Kenny Omega vs. Moose, Impact Against All Odds 2021 (6/12/2021)

Commissions return again, this one coming from longtime reader Bren. 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 $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), 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 Omega’s Impact Heavyweight Title.

I suppose this is what the commissions are for. Making me watch a match that I absolutely would not have written about otherwise. Usually, I intend for that to be like 70s stuff or French Catch or old Chicago footage, and not a match that happened in a year I already talked about and that, instinctively, repelled me so much that I didn’t even consider watching it.

There’s a version of this that works, maybe three or four years earlier when Kenny had a genuine Midas touch. Moose works heel, throws him around, add in some props, and take it home in fifteen or less. Maybe not great, but, you know, breezy and watchable.

Unfortunately, they met at the worst possible time for these two to ever meet.

First, it happens in the middle of the pandemic. The first thing about this that stands out, now that this period has been over for a solid two years and counting, is how much I don’t miss pandemic wrestling, and how much it sucks to watch at in retrospect.

Yes, I wrote a lot of positive things about a lot of pandemic era wrestling, when that was all that was available on TV from the two big companies (and also Impact, I guess). Given what the situation in the world was, there wasn’t a reasonable alternative, so everyone made due. The best wrestlers made something of it, using the lack of anything else to focus on very good wrestling, and when that happened, the things that made it so hard to watch — the emptiness of the buildings, the community theatre black box style atmosphere with other wrestlers pretending to be a crowd, the total lack of atmosphere — had a way of disappearing. It really had a way of emphasizing, at least in a purely mechanical sense, what good wrestling was and what bad wrestling was.

On a nuts and bolts level, it’s no good. Overlong, boring, full of work with no real point as both the work on Omega’s back and Moose’s arm are both never interesting to watch or executed all that well or sold very well and barely even matter. There’s a lot of sloppiness here too, as Omega is very clearly wrestling hurt as he did throughout this entire run, which really has a way of hurting a guy whose greatest virtue is/was his athleticism. On a level beyond that, it is also bad.

The other thing is that, independent of the environment, it is also just bad wrestling, as Omega meets a real average-at-best wrestler at his own creative nadir, at a point where any version of the smoke and mirrors show was not only not available to them, but because of what he was doing as a character and how that was shown in the ring, he also wasn’t in a place where that sort of match would ever have happened, or at least in one where it wouldn’t have made any sense. The addendum to the commission was that, “this was the best that the Kenny Belt Collector bit worked”, and I don’t know if that’s true or if I have any hard opinion about if it was or wasn’t or what match I would say it worked better in (maybe the title loss to Christian?), but truthfully, that was a bad bit that saw Omega focus on all of the things he does poorly (being a convincing heel in the ring, being a convincing heel outside of the ring, basic striking, etc.) resulting in the worst run of his career.

Looking at it from farther away, I maybe get it.

The idea of a guy big enough for Omega’s (godawful phony bullshit) heel routine to feel like less of a put-on against, leaning sort of into Kenny’s obvious injuries by having him struggle to lift Moose for his move and also having Moose attack a bad back in the first half, all of that.

But like the idea of Omega as a long-term heel champion itself, it falls apart when you actually have to look at it from more than a thousand miles up in the sky.

Moose is bad at all the things this match asks of him, so much so that it feels like nobody putting this together (or maybe at any point in his TNA run) ever got why or how he worked in ROH to the extent that he did like five or six years earlier, and like all of his matches in this run, it also asks Omega to do the opposite of everything he’s actually good at too. It’s an empty house, a model home to show off that maybe looks nice at a passing glance, but with nothing actually inside. 

It’s bad pro wrestling.

Not the worst thing in the world, lord knows Kenny has had many many worse matches than this, some in this very reign, but the exact sort of match that in the process of writing about and trying to deliver what I think a commission warrants (rather than what I would likely do had I seen it of my own free will, which is turn it off after like five minutes, realizing I would get nothing from this, and forgetting about it within 45 seconds), I like less and less the more time I have to spend thinking about.

I have no idea why anyone would like this or what they would see in it, but I appreciate the money.

Kenny Omega vs. Kota Ibushi vs. Cody, NJPW King of Pro Wrestling 2018 (10/8/2018)

This was for Omega’s IWGP Heavyweight Title.

When this match initially happened, a few people whose opinions I tend to trust, even if they don’t always line up perfectly with my own, swore that this was actually very good. They may have even sad it was great. Who knows? Anyways, I could never speak to that, because I just never watched it. Chalk it up to a healthy distrust that a thirty five minute New Japan three way title match, also featuring Cody Rhodes, could actually be great. You could also chalk it up to life events in the fall of 2018 not leaving me with a ton of time to watch wrestling I didn’t already suspect would be great. I honestly don’t know which one it was, but either way, I had avoided it until now.

I wish I watched it four and a half years sooner.

Genuinely, and against all reasonable betting odds, this ruled.

The pacing and the construction are astonishingly good, for one. It’s a thirty-five minute match with maybe only a few minutes that I find boring. They even find themselves some three-man spots that feel genuinely new and interesting. It’s obviously not all inessential material, but as with a lot of bigger Kenny matches in his 2017-2018 peak, and the best Kota stuff, there is always enough danger and useful motion and general fireworks that it stays interesting for the most part. Whenever it starts to feel as long as it is, there is some big table spot or an obscene Ibushi head drop or one real loud and enormously crunchy strike to draw the attention back. Beyond just what they do, they’re also very good at construction. Not so much a fear with big Kenny stuff, but it’s not always Ibushi’s strong suit, and I certainly would not call it a strength of Cody’s.

Generally speaking, the surprise of the thing is how well it utilizes a guy like Cody.

Out of his element in a cool moves three way, the match uses Cody to get to the root of some narrative stuff here, letting him be little more than a schemer trying to take advantage. Through him, they get to some standard triple threat spots, but they work a little better than usual because of how they take the time to set them up and go through them. Cody trying to force Kenny vs. Kota scenarios, betraying either man whenever possible, and then Kenny and Kota eventually coming to real blows when Kenny actually tries to pull off a betrayal for an easier win, rather than when Cody had set them up earlier. Like a lot of his other New Japan work, largely against both Lovers earlier in the year, Cody is put to his greatest possible utility in a match like this, not the star nor the focal point, but a viscerally unlikeable shitheel to try and run in and ruin or accidentally advance far more interesting stories with far better wrestlers.

The match gets to its big Kota vs. Kenny run in the end, and while it’s nowhere near as great as their less-heralded G1 epic and probably nowhere near as great as they could have simply done one on one, it’s still real great. Crisp and explosive and vibrant and just a little mean too.

Kenny reels off the One Winged Angel, and despite the three way spoiling it just a little bit, finally gets his win over Kota Ibushi after all this time.

Somehow, a great match. Not like, the match of the year, or anything, but a rare thing. A match so impressive that I will probably think of it more fondly than other matches of its level that I had already expected to be great, simply because of the surprise, and the process leading up to it. An admirable achievement, one so miraculous and unbelievable that it took me nearly half a decade to confirm it with my own eyes.

***

The Golden Lovers vs. Kazuchika Okada/Tomohiro Ishii, NJPW Fighting Spirit Unleashed (9/30/2018)

Less of any kind of build up tag, Omega/Ishii for the title having already happened and been decidedly Not Great through any number of factors (foregone conclusion, not as great at half an hour, repetition), and more of a thrown out there one-off to main event an otherwise lacking U.S. show, it completely fucking rules all the same.

The strength of this match, primarily, is that every pairing here absolutely rules.

No one on one combination exists here that has not had a great singles match before. The least of them, Okada vs. Ibushi, is that way simply because unlike the others — Omega vs. Ishii, Ishii vs. Ibushi, and Omega vs. Okada — they have merely only have had a great match together, rather than one of the best of a year (or between partners, the 2016 Match of the Year for example) or of the decade at large.

At no point here is there really any large narrative concept offered up, as is often the case with a New Japan main event. The largest thing anyone can grasp onto is the teamwork of the Lovers compared with Okada and Ishii simply being a functional quasi superteam, but even that is some real squint and look in between the lines shit.

What matter most here is the fireworks.

The bright lights and the loud sounds, all of that.

It’s easy to criticize, given all that these four have shown themselves capable of in larger efforts, but they are also unbelievably great at this too. Few other wrestlers, teams, or matches offer brighter lights and/or louder sounds than these guys.

Construction wise, as with all of the best work involving Omega, Okada, and Ibushi during these few years, it is a marvel and it is a marvel through ways that are hard to totally qualify, quantify, or put into words. There are teases and payoffs, the escalation is again ideal, but it is the sort of match better seen than read about, I think. It is all action, pristine dumb guy wrestling, but assembled with such care and precision that it also exists on a level beyond that. Everything that happens is unbelievably cool, but also within the confines of the idea of this match — a practiced superteam entirely on the same page against one without as much experience along with having a clear leader and follower, an echo of the same year’s Real NBA Finals in a lot of ways — it is perfectly executed, and ought to exist as some kind of case study of how to correctly pull this sort of thing off.

Okada is neutralized and totally cut off by the on-top-of-his-game Omega, and while Ishii can contend with either Lover individually, no one wrestler alive can handle them both at once. He’s cut off with the greatest two man arsenal in the world, and beaten with the Golden Trigger.

Secretly, given how in Prestige Wrestling Companies, things can fall through the cracks when they are only regular great and not like Match of the Year great, a true god damner, and a match that I am shocked I never hear more about. Relative to what it feels like they were trying to have — a 2000s ROH tag epic a la Aries & Strong vs. The Briscoes or something — a complete unabashed success, which ought to be celebrated far more than it is, especially by the sorts of people who tend to love such things.

To date (6/23/2023), the final time Omega and Okada have ever been across the ring from each other, and like every other time when it mattered, they made the most of it. Not a match imbued with the importance of their four singles meetings, but a pristine example of how this sort of a tag team match ought to work.

***1/4

The Golden Lovers vs. Tomohiro Ishii/Will Ospreay, NJPW Road to Destruction 2018 Day Two (9/7/2018)

Infuriating Ospreay and Ishii team aside, it’s a hell of a build up tag.

The obvious Kenny Omega vs. Tomohiro Ishii rematch for the IWGP Heavyweight Title comes up about a week after this, but this match is just as much, if not moreso, about starting the build to the Kota Ibushi vs. Will Ospreay match for Wrestle Kingdom. With Omega and Ishii, they’ve had matches before, and got here by having their best ever singles match together about a month before this. The build up to this match is, more or less, already done. You can’t hurt it by giving away too much, because between the 2017 series and the past summer, shit has been given away, and you also can’t help it in the way an all-action build up tag might either (which is to say, it is not one of the Tanahashi/Okada build up tags from the spring that added in narrative elements before the match), because there’s nothing to really tease either.

With Ibushi and Ospreay, everything is brand new, and the match gets the mixture exactly right. There’s enough here to take it from a thought in your mind that this might actually be cool to showing you that, yes, it would be cool and is actually pretty cool. Enough to whet the appetite, but holding back on the real important things and biggest pieces of offense, and avoiding ruining the final course.

Beyond any utility this has as a build up tag, it also just absolutely whips ass.

The match is almost all back and forth, but is paced and laid out in such a way, that it still feels like a thing with form and a real sense of drama and escalation to it anyways. It’s another one of these times in 2017 and 2018 where an Omega match completely gets it right, and is the sort of thing that every failed imitation since ought to take a much closer look at. The fireworks are all bright and loud and dizzying in the best possible way, but they’re also given more value by the early teases, and the way the match returns to all of the different pairings throughout, with heightened intensity and a more frantic approach.

What this match has going in its favor more than anything else though is simply that it is hard to go too wrong — or wrong at all — when every single match up in a tag team match is great.

Yes, even the Ospreay ones.

The problem with Will that really began to emerge in 2018 is that he sucks shit when trying to be a top guy and a Serious Wrestler, but a match like this casts him as the underdog and has him following the lead of two far better wrestlers, which is always when he has done most of his best work. It’s not just that he’s following the lead of two wrestlers with a far better grasp on how matches like this work best, it’s also that the match casts him as the underdog and thus cuts him down to almost entirely flying offense, which is what he’s best at and the role he’s still most suited for.

With that problem solved through force of will and force of maybe casual talent, every other pairing is as great as it’s always been, resulting in a real easy hit.

Ospreay gets caught at the end eventually, Tomohiro Ishii being poorly suited for the pace and style against two opponents like this and fairly easily removed from the equation for longer stretches, and the Lovers win with the Golden Trigger.

2018 was the year that New Japan briefly figured out how to correctly do build-up tags, and there were few better than this one.

***1/4

Kenny Omega vs. Kota Ibushi, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Eighteen (8/11/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

You could again note that this is a de-facto semi-final for the B Block, with Tetsuya Naito having been mathematically eliminated in the previous match by losing again to Zack Sabre Jr., and that Kota Ibushi is in a must-win setting, whereas Omega can advance to the finals with a draw as well as an outright win, having a twelve to ten advantage in points, but as is often the case, these unofficial semi-finals are about more than just the tournament itself, with that added something on the line being more of a bonus.

Beyond just the stakes of the thing, it is also the first Kenny Omega vs. Kota Ibushi match not only since both joined New Japan, but since their famous outing in this same building (Nippon Budokan aka Budokan Hall) six years earlier from the 2012 edition of DDT’s annual Peter Pan supershow.

Truthfully, I was never the biggest fan of that match.

It’s not to say it’s a bad match, as I softened on it somewhat since the last time I watched. The narrative qualities of it are exceptional, not only on the smaller scale, where Omega cannot handle Ibushi, but in terms of the larger idea of DDT building up the Peter Pan main event for the previous three years as when a top babyface gets their coronation title win and big moment in the sun, only to deny Omega that in kind of a heartbreaker. On paper, it rocks. It is however a thirty seven minute epic where half of the match holds very little value (there is legwork on Kota Ibushi, and while you can fanwank it off as an expression of Omega not knowing how to handle Ibushi as an opponent, I suppose, it’s still an extended period of work in a match that mean absolutely nothing as soon as it finishes), and that overstays its welcome on the other end too. It has some truly incredible moments, but it always felt like there was very little connective tissue on the mechanical end, despite the extraordinary narrative quality of what they were trying to do. I’ve always thought of it as the sort of match that a quality editor could create an incredible twenty to twenty five minutes out of more so than a great match itself. Raw material in need of refinement.

Which is the deal here, basically.

Cut down to twenty three minutes, all of the coolest and best stuff, now armed with a bigger and hotter crowd and another six years of experience refining these techniques and getting worlds better at all of the smaller elements in between those big displays of fireworks (facial expressions, slight movements, but especially smaller scale strikes like audibly impactful elbows even in less dramatic moments), Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi finally have the sort of match that I always believed that they could have, and wanted them to have in the first place.

That is not to say the core of the thing changes.

Kenny Omega vs. Kota Ibushi is still an absolutely deranged display of the coolest, nastiest, and most deranged pieces of offense that either man can conjure up.

It is just a better version of that.

Better executed and far better constructed, with not only so much less dead space, but also far more coherent connective tissue, and a real sense of escalation to it as well. They don’t necessarily increase the hostility between them (itself actually quite impressive in a certain way, as this is a huge bombfest between friends that manages to have an edge to it at points, but without needing to get hateful and spiteful to find that edge), but everything gets a little more desperate and heated, and a lot more frenetic minute by minute. Everything is done as well as it could be mechanically speaking, every bit of it seems like it matters and like they’re trying to win, and it is all very cool and exciting. The brightest lights and loudest noises, assembled and presented in as tight a package as you could ever imagine.

For you absolute cretins who also need some kind of a story, of course Kenny and Kota have one for you there too. It‘s not especially complex, but it’s as well done of a top-this style competition as this style’s seen in some time. Both men do a lot of the same things, with Ibushi tending to find more success with bigger or more inventive versions of something. Omega has the knee to always even things out, but he’s also always the first to panic. As someone incapable of experiencing emotions or many feelings, Ibushi never really does, and always takes advantage when Omega either goes for something too soon like his early One Winged Angel or tries something repetitively. 

Essentially, a million other things have changed, but the core of the match up has not, which is that one guy thinks about everything, and the other thinks about nothing.

Kota again catches Kenny going for too much too soon, and blocks a top rope Angel before the original has ever been hit, going instead into a real God Damner of a top rope Tiger Driver, before taking his head off with the Kamigoe to win. From a narrative perspective, it is again Kenny Omega falling victim to his myriad of neuroses. Mechanically or stylistically or ideologically, it is that, once again, Kota Ibushi invented things and broke out things he never had before in a big match, while Omega relied on simple bigger versions of the existing attack. For the same reasons he beat Naito to start the tournament, he loses again to Kota Ibushi to end it. Against Naito, it is Kenny‘s game, and against Ibushi, it is not. You cannot succeed in a match like this while living inside of your own head against a wrestler who not only is even more inventive, but who is incapable of living inside of his head, because he has never had an inkling to ever even look inside of it. 

Perfect for what it is, and if not everything it maybe wants to be, better than the think it just might aspire to.

I never want to see this match again.

That isn’t to say Kenny and Kota can’t do better against each other. I’m sure that, given the right setting and given all things going exactly perfectly, they can. It’s just that after how totally correct this match got them together, I kind of just don’t want to risk it.

It feels as great as this can possibly get.

Something approaching the ideal version of this thing, a god damned Encounter.

***1/2

Kenny Omega vs. Tomohiro Ishii, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Fourteen (8/4/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

It is not quite the original.

I don’t mean that this is not the first Omega vs. Ishii match exactly, although they had a trilogy together in 2017. However, I never really loved those matches like a lot of other people did, and this match is different enough from all of those that I don’t think it matters all that much that this is the fourth Kenny Omega vs. Tomohiro Ishii match. It would have worked even better had they never once touched before, but like the match seems to emulate, it does not matter all that much that they have.

What I mean by the original is that this is not exactly Okada vs. Ishii, the match that it clearly aspires to be.

You can talk about decades of G1 upsets prior to that, specifically Ishii’s first one in 2013 against then-Ace Hiroshi Tanahashi in Korakuen Hall, but the inspiration here clearly comes from the Okada one in 2015. The reigning IWGP Heavyweight Champion losing an upset to an already mathematically eliminated Tomohiro Ishii, a victory for a certain type of fan, the underdog defeating one of New Japan‘s golden boys. Hell, it even comes at the same point in the tournament, the third to last night of a block. It just happens to have less behind it narratively (go read about Ishii/Okada if you want more here, I thought it was the best wrestling match of 2016, and one of the best of the decade period), and also happens between wrestlers with less physical chemistry, and with a champion/main event figure who it feels a little less great to see eat shit (this is not an insult to Omega really, it’s just that nothing in 2010s New Japan feels as good as seeing Okada eat shit). 

Everything this match seeks to do, Okada vs. Ishii did only two years earlier, and did in a better and more satisfying match.

Having said all of that, it both rocks to see Tomohiro Ishii succeed and to see Kenny Omega get his shit rocked and laid low by someone tougher and cooler than him, so there is really only so much you can take away. It is not the absolute best version of this sort of a match, but this sort of a match is one of the best things in wrestling, the reason you watch tournaments like this, and the match both whips a ton of ass and feels really great when the moment strikes.

That’s not only just because of the thrill of that moment itself, but also because of how great it is in execution. I don’t mean the simple mechanics of it, hard hits and crisp offense, but that’s all there too. What I really mean is that at large, the match is so well assembled and performed just as well.

More than any of their prior singles matches, this feels like a Kenny Epic and an Ishii Epic finally finding some middle ground between them, building a bridge to the other. It is more Kenny than Ishii, to be sure, but there’s just enough ground ceded here to make it really work in a way that their prior work did not.

What works best about the match that wasn’t there in 2017 is the obvious thing, that it finally allows someone to be 100% pro-Ishii and anti-Kenny. Their meetings in 2017 were about legitimizing Kenny and having Big Tom be an obstacle for him to overcome, and while they did a great job of that, this is so much easier, so much more natural, and feels so much better. Kenny, to his credit, doesn’t overdo it like he might have two or three years prior. A few slaps on Ishii’s head at the start and a few minor taunts sprinkled throughout, but otherwise, it is simply wrestling, with very little bullshit.

In fact, the entire point of the match is something directly for big Ishii fans in that sense, which is that the presence of even a little bit of bullshit on Kenny’s part is directly responsible for his loss.

Kenny is more explosive, faster, and more athletic than Ishii, and the major difference in his game from year to year is that he doesn’t try and wrestle Ishii on Ishii’s terms (another improvement for the match overall). There’s no real slugfest here, no attempt to prove a single thing. He has him, for most of the match. Whenever Ishii grits his teeth and pushes through something, Omega is there waiting with some sensational feat that Big Tom cannot do a whole lot against. The problem for Kenny is that he also knows this, and from time to time, cannot help but rub it in. Sometimes, it’s a smile and a light shove of the head, and other times, it’s trying to do one more thing than he needs to, opting to put on a show in moments when he probably could have ended the match, leading to a conclusion where he pays the price for every ounce of bullshit and nonsense that he tried to bring to a match with the wrestler with the least tolerance for any of it.

Something that stands out here with Kenny too is the total mastery over this style of match. I don’t just mean the construction or the escalation of it, although both are as good as always. What I mean is that there is always a little extra something to add real confusion into the mind over how this is going, or these little wrinkles to the formula that stand out, the sort of thing really only Kenny and a few others can pull off in an all-action match like this. There are small differences, nearfalls Ishii would not normally have, first creating doubt in an Omega win, but then also creating doubt in an Ishii one as well. A nearfall or two off of rare moves that, one might think, Big Tom might not otherwise get in a victory. The match is a few minutes too long, to be sure, but those excess moments kind of help the match out in a weird way.

The magic of this is that this is a Kenny Omega style match, but a Kenny Omega style match telling the story and carrying the ideological values of a Tomohiro Ishii match.

Nobody does this like Tomohiro Ishii.

If nobody can quite have these sorts of fireworks shows like NJPW era Kenny, then the same can be said for the things Tomohiro Ishii does in this match. It is a tired point, I am bored of making it, but the performance of Tomohiro Ishii in one of these big G1 matches is the sort of thing that every would-be imitator would do well to take a much much closer look at, and see the things he’s actually doing. The point is never that Ishii hits hard or that he kicks out at one or does a fighting spirit no sell spot.

The point is the struggle behind all of that.

Big Tom managing to get up in key moments late in the match whips ass, but the reason it works is all of the times early on when he tries to do that and fails. It’s the moments of righteous indignation, the measured fighting spirit sells that are only like half successful, all of that. The moments where he tries to stand back up after a third or fourth thing, but cannot, or where Omega catches him. The moments when he knocks Kenny on his ass are made all the more captivating by the ones where he cannot earlier, or where Omega blocks or manages to reel off his big strike first. In the same way that Kenny Omega has a total mastery over his style of match, so does Tomohiro Ishii, and it’s on display in the way he slightly changes up his usual bits. They do a multi-move fighting spirit exchange, and in that, Ishii almost goes down for good a few times, only to stretch it exactly long enough that you think he’s really got him, only to then get shut down, turning a usual routine into a real gut punch.

It’s masterful stuff, especially considering that all of those heartbreaking gut punches eventually lead to a real fist pumper of a conclusion.

Kenny and Ishii put together a motherfucker of a fireworks show yet again at the end, and now with a sturdier foundation than ever before, it finally has the ability to land with some real emphatic force and real impact. The twists and turns are handled beautifully, each Ishii comeback and each Omega cut off ratcheting up the feeling that much higher, and especially the way the final moments are done. Ishii tends to get his big wins with a flurry, usually a big Lariat, Powerbomb, and then the Brainbuster. When Ishii nails the Lariat, but Kenny’s able to escape the big one, the match feels over, making the payoff when Ishii reels off the Brainbuster out of nowhere for the win all that much sweeter.

It is not perfect. There are minor flaws if you want to hate, scabs you can pick at, and it suffers from the comparison it draws and the shadow it intentionally puts itself in. At the same time, an outstanding epic, the best G1 match of the tournament to date, and the sort of match I always thought these two could have under the right circumstances. Another success from the Great Match Factory.

The second best version of one of the best things possible in wrestling is still a hell of a thing, and one of the best matches of the year.

***1/2

Kenny Omega vs. Zack Sabre Jr., NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Twelve (8/1/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

It is a fascinating match.

Not so much a great one. Don’t mix up my words. Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Kenny Omega was a nightmare match of mine from the day Zack Sabre Jr. first started to even flirt with coming into New Japan, and this is almost every nightmare (being the G1, they can not quite have the absolute nightmare of a 30:00+ minute title match version of this match) come to fruition.

Being entirely fair, this was not an absolute lock to be a bad match.

I can imagine a version of this that might be very good, and maybe even great. Rather than his typical shit, Zack keeps it loose with his attacks, or focuses on the neck or the back. Something Omega can sell while still running through his bombs, like the Okada matches or the last two Naito matches have allowed him to. He isn’t even a bad seller in a situation like that, and Zack has shown an ability to do matches like that very very well in the past. Keep them around twenty minutes like this match with a match that plays to the strengths of both

That is not the match that happened.

Instead, Zack went for his two-pronged limb attack that worked in the New Japan Cup, working the knee in the first half to set up openings to go to the arm, and Kenny Omega predictably does not do all that well with this, despite his genuine effort in trying to keep up with it, while also fulfilling the demands of a semi-main event Kenny Omega match in New Japan in 2018. He holds his knee and his arm, does his best to always keep it present, but through the amount of explosive offense and sheer physical activity that his matches require, that they are basically advertised to include, it is more of a hinderance than anything. Kenny look a little dumb for never altering what he does, and Zack looks a lot ineffectual for doing all of this, but never once being able to really stop him from doing the things that he was always going to do.

What we wind up with, to me, is an intriguing litmus test for the brains of both wrestlers in the match (and also for anyone watching). It is not a match with maybe the most obvious route to being good/great, but it is one where there is a clear history of what works and what doesn’t with one of these guys. Given the choice to be stupid about it and given the choice not to be, one wrestler chose the former and one chose the latter in response. The shock comes not in that it was not a match I enjoyed at all, but instead in who it was that made the bad decision, and particularly, who it was who did all that he could (if not enough) to counteract that.

The records, the spreadsheets, the consistency and/or peaks or whatever may say otherwise, but I think above all, you simply have to trust your eyes. When put against each other, one of these two wrestled a stupid match that only benefited himself, and the other tried his best to fit into that, despite it not being his strongest suit at all. I would not have predicted writing this before now, but my eyes do not often lie to me.

Kenny Omega is a better wrestler than Zack Sabre Jr. in 2018.

A remarkable case study, resulting in a conclusion I did not expect, and I guess, also technically a professional wrestling match.

Kenny Omega vs. Tetsuya Naito, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Two (7/15/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

As the lowest stakes match in a trilogy between two of the better Big Match Guys in the world at this point, it is fairly comfortably the least of said trilogy. Part of that can just be chalked up to having seen most of it before, but largely, I think it’s just down to when it happened in the tournament.

Naito and Kenny both, despite their most celebrated matches often appearing that way or being referred to in that way, are not successful in their best moments because they are pure fireworks guys. They are guys with a lot of big and impressive moves who have these operatic displays of bombastic spectacle, but their very best work has and will have a lot of help from narrative sources. Either from larger multi-match narrative at play, some character element, or simply a sense of occasion, as seen in their previous two G1 meetings. This is simply the sole match of the three without something really tangible being on the line, either getting to the G1 final, or being the G1 final itself. It is an opening day (for the B Block) match, and given their status as two of the company’s top four stars, it cannot be called unimportant, but compared with the momentous events of their first two meetings, this is simply a wrestling match.

The good news is that this still whips a lot of ass.

What they lack in setting (to some extent, this is still Korakuen Hall), they make up in most of the other ways. It is a fun display of nonsense, crafted and executed just well enough to succeed, and without the existence of any annoying other element that could undercut all that good work.

Omega and Naito have a little trouble getting moving early on, the first section being the largest victim of the match’s lesser sense of occasion, but at some point, the switch does flip, and two of wrestling’s better big move freaks spend the last like seventy percent of the match unloading on each other. They’re smart enough to always escalate correctly, have enough of a feel to almost always feel like the right call is being made in a match like this, and once that switch is flipped, always move with a ton of snap and energy and (outside of a few bad elbows in the first half) execute fairly perfectly.

What narrative success this has — Omega starting to turn into a real rotten boy with the title and in response to a crowd 100% siding with Naito — is never entirely fleshed out to the extent that it feels like it could have been, or that other Omega matches as champion saw him succeed with, but they have a smaller idea that sort of works.

The match’s greatest virtue is the way it presents the idea of this sort of wrestling, and Omega’s place as the theoretical best at it as its champion. It is a match about going bigger, leveling up offense, countering big things that worked last time, and things of that nature. While they don’t hit that sort of idea as well as any of the Omega/Okada matches, or the G1 Final between these two eleven months prior, there’s an undercurrent to this I picked up on on rewatch that I really liked.

Both guys have all these answers set up for the things we know are coming, but while Naito fails to really come up with any new additions to the arsenal after a significant step forward last year, Omega always has another thing. The package tombstone to counter a One Winged Angel block, top rope or leveled up versions of the big signatures, and especially a Fire Thunder Driver to cut off the Destino at the end. It feels like how a champion in this sort of a company ought to be presented — or at least one of the ways — always having an answer for the next thing, with the guy on the other side eventually getting a point where he’s run out of stuff. It’s a real interesting idea, one that helps a lot if Kenny isn’t going to be allowed to work as a pure fireworks babyface (what he’s best at) as champion, a guy who is not the most athletic or technically gifted, but who can simply do the most things.

Following the big Destino counter, Kenny pours it on, and wins the rubber match with the One Winged Angel.

Not what it was what it was newer and far far more consequential eleven months in the past, but a stellar example of big moves firework wrestling from two of the better ones in the country/world at it when it matters, with the trick once again to be putting exactly enough thought into it to make sort of basic sense, but never enough to weigh down the more lizard brained delights of the thing at large.

A better match than I remembered, although the mixture is unclear as to what part of that is through the benefit of hindsight, and which part of that is down to the fact that this time, I didn’t watch it in bed on my phone while hungover.

***

Kazuchika Okada vs. Kenny Omega, NJPW Dominion 6.9 (6/9/2018)

This was a Best Two of Three Falls match for Okada’s IWGP Heavyweight Title.

If you have read any of my work on their previous three matches together, I do not want to belabor the point and repeat myself again, but for any new readers, I think it is worth saying again.

I believe that a great many of you want me to hate these matches. You want me to complain about selling or talk about how long three of the four of them are. Maybe some other bullshit that I cannot fathom.

That is not going to happen.

I love these matches.

Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada are, somehow, a perfect marriage topped only by the matches both men had with the best New Japan wrestler of the entire decade in Tanahashi. They are immediately and constantly on the same page. These matches go for so much, but they go for it so well. They have perhaps not mastered anything, but understand construction and proper escalation in matches like these better than ninety percent or more of the people who have tried to have matches like this in the years before and after this quadrilogy. Simply put, these matches work because they commit entirely to the premise, and care enough enough to not only pace and construct these matches in such an intricate way so as to get as much as possible out of every inch of them, but to also offer the lizard brain thrills alongside them.

This is not only no different from the three before it, but it is the natural endpoint, and if not for Dominion the year prior in a match that has this kind of epic scope, but without as much dead space or repetition (I still think this is the best match to happen in 2018 to date, these are only flaws when compared to another nearly all-time great match), would be the best of the bunch.

Okada and Omega’s first fall feels like an extension of Dominion the previous year.

Not only in the sense that they call back to a number of big spots, but that it feels like a continuation of everything about that match. Kenny is ready and prepared and confident, but nothing really sticks. Nothing really works like it should. Even when he’s ready, he’s not really ready. The mountain is still so steep and seems to constantly become steeper. Omega takes his time more than ever before (this is both a compliment to the narrative as well as the performance of Kenny Omega), avoids rushing for it when in control, and for like eighty to ninety percent of the half an hour that makes up the first fall, feels like the better wrestler, the one who is far more ready for the champion than the champion is for him.

Kenny has the counters ready and he breaks wrist control on the Rainmaker repeatedly like nobody has in years, but like his total opposite Hiroshi Tanahashi the month prior, it absolutely does not matter. Following the third or fourth counter of the Rainmaker and the consistent ability to escape his grip, Kenny tries to swing around under the arm for a sunset flip, only for** Little Kazu to sit down on the sunset flip in a cutback and get the win.

Not through any emphatic finish or move of great impact, but in the simplest and clearest way, simply outwrestling Kenny Omega even after all the improvements shown in the first fall.

It is the most crushing possible defeat, and the perfect end to a first fall.

The second fall is, I think, my favorite of the bunch.

Little Kazu not only takes control and resumes the role of aggressor, the one that he is best at and that allowed their latter two matches in 2018 to excel in the way that they did. The most interesting aspect though, even beyond the very casual disdain Okada has for Kenny and all people in the living world when in control, is the total confidence he has. Okada wrestles this middle fall as if he is waiting for a mistake, but unlike Wrestle Kingdom 11 (even calling back to that with an attempted back drop over the top through a table that never happens, the one time in wrestling I can recall that Checkov’s Gun is never fired and it is a good thing), it never quite comes. The sunset flip cutback of the first fall falls short, and when Omega hits the Jay Driller, it opens the flood gates just like it did in the G1, and the One Winged Angel does the deal again.

If the match has a weakness, it is the third fall, in which they constantly seem to repeat themselves.

While the work is so pristine — in the match and in the three epics leading into it — that there is no real chance for minor repetition doing this in, what they have built up no move can tear asunder, etc., it is comfortably the least and most belabored of the three.

That certainly doesn’t mean it’s bad, because really, it is mostly great.

Okada immediately hitting the Rainmaker to start the third fall and negate Omega’s advantage is a spectacular decision. They wrestle with a real urgency and desperation. The central theme of the fall, and the match itself, is that Okada clearly assumed he could go 2-0, but did not account for Omega having the best night of his career and not only making zero mistakes, but Having It in a way Okada was not prepared for. He lacks the urgency to fight against this in any meaningful way, and simply cannot combat the fact that on some nights, some people simply cannot be beaten, and Kenny Omega is having one of those nights in front of his eyes.

What it reminds me of most is not another wrestling match, but a football game that happened some four months prior. This is maybe disrespectful to the Philadelphia Eagles, for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect on a spiritual and ideological level, but it’s hard to deny given all the other stuff. A long-standing champion, assured of his/their own success, brought low by someone who had failed to unseat them in the past. Coming down to the final moments, only for the Hail Mary to be stuffed in exceedingly satisfying passion.

Cue the crying, cue the Celine Dion. Go birds/lovers.

Omega breaks out a new one at the end, ducking the Rainmaker and immediately snatching Little Kazu up into the One Winged Angel. They make the smart decision to not go for the end just then, but to pour it on a little. The two sit up against the ropes right next to each other, making the subliminal liminal by having Kenny literally rise above Okada and stand up first (I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards), before running for a particularly emphatic V-Trigger, and the third One Winged Angel of the match for the win.

Do I have minor problems with this?

Yes.

Of course, it is a wrestling match.

They go a little too long, you can cut out ten minutes and lose basically nothing. There’s repetition. All of that.

However, the hallmark of this match and the true sign of its greatness is how little I care about any of that at the end of it. It is not the match they had a year ago just quite, but all the big stuff makes up for the dip in quality of the little stuff. It feels exceptionally good to see Kazuchika Okada beaten in a title match for the first time in two years, and even better for it to come at the hands of someone even half likeable in Omega, for which you have to go all the way back to January 2015.

It is big. It is dumb and smart in equal measure. It is ambitious on a level that few other matches and/or stories can live up to. It is not the last major tentpole of Peak New Japan, but if you want to call it the final all-time classic of this peak run, I will not fight you (although Omega still has one even greater match to come). It’s that great. When Ibushi and the Young Bucks all join Omega in the ring to celebrate with their titles, it feels like a big deal. The dismissive thing to say is that people who became NJPW fans in 2016 finally got their moment, but being the open hearted and kind eyed sort of a person that I am, I cannot deny the feeling on display.

Like their match a year ago, a true monument to excess. If not as high in the sky as that one, one constructed with such a design that makes it unforgettable in its own right.

***2/3

 

Kenny Omega vs. Hangman Page, NJPW Wrestling Dontaku 2018 Day One (5/3/2018)

The forgotten match.

Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. Despite generally liking both of them, or at least liking Hanger and liking Kenny as a singles babyface separate from the entire Elite business, I don’t really have a habit of engaging with the more virulent and vocal fans of both of these wrestlers. So, maybe this isn’t all that forgotten.

Maybe it’s just this strikes me as so clearly better than their American work.

That’s not totally an insult to that work. While their actual World Title match was super middling, their pay-per-view opener in the finals of a number one contender’s tournament in 2020 was genuinely really good, and only a little lesser than this match. Half for reasons out of their control (no real crowd to speak of) and half for the reasons a lot of Kenny’s work in between New Japan runs has not been my favorite (asking him to be a bad guy when he is one of the least genuine feeling antagonists in wrestling history), but with the same energy this has. In both cases, it allows these matches to overcome slight problems, and succeed anyways.

In that match, it was simply that it was only like fifteen minutes and all action, so for whatever misguided ideas they had about the story and what Omega is actually great at, it succeeded on a purely mechanical level.

Here, in May of 2018, it succeeds less on that level as there are still some issues with the nuts and bolts of the thing (bad elbow exchanges, too back and forthy for the way the first third of the match goes, not enough focus on the best part of it, maybe two or three minutes too long), but it works because they get the core of the matter more correct than in any other meeting between the two.

Kenny Omega is at his best as a pure offensive machine babyface, sometimes as the focal point of something, but a lot of the times, simply as the guy reacting to stronger environmental factors.

On top of all the cool moves, this is a match that simply allows him to be as he is.

Cody and Hanger get him before the bell, and the match benefits a lot from a rare and measured injection of some good old fashioned bullshit. Not like a 2020 EVIL main event title match level of cover up bullshit, but some table spots here, a spoonful of interference at the start, and enough blood to keep it interesting. The latter comes as a result of Hanger hitting Kenny with the Rite of Passage on a table lying on the floor, staining the top of Omega’s head. Everything looks cooler with the red seeping through, and Omega’ natural explosiveness and hotdoggery is put in great contrast against Hanger’s (mostly) more simplistic attack. Omega gets to be in his element, reeling cool stuff off moment after moment, in a match designed to ask nothing more of him than that, and constructed to give that near maximum impact.

He is a force of nature to be channeled in one way or another, and I’m not sure any company understood and/or understands that better than New Japan did in 2017 and 2018. Even if it’s nowhere close to being the best example of this concept in action, it’s as good of a display of the idea as any.

It isn’t perfect.

For all the match gets right in how it presents Kenny and how it doesn’t ask too much of them time-wise, it still makes the mistake of casting Hangman Page as the antagonist at all. It’s for sure a victim of hindsight, figuring out how great ol’ Hanger is/can be as a working class adjacent babyface colors all the past heel work as a lot wasteful, but he’s also a little scatter brained here too. He doesn’t attack the head anywhere near as often as he should, which would be a much larger weakness (the match offering a perfect opportunity that’s never taken), except that he did go to it in moments of desperation, so it comes off more as a younger wrestler not totally getting it yet, and that works well enough. There’s also, again, maybe one, two, or three more minutes than it needs. Not ever getting to a point where I am praying for them to find their way to the finish or anything, but enough to where I could never call this tight or especially efficient.

Still, they just get too much right to deny, especially when the fireworks show hits like it does, and when it wraps up in a tidy enough twenty minutes or so with the predictable One Winged Angel finish.

If not the ideal version (in between sixteen and twenty two minutes, maybe even more shortcuts, face vs. face bombfest in 2023 at some point) of this match up, arguably the closest to that ideal that they ever came, all facets of the thing considered.

***