time too.

One of the most fun matches of the year and decade both.

***1/3

Shin M2K (Dragon Kid/Masaaki Mochizuki/Kenichiro Arai) vs. Crazy MAX (CIMA/Don Fujii/SUWA) vs. Italian Connection (Milano Collection AT/YOSSINO/Condotti Shuji) vs. Do FIXER (Genki Horiguchi/Magnum TOKYO/Susumu Yokosuka), Toryumon Verano Peligroso II 2003 Day Sixteen (8/30/2003)

Another commission from Eamonn here. You can be like him and pay for me to watch and write about all sorts of things if you would like. You can achieve this goal by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The going rate is $5 per match or fight or what have you. If you have goals more complex than just one match (I encourage this, for the most part, just don’t be blatantly rude), add the matches/fights/fight scenes up, and do that math yourself. If you have a higher aim like some kind of a list or larger idea, hit the DMs, I’d love to talk.

This was an elimination match for the UWA World Six Man Tag Team Titles.

Rarely in the Dragon System do you see matches referred to in the way we talk about 1980s & 1990s All Japan. In fact, rarely in wrestling after 2000 do you see that. Something changed culturally about that. There’s some confluence there between shows having more recognizable names, more wrestling in general making it harder to differentiate, and also more people involved with the Disc Horse meaning that there is less of a consensus on what is really canonized on that level.

This is the only match in Dragon System history that I’ve ever seen identified by date alone.

And with good reason.

First of all, some context could help you.

Over the last several years, Toryumon specialized in these sorts of matches, much as Dragon Gate will specialize in them. This was the first big four team one after years of three trio matches like this, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean the world when they’ve been happening fairly often since, there is an importance kind of baked into this that helps. The way the crowd reacts to certain things, for example. Everyone in the match seems to wrestle with maybe not a full on sense of importance, but as the best possible versions of themselves, throwing things out with as much snap and intensity as possible. There’s an energy and atmosphere to the thing that I think makes a difference. Even if I had seen other matches like this by the time I first saw this (you are likely in the same boat, unless your ass was on crazymax forums in 2003 trading tapes), there’s an atmosphere to this that elevates it not only among every other match of its kind, but I think above virtually every other match in both Toryumon and Dragon Gate history.

There is just a certain joy to a match like this. How it’s received, the feeling it inspires in me and most people who’ve watched it, and in how it’s both crafted and performed as well.

An astute scholar of these companies and/or matches like this and/or simply an astute reader with a good memory or enough psychotic issues to look up every match like this in the 2010s that I’ve ever reviewed may also note that a lot of these matches have very similar bits and many of the same flaws. Uneven pacing can sometimes lead to issues like spending so long on the bit where every team is in, only to all be eliminated in something of a flash at the end. There also just a whole lot of bodies (twelve, to be exact), and so people can occasionally get lost on the floor and a lot of space is filled with empty calorie brawling in which clearly nothing happens that either matters nor is cool. Dragon Gate particularly has this problem in the 2010s, typically when doing matches like these in Korakuen Hall where they fight up into that upper aisle area by the concourse tunnel, but never do anything cool.

This is a match with none of those flaws.

Very little time is wasted here, if any. Very little falls short. I suppose if you’re the sort of weirdo who needs legal man spots or is going to pop up every two minutes with a “why did [x] happen?” question, you may not be head over heels for that. But for the rest of us (and bare in mind that I am telling you this), this is just spectacular. Every classic bit here is either the best version of said bit (big man chop wars) or the sort of thing that always works on some level (12 man suplex spot, etc.). The escalation is perfect, everything lands right, and they’re able to mostly establish who people are relative to each other both in terms of like big vs. small but also who the leaders of the groups are and things of that nature, so you get the most out of certain things down the stretch, like CIMA and Genki going back to war or the big Milano vs. TOKYO run at the very end.

Of all of these matches, it is by far the best constructed one.

I’m not going to gif every cool thing that happened here, or we would be here all day. Suffice to say, the match is full of it. Great little comedy bits, fun payoffs, great double and triple team spots, genuinely remarkable nearfalls, all of it. You can also find out what happened for yourself, because (a) this is not a big storyline thing really, nor does any Toryumon story that have a lot of impact on what happens here, outside of the group that wins finally cementing itself as the absolute best and the year’s previous CIMA/Genki fight (another iconic Toryumon thing that I think many people know about), you can hop into this and know basically nothing and get it & (b) I think if you don’t know what happens exactly, or haven’t seen it before but are interested, you really really ought to. It is not a hard match to track down, and you really ought to. 

(if you don’t know how to track down close to two decade old Toryumon matches, I’m not sure if you should be watching them. Gatekeeping, on a smaller scale, is objectively good. Learn to do something for yourself.)

Genuinely, this is a delight, and everyone should see it. It is a These Days ten man level peak of the style and promotion. It stands above all the rest as a monument to what this was at its best, what the best possible version of this whole thing looks like, and how much god damned fun this could be.

It may also only be the third best match of the month.

****1/4

Shingo Takagi vs. Don Fujii, DG King of Gate 2016 Day Seven (5/22/2016)

This was an A Block match in the 2016 King of Gate tournament.

Shingo and The Big Don previously had a scorcher in October 2015 that slipped through the cracks for whatever reason (probably because it came before a more widely celebrated and far worse Shingo title match). It had the problems Dream Gate matches have where it wound up going on too long, because only long matches are great main events, but still rocked. I wrote at the time I last watched it that while that match was near half an hour and still a lot of fun, a fifteen minute version of this may well be one of the best matches of the year.

Sadly this is only twenty minutes exactly for a time limit draw, so we’ll never know.

However, we still get twenty minutes of these two with less bullshit and less wasted space, and it kicks ass.

It’s another classic style psuedo heavyweight match out of Dragon Gate.

Tons of hittiing, some cool power moves, great escalation, all of that. It’s not without waste, as Fujii and Takagi cannot help themselves and waste just a few minutes on Shingo’s arm. Even then, it’s Shingo Takagi, and he makes the most of that for the second time in the tournament with another really good transition selling performance. Little shakes of the arm minutes after Fujii’s forgot, stretching of the arm later on. Again, it’s nothing complex or showy, but enough to show that it mattered. Even if it wasn’t vital to anything all that important later on, it’s a nice show of respect for our time.

Like other matches like this, there’s also an easy story to tell, and one that they hammer home time and time again. Fujii is old but tricky, Shingo is the best in the company but hot-headed as hell. Fujii keeps frustrating him, but gets his ass kicked worse every time he does it. At the end though, because it’s a tournament and they only have twenty to play with in the King of Gate, it turns out Fujii’s been playing the long game all along. With time limited, Shingo throws the book at the old man, but just runs out of time.

Fujii hangs on, pulls off the most frustrating result of all for a guy like Takagi (neither destroying Fujii a second time, nor being outright beaten, so not even being met fairly by another strong wrestler), and that’s that.

It’s not a win, but in a setting like this, I think it might feel even better.

Don Fujii never had any real chance in this tournament, but Shingo did, and Fujii helps take some of that away from him. Too young to explore the world, too old to explore the stars, but still having just enough left to destroy the work of the former and the dreams of the latter. God bless him, man.

Not as large in scale or impressive in quality as their 2015 title match, but a great match for all the same reasons.

***

Shingo Takagi vs. Don Fujii, DG Gate of Victory Day Two (10/4/2015)

This was for Takagi’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

Since the all-decade angle six weeks earlier, Takagi’s engaged in a war on Dragon Gate’s legends and the obscene deference it still shows to them instead of the current generation and those coming up. It’s just on the border of being a little too on the nose (as it is one thousand percent correct and leads to Problems in a few years), but Takagi is exactly enough of a contemptuous prick to get away with it. Doubly so now that he’s given all the former MAD BLANKEY members a home in one of DG’s least inspired heel groups yet, VerserK.

The match itself is everything you would expect, for better and worse.

Firstly, it absolutely rocks. It’s fun to see another Dream Gate match in a row with no real bullshit to it. It’s straightforward fighting between two of the company’s more straightforward fighters. Lariats and chops and big throws and head drops. A piledriver through a table and a chokeslam off the apron to a pile of chairs are the highlights, but there’s no moment of this where the action is outright lacking. The construction isn’t perfect, but all the material is, if that makes sense.

However, it is still a Dream Gate match.

Shingo vs. Fujii is an incredible match that at fifteen minutes, may have been one of the best matches of the year. However, matches can’t be great unless they’re at least twenty five minutes, so this has to go at least that far. There’s fat on it that doesn’t need to be on it, a belaboring of the point that muddies the waters by way of repetition, and in general, it’s just too nice to the old Big Don. I love him too, I get it. He’s as charming a wrestler as Dragon Gate has ever hosted, unquestionably the #1 pipe layer of the entire outfit. But it’s been years since he mattered like this, and the match loses a lot of believability by the end, along with most of its charm. It’s a lot more interesting to see an old guy doing his best in spite of everything than it is to see them go largely even by the end, but Dragon Gate is Dragon Gate, and it’s almost always gonna be like this.

However, it is a bit of a hilarious own goal at the end to have a match built on Shingo accusing the company of catering too much to the old guard go on ten minutes too long because they can’t help but be deferential to the old guard. I can’t totally hate something that nails its themes so succinctly and proves someone right in the end, even if the company trips backwards with pants arounds its ankles into doing it.

In the end, it’s a great match that could have been a much greater and far more timeless one. However, a great Dream Gate match is still a gift horse, no matter how many we’ve somehow had in a row in 2015 now (3). We got what we got, it’s a happy little free prize where we wouldn’t usually get one, and there’s no need to look it in the mouth.

***

Shingo Takagi/Akira Tozawa vs. Masaaki Mochizuki/Don Fujii, DG Dead or Alive 2014 (5/5/2014)

This was for Takagi and Tozawa’s Open the Twin Gate Titles.

Dragon Gate rarely offers a sort of straightforward dudes rock style of match like this. Even when they throw the heavy hitters like this against each other, it’s usually spoiled like the overrated Takagi/Mochizuki title match by attaching meaningless limbwork onto it to spoil the broth. It just isn’t in the nature of a more narrative based promotion like Dragon Gate to offer up a style match that’s largely just simplistic and thrilling in a purely violent and physical sort of a way.

They did here though!

Mostly. Dragon Gate can never totally leave well enough alone, but the story elements here are less someone blatantly killing time or adding melodrama. It’s just that each team is composed of a more traditional badass and then a weirdo partner, and then there’s all this Tozawa and Mochizuki history, of Mochi always being this stumbling block for Tozawa in matches that have mattered. However, unlike a lot of other Dragon Gate matches, that’s just sort of subtext. You don’t need to know it, it isn’t spelled out, and I doubt there’s some 2,000 word writeup on this match on some website talking about how emotional a lariat was just because it made some goon feel smart. It’s simple, mean, and physical wrestling that just happens to have some minor background. I like it better that way in a match like this, because they don’t need any of that.

What develops is clear bell to bell storytelling. Tozawa is a ball of energy that they try to contain, but can’t in the way the veterans can handle the more traditional and predictable Takagi. At the same time, the Monster Express superteam is so dynamic itself that they keep catching the old guys in different ways, and forcing Fujii to dig deep and break out things like a chokeslam off the top, is a whole lot of fun too. They go back to the big thing at the end though, and it’s Tozawa and Mochizuki. It’s good. It’s snappy and light and more of a traditional DG match up than any other one on one pairing in this match, but it’s still all really good. Tozawa does what he had trouble with before, and manages to keep a hold of Mochizuki after he starts to pour it on. The dream team keeps the titles following the Package German from Tozawa to Mochizuki.

While it isn’t some top ten or top twenty five Dragon Gate match ever, it winds up standing out as one of the easiest-to-watch Dragon Gate matches ever, probably only next to the Tenryu/Magnum TOKYO stuff from 2006.

***1/4

Shingo Takagi/YAMATO vs. Masaaki Mochizuki/Don Fujii, DG Gate of Maximum 2013 Day Five (6/2/2013)

This was for Takagi and YAMATO’s Open the Twin Gate Titles.

It’s one of the more can’t-miss tag team pairings in Dragon Gate history, having delivered big in 2012 and having been, to my memory, the best Dragon Gate match of 2009 as well. This isn’t quite as great as those, it’s in front of a smaller room with aims other than simply “go kill it”, but it’s still a great match consisting entirely of really great individual match ups.

Mochizuki vs. Shingo is the best among them, which gets plenty of time. On the other side of that, there’s an incredibly fun and different segment where Fujii and YAMATO fight outside of the venue and down the sidewalk a bit before returning. Otherwise, it’s straightforward formula meathead stuff. The old(er) men work over the slightly softer and slightly less powerful Shingo, leading to another fantastic hot tag. YAMATO and Shingo are then still not on the same page as a team, which gives the old guys enough of a window to constantly double team and separate them from each other. Very similar to Prince Devitt in the match in April before he turned on Ryusuke Taguchi, YAMATO often comes across like a guy who WANTS to lose the titles, so he can get away from this and do the turn, but he isn’t quite fed up with Shingo enough yet to do anything about it or REALLY tank it like Devitt could have been accused of doing.

And yet, Shingo keeps them in it in spite of YAMATO ignoring cues and not really bothering trying to block the saves at all. Shingo eventually gets his own man again with a Pumping Bomber on accident ad gets taken out by Fujii with the Nodowa Otoshi on the apron. It’s a perfect set up to do the switch and then get the YAMATO turn over with, but instead, he’s a hero? He manages the two on one totally cleanly, and pulls off the miracle with a Hurricanrana counters out of a second Nodowa from Don Fujii and cradles the legs to grab the win out of nowhere.

It’s a confusing finish given everything coming with the story, but Dragon Gate hasn’t really ever let anything like that get in the way of YAMATO looking like God before, so there’s certainly no reason to stop now. Match ruled once again though.

***

Masato Yoshino vs. Don Fujii, DG Primal Gate 2011 Day Six (1/18/2011)

This was for Yoshino’s Open the Dream Gate Title. 

In 2010, Masato Yoshino was yet another guy to surprisingly emerge as a successful long term champion. I wish the footage was there to properly cover his rise up the card, because it came about through one of my favorite Dragon Gate storylines ever. YAMATO did his spin on the classic ROH 2005 bit where a new champion follows the longest title reign ever and feels a need to prove himself, so he goes a little wild. Instead of wearing himself down though, YAMATO tried to big himself up by picking on Yoshino but ended up suffering a loss in a tag team match, and demanded a rematch, which he also lost. Yoshino was seen as maybe not a total fluke, but a very beatable champion, and the failure of top level guys to do that drove a lot of them crazy. It’s what finally broke up Speed Muscle and led to the formation of the mega heel stable Blood WARRIORS and then WARRIORS 5. Don Fujii’s the latest one to think he can come in and take advantage of a smaller champion than DG usually has. 

This is one of the better examples ever of the kind of beautiful layered storytelling of a company like Dragon Gate. Nobody is really bad here. Don Fujii is the bigger veteran, but he’s a career midcarder who’s best known for being CIMA’s Arn Anderson, but much goofier. It’s totally understandable to come into this wanting to see him finally win a chip. At the same time, Masato Yoshino is my guy, y’all. The fastest man in the world who never sought this out, but has quietly had the title for six months and isn’t really taking shit anymore. In his own way, he’s as much of a man rising above his station, only with supernatural speed as his ally instead of hands of stone. Neither of them does anything wrong and cheering for either of them is one hundred percent justifiable, but for the night, they are at odds with each other. 

The contrasts do their part to making this an easily great match, but so much else goes right. It’s a Dream Gate match that’s under twenty five minutes (the clipping on the Infinity airing of this gets it down to sixteen or so, which mostly helps), Korakuen Hall is WITH THEM in the sort of way that elevates matches to a next level, and there’s just a sort of magic to the whole thing. It’s a very uncomplicated match too. One of the least complicated Dream Gate matches in history, as two men with great and very different offense just hurl it at each other. Fujii is desperate, and in his desperation, Masato Yoshino feels more like The Man than ever before, and I’m a sucker for that sort of transition. The Big Don does his best, he never lets Yoshino get a hold of his arm to fuck him up like he did to YAMATO or Naruki Doi or anyone, but he’s in over his head. Fujii unloads the arsenal, and it’s never enough. He took his shot and missed a shot he was always going to miss. In his desperation, Fujii begins playing those away games and tries to roll up Masato Yoshino. His science is much worse than Yoshino’s, and he is much slower and less nimble. Yoshino is eventually (and barely) able to wrap him up into the Riverina Especial and he keeps the title. 

Because of the way a certain archivist feels about Dragon Gate, this is one of the only matches of the time that’s survived online and from many sources. There’s no reason not to seek this one out. It might not be the most bombastic, epic, or nutty Dream Gate match, but it’s very hard to think of a more agreeable one. It’s a sixteen minute match because of some mostly alright editing, and while that editing is always going to cause me to wonder what else there is to this match, you won’t find many brisker or more congenial little matches like this in this setting or for this title.

***1/4