KENTA vs. SUWA, NOAH 2nd Great Voyage 2005 (9/18/2005)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from frequent Ko-fi contributor Chris Jackson. 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 for KENTA’s GHC Junior Heavyweight Title.

Really really arguably — although there are other contenders in KENTA/Kanemaru two months before this, Kanemaru/Low Ki in 2004, KENTA/Sugiura in 2006, or KENTA/Nakajima in March 2009 — this is the best ever GHC Junior Heavyweight Title match ever.

A big part of that is that is is not like a lot of the others.

While this title is prone to more bullshit than other NOAH titles, even a point when they tried to pretend as if this was a prestige wrestling company still — notably, Kotaro Suzuki using a blood packet as a heel trick to try and win by disqualification in 2009 (a formative experience that showed just what it looked like, allowing me to call out every British wrestler of the 21st century for being too afraid to cut themselves while also wanting to act like they did) — this is the best bullshit that the title has ever pulled off.

Following a year plus of SUWA fucking around with the rules, and especially with KENTA, he does the same here early on. Use of his Dragon System ass big box, antagonizing of not only the referee but of legendary referee turned timekeeper Joe Higuchi, constantly cheating even to the result of a shocking for NOAH no contest before a restart, it is a plain and simple sign of one thing that benefits the match so so much in its clarity. So often the story of a big NOAH (or previously All Japan) match focuses on years of things to pay off, movements and pieces of offense and more quietly established ideas, but that is not the case here.

Beautifully, this is incredibly simple.

SUWA has to be punished.

That is it.

Naturally, there is a little bit more to it than just that, there is an ebb and flow as SUWA scrolls through and breaks out just about every trick in the book to avoid it, including actually trying and breaking out huge offense of his own including an actual dive to the floor. But mostly, it is that beautiful struggle so in line with many other great matches in 2005 (sadly this is no Cena/JBL or Punk/Rave), as the worst man alive inches closer and closer to being punished for his crimes by one of the definitive faces of the era.

Like the others, there is an art to it, as well as an art on display.

Our young hero is made not only to fight through the bullshit, but through SUWA’s skill as well. While two months earlier, KENTA broke through Kanemaru’s wall of sound ass offensive blast, here, SUWA is constantly waiting with a counter in a way that makes him — although less accomplished in NOAH — about as impressive of a defeat. SUWA has something ready for everything, and although and because of how SUWA totally has the new (this is perhaps an insane concept to newer fans reading this but in 2005, it was a new move) Go to Sleep and/or all of its set ups scouted, KENTA is forced to rely on pure striking.

Fortunately, KENTA has also gotten to the point where — both as a high level figure in NOAH and also as a wrestler — he can simply kick every single devious thought out of SUWA’s head, and so he does. It is the end of all of SUWA’s schemes, and on a purely mechanical level, also beautiful and thrilling. The best of both worlds is achieved in these final moment, not only offering up glorious violence, but also the eternal thrill of Our Hero meeting someone worth destroying, and rendering him unto dust, showing once more just how easy and wonderful this all can be.

KENTA repeatedly kicks all of the evil out of of SUWA’s horrible horrible mind, before retaining the title with the Busaiku Knee Kick.

An even better promotion than NOAH may have made this even better. They may have put blood into it as well, incorporated even more bullshit, have made the most of the months of build that this had to offer, but you work with the tools you had, and this still had some phenomenal tools. For whatever it lacks, or whatever box it had to fit into on a big NOAH show as a semi prestige match, it still gets so much more right than wrong, and shows — at least a little bit — how a match can be both satisfying for the nerds as well as for the actual human beings out there who only want to see a terrible human being punished in the most painful and physical way.

The real shit and the good shit.

***1/2

 

Holy Demon Army vs. Jun Akiyama/KENTA, NOAH Great Voyage 2009 in Osaka ~Mitsuharu Misawa, Always In Our Hearts~ (10/3/2009)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from one of my favorite old MV Zone guys, ddevil. 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. 

After writing about one of my favorite old MV Zone videos, the “Wild World” finale with these two, when talking about the final Misawa vs. Kawada match, it was a genuine pleasure to hear from one of my all-time favorite wrestling music video creators in ddevil, offering up this match. Genuinely, outside of the fact that I can actually make money talking about professional wrestling, hearing from people whose work I have admired for years and that seemingly being a two way street is one of the coolest things about this entire endeavor.

Fittingly, this is also one of my favorite matches of all time.

Very little of that has to do with the physical content of this as a wrestling match.

That isn’t to say this is bad, because I think just about anyone can watch this and see the greatness in it.

All four are tremendous.

KENTA and Kawada are probably the story here, as the only pairing with true antagonistic feelings between them. KENTA, being the only one in this match with no real sentimental tie to anything happening outside of professional respect for the portrait hanging over the entrance, cannot help but take shots at the only one he hasn’t fought a million times and who he most resembles, stylistically. Kawada, in the other best performance of the match next to KENTA’s ultra spirited showing, looks as offended as possible, and they spend the match running at each other whenever possible, elevating the match above mere emotion and feel-good sentient into being super super interesting on another level. Akiyama and Taue are asked to do less — Taue as the sympathetic old man of the bunch and Akiyama kind of just as this control group, the one of the bunch in his prime and semi-dignified in a match that feels always on the border of losing that — but they are also both fantastic, and give the match all that it asks of them and then some.

The match is also as well put together as you might imagine from four all-time talents. The early sparks, dueling control work, hot tags, the escalation of both the offense and the anger between KENTA and Kawada, all of that. Even on a micro level, things the younger KENTA avoids before later falling victim to when Our Heroes really commit themselves to it.

It is not a match that succeeds entirely because of these things, but it is clearly a match put together with some level of intelligence.

What works about this match is, fucking OF COURSE, everything else.

In the first week of October 2009, I moved from Chicagoland to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not at all by choice, however much I love it now. I had moved out of my mom’s a few months earlier to live with a cousin in Chicago proper, then a windowless basement apartment of my own after that, but when that wasn’t working out anymore, I found out my mother had moved back, and my uncle had a small apartment ready for me. I took an Amtrak over, got there later in the night and found what I believed to be the door to my apartment locked with no key waiting as I had been told of, and spent the night sleeping in the second floor landing of a staircase before I moved in the next day, using a duffel bag full of clothes as a pillow.

This was not the first wrestling I watched in that new home — it was a bullshit Smackdown eight main event that night, the go home to Hell in a Cell 2009 that I think was Cena/Undertaker/DX vs. Orton/Punk/Cody/Ted Jr. — but it was the first really great and/or affecting match I watched in my new home, and I guess, at least with a match like this, that is the sort of thing one remembers.

At least it is when a match so clearly revolves around the mental state of one of your all-time favorites.

For whatever reason, when I first laid eyes on Toshiaki Kawada in the summer of 2006, hunting down the All Japan classics and finding 6/9/95 first, there was something about Dangerous K that drew me in. The meanness and brutality are exciting, but what got me was the way he looked at people and carried himself, and how even in moments where he was objectively being cruel and unfair, you could always see his side of it all. Many wrestlers have gone crazier with them, but few have gotten as much out of facial expressions and eye movements and body language like Kawada has. I personally believe that Kawada is the greatest facial seller in pro wrestling history. This is maybe not the absolute best example of that, in the way that his 1993-6 work, when he was at the peak of his powers as the greatest wrestler alive, was, but it works in the same way.

Truly, I have never seen a wrestler wrestle with the feeling of a weight on them like I do here with Toshiaki Kawada.

Spending the last twenty years, minimum, measuring himself against his childhood friend, to both great emotional turmoil and complex suffering and even occasionally real victory, Kawada suddenly finds himself without any of that. There’s a weight to every single thing he does in this match, from the spirited cut-offs to his explosive moments against KENTA. He always feels like the most put-upon wrestler of all time, especially in the moments where they cut to the Misawa portrait, with Kawada now literally wrestling in the shadow that he did escape, but also never quite let out of his sight. With few exceptions, such as Mark Briscoe following the passing of his brother or Eddie Kingston’s famous “the best man at my wedding” promo, grief has never poured through the screen in quite the same way, in large part because it is treated entirely as a purely professional thing. I immediately recognize it. Not so much in the same way I did at the time, seeing Kawada holding his face tighter than usual, but in a way I understand more nearly fifteen years later, and having suffered some loss and having to work through it.

Almost impossibly, on the fourth or fifth time I watch this, the first in at least a decade, I somehow leave this match thinking more of Toshiaki Kawada than ever before. It is not one of the greatest performances of all time, as this match is not quite so ambitious, but it is one of the more affecting matches of all time.

It doesn’t make the match better mechanically.

Taue pins KENTA with the Ore Ga Taue to win, and the match is a kind of classic NOAH young vs. old sort of thing, one of the enduring formulas for a reason.

In some small part, I like it more like this. Kawada gains nothing from a win, and more simply from the moment itself, going through it with Taue, in sight of Akiyama in the match to be stopped yet again and Kenta Kobashi on commentary. Kawada, even as tampered down and buttoned up as this match seems to be at times, cannot entirely hide from what is obviously there, and in as much as what was real enhanced the work of one of the greatest stories in the history of professional wrestling, what is here now makes the aftermath into one of the more unforgettable matches ever.

Like the feud that this is an epilogue for, some of the most powerful and affecting pro wrestling possible.

***3/4

Kenta Kobashi vs. KENTA, NOAH Navigation Against the Current 2004 Day One (10/9/2004)

Commissions continue, this one from Ko-fi contributor thouxanbanjack. 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 $10/hour for things over an hour in length, 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 the second to last match in KENTA’s trial series.

On some level, the trial series that Pro Wrestling NOAH hosted for KENTA feels like the most comical of them all.

Largely, that is because it was far too late. Most of these happen in the first year or two of the career of someone a lot of people can see will be be Great. Italics and capitalization fully intended, because while the potential was there, they were not on THAT level yet. Kenta Kobashi, Jun Akiyama, Go Shiozaki, and the like. With KENTA though, it is a trial that began at the start of the year after he arguably just had the best tag team match (KENTA/Marufuji vs. Juventud/Marvin) of the previous year. It’s the only trial series in the history of them, as far as I know, where the one undergoing the trial was already a top ten to twenty wrestler alive.

That’s the case for KENTA here.

It feels almost rude to KENTA to say it, but relative to spots on the show and the amount of love the audience has for the one named underdog against the world champion, this feels like the Samoa Joe vs. Hook of 2004 (but worse, of course).

Generally, they do not have quite the same approach nor spirit of disrespect, but it works the same way.

KENTA insists on throwing it all out there, all of his kicks to the face and to the world’s thickest chest, at the most unbeatable wrestler alive, and constantly eats loads and loads of shit for it. He is, yet again, this kind of rare perfect trial series wrestler (likely due to taking four years before getting into it so that he is already one of the best alive) in that he is both ultra sympathetic but also just genuine enough feeling for that thing to pop up inside of you watching his kickouts and comebacks.

Not so much the all-powerful “well maybe” or “what if”, but an also very powerful kind of “well okay, hold on now, wait a second” that comes with every great match like this.

What works isn’t so much a believe that the upset will happen, but the idea for a moment that it might, before Kobashi slaps him down to Earth. The thing, of course, that makes this work in the first place is a little how great every inch of it before that moment is, to be sure. KENTA beating his ass, avoiding the receipt until the most satisfying and demoralizing moment possible (these go hand in hand or fist in fist in a match like this), really reveling in those brief moments before gravity sets in, and one remembers how this is always supposed to end to begin with,

Kobashi wins with a real mother fucker of a sort range Lariat.

The closet that any match I’ve seen in the last week (1/12-1/19/2024) to being near to Samoa Joe vs. Hook without being better than Samoa Joe vs. Hook.

***

Genichiro Tenryu vs. KENTA, NOAH Autumn Navigation 2005 Day One (10/8/2005)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Four Pillars of Hell. 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. 

So, yeah, it’s one of those KENTA-on-the-cusp beatings against an older heavyweight.

This is not the best version of this you could maybe ever conjure up. It’s pretty simple, KENTA is largely eaten up as he was throughout the trial series, and Tenryu is not bumping his ass off all that much for anyone at this point period, let alone a junior heavyweight. You wish KENTA debuted five years earlier and they could have met a few years prior once KENTA’s slow transition to the heavyweight ranks had begun, and it looked like that second KENTA vs. Takayama match, where he got in a lot more offense before getting destroyed by the bigger guy.

All that being said, time is linear, some things simply did not line up perfectly, and seeing as this happens around the time Tenryu singles matches begin to stop turning up quite so frequently, it’s very easy to be happy with what this was, because what this was whips a whole lot of ass.

While wrestling is more art than science, sometimes, it does just come down to math.

For example, this match.

One of the best match types of all time is Genichiro Tenryu being a bully and terrorizing a younger and/or smaller wrestler. He is one of the greatest bullies in the history of wrestling, not only for how mean he can be and how convincing he is as this cruel old man, but also because he is also better than most on the other end too. Beyond the punches and the table throwing (and this is no small feat, Tenryu has maybe the best cut off snap jab in wrestling history ever, and nobody has made table throwing feel like more of an artform than Tenryu either), the greatest things about a Tenryu bully performance are the moments where he’s not on offense. It’s the moment where he first gets hit hard after making a show of brushing off shots earlier, before he gets even meaner as a result. It’s the moment after that especially, when the facade breaks, when Tenryu gets in trouble and he can’t even shut the guy down and pretend he’s not anymore. Above all, the Tenryu bully match works because Tenryu gets better than most ever what it requires on both ends. Not only whipping ass in an ultra-entertaining fashion, and not only getting your ass beat on the other end, but doing it in a way where he never loses anything and it feels like the other half of the match rising up to his level, rather than diminishing himself by playing a phony-feeling stooge.

During any point from the early 90s when he first started to really perfect the role through, really, the very end (even though it mostly turned into tags), a Tenryu bully match presents one of the higher floors per formula in pro wrestling history, to say nothing of the height of those ceilings.

While not as prodigious long term as the Tenryu Bully Match, KENTA against bigger guys in the 2000s and early 2010s was another can’t miss idea.

KENTA, during his peak, was a rare combination of things. A world class striker with an insane motor, someone with the sort of pure character instincts it seems like nobody can ever teach, mean enough to push guys believably to crossing a line in retaliation, but also small and sympathetic and enough of a bump freak to work perfectly in matches like these despite how great he was at the complete opposite approach. It’s not a complex a system as the Tenryu routine, he gets destroyed before having one of the most intense and energetic and frantic feeling comebacks in all of wrestling, but it works so so well.

Throw them together, maybe the best bully routine in wrestling history and the best underdog fighter in the country at the moment, these two things that fit perfectly together, and the magic happens.

Both physically unable to show respect or deference for any other living person, things immediately become hostile. Tenryu plays the hits with nearly as much skill as ever. The table throwing has a lovely new addition where Tenryu politely puts it back in front of the ring announcer, only to then take his hammer and hit KENTA in the head with it. As Tenryu is throwing more punches than what feels like usual at this point to cut off all these slap flurries, he also displays a handful of great little shake sells of the hand, before selling his annoyance to an even greater degreee, in one of the great old man bits ever. The escalation of selling leading to Tenryu getting his ass kicked for a few minutes at the end lands better than usual, because of how great all of KENTA’s striking is, and also how enthusiastic and animated he is while hurling everything he can at the old man. Tenryu shuts him down all the same, but the last time he does it, it feels like a thing he really had to fight for, and that’s where the match succeeds the most.

KENTA kicks out of one of the grossest Northern Lights Bombs of all time, seeming to genuinely shock Tenryu in the moment that really gains something for KENTA even in defeat, only for Tenryu to collapse his throat for the third or fourth time with a Lariat for the win.

Nothing unexpected, and at the same time, absolutely nothing that didn’t rule.

The sort of match that proves these formulas correct.

***1/4

 

 

Jun Akiyama vs KENTA, NOAH/KENTA Produce Cross Road (5/17/2009)

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

In 2009, if not for the entire year than at least for a sizeable chunk of time, I believe KENTA was the best wrestler in the world.

Long term, looking at the year at large, I think I would probably go with Rey Mysterio or Bryan Danielson as your actual Wrestler of the Year, given that KENTA wasn’t able to put together the full twelve months of variety and consistency that either of them did, helped by regular televised work (as one of maybe twenty living people to watch every episode of ROH on HDNet who weren’t paid to do so, it counts) and a wide array of opponents that KENTA maybe didn’t have as much access to. All the same, match to match, KENTA had what I would absolutely consider his career year in 2009, and a match like this is yet another stellar example of an all-time great in his prime, just so happening to come against another all-time great not all that removed from his prime.

On KENTA’s big produce show (I mean it’s Differ Ariake, not the Budokan or anything, but getting a produce show is big, especially for an in-peak junior heavyweight in 2009), NOAH’s two singles champions meet in what is maybe not the biggest deal in the world when you look at venue and occasion, but what a combination of talent and booking make feel like one of NOAH’s biggest matches of the year.

Theoretically, matches like this happen relatively often.

Heavyweight and junior heavyweight champion, or simply, top heavyweights vs. top juniors. NOAH famously ran Kenta Kobashi against KENTA and Naomichi Marufuji as big singles matches on Budokan Hall shows back to back in March and April 2006, but history is littered with other examples. This decade, the 2020s, something like Tetsuya Naito vs. Hiromu Takahashi comes to mind, but in the 2010s, New Japan also loved to occasionally throw this on the anniversary shows, as seen with Okada vs. Ibushi or Tanahashi vs. Devitt.

The difference between so many of those matches and this is that, in a rarity maybe only achieved otherwise in Shinya Hashimoto vs. Jushin Liger in 1994, it doesn’t TOTALLY feel like a foregone conclusion from the opening bell. As opposed to KENTA’s past efforts against heavyweights while being GHC Junior Champion and as opposed to others in this position in the past and future, KENTA really feels like he has a shot. Not a fifty fifty split total toss-up exactly, but given that almost every other match like this feels like only a matter of time, the fact that for so much of this match, it feels like KENTA really might be able to do this, feels like such a huge accomplishment. Part of that goes to NOAH’s booking of KENTA for the last decade, part of it goes to NOAH’s willingness to take chances in the 2000s, part of it goes to simply the way KENTA wrestles and that Akiyama has put over juniors (Marufuji) before in bigger spots than this, but most of it just simply goes to the way in which this match is wrestled.

What really helps there is that, for the first third of this match, KENTA unequivocally and completely whips Uncle Jun’s ass.

It’s not a brutal beating, as KENTA seems on edge for every single second of the time that he’s in control, but it is a relentless one. Early on in the match, KENTA lands the same basement roundhouse to the forehead that his former partner and friend Shibata famously hit on Akiyama in 2005, and after that, KENTA dominates Akiyama for minutes at a time. Everything he does is crisp and intense and loud as hell in the most pleasing way possible, but also has this really appealing edge to it, as if he is stressed out about getting every single thing right. The result is a run of offense that is not only appealing in a lizard brain kind of a way (loud strikes are great! i like seeing cool wrestlers kick ass!), but that adds so much to the match.

Of course, nothing that someone is this tense about preserving can last forever, and the second that KENTA first overreaches, Akiyama punishes him.

Naturally, KENTA cannot help but reach too far. His mistake comes in trying to suplex Akiyama back in from the Differ Ariake Big Ramp, and Akiyama instead drags him out for a Brainbuster on the ramp. From then on, Akiyama zeroes in on the head and neck of our undersized hero and never totally lets up. The cut offs are brutal, the hope spots and comebacks are terrific, and most impressively in this portion of the match, Akiyama is able to constantly cut KENTA off in a way that feels both deeply brutal and both nonchalant enough at times to feel crushing, and spirited enough at other times to again further that idea that KENTA really might have a shot at this, if he can make Akiyama this upset by simply staying in it.

KENTA’s comeback whips a ton of ass in a pure physical and mechanical sense, a million hard shots thrown out with a real feeling of intensity and desperation, but it also succeeds as much as it does because of how well the match set it up. KENTA’s initial onslaught and the Akiyama attack in response gives the comeback this feeling like it might genuinely and actually work, and it creates a nearfall run that a match like this doesn’t often have the benefit of.

The real joy here is that, in the last five to ten minutes of the match, Differ Ariake comes alive. If you know your shit, you will understand just how impressive that is. If you don’t, then you ought to know that, when it existed, Differ Ariake was a famously low energy crowd no matter what company or what wrestlers were in front of them. Eliciting a single noise out of them was a sign of something special in the twenty first century, and doing it on a continual basis the way that this match was able to is something only a little short of a modern miracle. It’s the ultimate testament not only to how great Jun Akiyama and KENTA are mechanically and how big of stars they feel like in 2009, but also of the match they constructed together, that fucking Differ Ariake of all places feels like a real genuine professional wrestling crowd.

In a big step forward, KENTA survives the Wrist-Clutch Exploder, and forces Akiyama to break out the Sternness Dust Alpha to beat him. It’s not quite a win, but given the way heavyweight champions tend to dispatch junior heavyweight champions, and given how Akiyama dispatched KENTA years before, it’s real hard not to see it as its own small success too.

While we never quite got to see the most ideal possible version of Jun Akiyama vs. KENTA (ideally some K-Hall meeting in 2006-2013 when their primes overlapped, rather than a Differ Ariake one like this, but also in a situation that mattered), this is as close as we ever got. Not only nearly the ideal version of this particular match up, but with only a few exceptions, the ideal version of this thing — heavyweight champ vs. junior heavyweight champ — as an idea.

***1/2

Bryan Danielson vs. KENTA, ROH Glory by Honor V Night Two (9/16/2006)

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

This was for Danielson’s ROH World Title.

It is a great match, but also, it is maybe time for a secret.

I have never loved this match. It is a match that I admire more than one I really love.

Definitely, this is a great match. It is an undeniably great match. I would get very upset if anyone ever tried to tell me that it’s bad. However, as this sort of pantheon level match that it is so often talked up as, I have simply never gotten it like that. It is one of those matches. Not a “why do you freaks like this?” and more of “I get it, but why do you like it this much?”, which has a way of transforming over time into a sort of resentment. I love both of these wrestlers, and I would rather watch at least like fifty other matches each of them have had than this match, and I would be happy to list them if anyone gives that much of a shit about that.

Something about this match has just never hit me.

Or maybe more accurately, there is a certain aspect of this match that has always bothered me, and always been this Yeah But tacked on the end — or in front of — everything else that this match does so well.

The narrative of this match — or at least the one this tries to pay service to, before going to the other way in the end — is all wrong, and the difference between what everyone wants this to be and what it tries to be is just kind of flat out weird.

In some respects, I do sympathize.

What this match had set up was great.

This is a match clearly built up as a popular and seemingly unbeatable foreign star against a best-in-the-world long term champion. Ric Flair vs. The Great Muta in 1989 with the roles inverted. It’s a fascinating idea that ROH has built up very well over the preceding six months, not only with Bryan being pinned twice by the Go 2 Sleep, but by KENTA having very little problems with some of Bryan Danielson’s toughest opponents. The issue is that Bryan Danielson fucked up his right pectoral and shoulder three weeks before this (maybe it is a bad idea to book a wrestler to have three sixty minute draws in three weeks, on top of something like the Nigel McGuinness UNIFIED match in between them, with this style of wrestling???), and the match cannot ignore this, given that Bryan Danielson cannot use his right arm very much.

Bryan Danielson is naturally sympathetic here as a result (with the crowd immediately taking his side and rarely wavering), having to shift away from the right into using the left, clearly giving off this naturally likeable feeling of a man out of his element and having to adjust against an absolute killer. KENTA is in a tough spot too. KENTA can’t not go after the arm, even in passing. He is a simple and direct wrestler who kicks a lot of ass, not tethered to either side of the spectrum as either a hero or a villain, and the circumstances of the match make him feel far more like the latter than the former.

Where they run into problems is that, in classic Gabe fashion, the match refuses to completely change to accommodate this new reality, or at least, it digs its nails into the carpet and tries far too hard to fight against it before finally giving in.

Danielson is hurt and sympathetic, but still adheres to who he’s been in ROH for most of the year. He eventually takes over in the middle of the match, cheating and being the more aggressive of the two, trying to also be the less likeable wrestler in the match. On one hand, I respect it. I would be almost as put off if the match decided to ignore the last however many months of Bryan’s run in Ring of Honor, from humiliating Nigel in his home country to what he did to Samoa Joe in Cage of Death, to running from Homicide, and he was suddenly a hero. On the other hand, of the two choices, the alternative strikes me as clearly being the better in retrospect, not trying to move against the current or trying to argue with the natural response of every single person watching this. If it was work KENTA originated, this weakness of his own making, it would be one thing, but what it feels like instead is KENTA taking advantage of something in a way that is unbecoming of a babyface challenger, and that yet makes too much sense not to go with in some way. There are some real fair arguments as to how this went, but something about the way it unfolded has always felt off to me, no matter what the reasons were.

Each one of them has real merit and can genuinely be defended, but sometimes this shit is not about logic at all. One wrestler is a generational buzzsaw, the other has a hurt limb, and there is no need to complicate things beyond that, and it’s in the moments when this match remembers that (the first and last thirds) that it feels like it is as great of a match as everyone always says. It’s a real issue that this match has, maybe not a total tonal disconnect, but a real lack of unity and narrative coherency between different sections of the thing. 

At the same time, there is something about this that still rules so much.  

Firstly, beyond just that immediate and obvious thing that does this match such a significant service, it is because of a kind of larger scale ROH booking that this match works as well as it does. KENTA having run through everyone for nine months, including Bryan twice, gives him an even great sense of danger and importance. While the booking felt obvious, even at the time and especially in retrospect, there is always a kind of What If that exists here that helps this so much, if only because it has added so much to the responses from the audience in the Manhattan Center for everything that happens. For whatever other faults this has, it feels like a big deal and an important match. KENTA and Danielson are already two of the best wrestlers of the twenty first century at wrestling in a way that feels important, but the setting and the build to this does them so many favors.

Secondly, it is the utmost credit to both KENTA’s natural brutality and the dangerous feeling he is able to inject into his wrestling, as well as Bryan Danielson’s natural babyface instincts that come out in the first and last thirds of this match, that despite all of these issues and despite some of the things that happen in this match, this works as well as it does anyways. In spite of what the narrative of the match may be, the roles they may play, the reason this match works comes down to one simple sentence, and the title of a great great song.

If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.

Bryan Danielson is not a smart wrestler for taking this match, but in doing so, and in fighting for thirty two minutes and in succeeding, he proves a kind of toughness that makes it near impossible for anyone to ever really boo him again. It doesn’t feel totally right to praise the way he uses the left arm for so much of this match and only the right in select moments, given that it is not so much an artistic choice (as you can see on display in like a hundred other great Danielson arm or leg selling performances), but it is an admirable adaptation Danielson shows throughout the match, as well as his selling of a very real injury, all the same.

What this always was, and what each arguably superior future version of the thing would make the most of, is that KENTA is a mother fucker and Bryan Danielson is a wrestler doing his best to keep up with this generational killer, surviving his biggest shots, and constantly walking into even bigger ones in ways nobody could have expected. The match is at its best in the moments when it aligns with this reality that everyone immediately understands, acknowledges, and accepts as the truth.

No matter that role Bryan may try and play to appease the larger plan of a booker who notoriously had a very hard time adjusting Long Term Plans, what that match has going for it is everything previously laid out. The real beauty of this match — independent of build up or story or injury or anything — is that Bryan Danielson and KENTA are two of the best wrestlers alive, and when they get down to just the meat of the thing, it is completely undeniable. There is a magic here. It is wonderful to see Bryan Danielson against KENTA. They are able to do so many different things together, they fit together so perfectly, and almost as if in defiance of everything working against this match, it finds a way to succeed.

Bryan fights through it all, uses his right arm consistently for the first time in the closing moments of the match to deliver the crucifix elbows and to lock on the Cattle Mutilation, and finally beats KENTA to keep his title.

An real gem, if nowhere near the best either man can do, either against each other or in general. The match it eventually became is the match people have always pretended it was from start to finish. Not the best match of either man’s year, nor one of the best matches of the year as a whole. In fact, at the end of this specific watch, of their four matches together, I’m not sure that isn’t the least of the four period. That is less a judgment on this match, for all that may seem negative about this, and more of a comment on just how great these two are together.

***1/2

 

 

Nigel McGuinness vs. KENTA, ROH 7th Anniversary Show (3/21/2009)

A commission here from friend of the blog Tim of the Q&T podcast, one of the only good wrestling podcasts that’s ever existed. Give them a listen if you haven’t, and happen to agree with many of the wrestling and political philosophies spouted on this blog. You have the ability to be like him and pay me to watch and write about wrestling matches, over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon for $5 per match.

This was for McGuinness’ ROH World Title.

Perhaps surprisingly to those who haven’t seen it, this not only isn’t a great match, but it’s kind of a hard one to watch. It has fans, but I’ve always seen fandom of this match as part of a certain sort of wish fulfillment response to matches not being as amazing as people might think or want them to be. This should be better, and so people grasp onto elements of it that are good (two good wrestlers with good brains having a very good match in spite of physical issues, the realism) and magnify them, badly wanting this to be great. At the time, I imagine it was both satisfying a need for people to both still see great classic ROH World Title matches despite the bottom clearly having fallen out by now, and also a need to believe Nigel McGuinness could still do this, like the way he recovered from his last arm injury a year earlier.

Removed from all of that and from this match by nearly twelve years and counting (Jesus Christ. Fuck me.), I think we can all now kind of watch it again removed from those understandable hopes and desires, and admit the reality of the situation, as there is always far more dignity in such a thing. It’s a good match that could realistically only have ever been that, and succeeding in spite of everything against it is impressive enough without needing to tell ourselves these tales.

(or you actually really do love this, in which case, I sense that you love every single match that’s even like half great. in which case, hey, we have wildly different brains. i imagine you really like the ideas of things and don’t care quite so much about the execution, as this match does have a few interesting ideas.)

Like the Joe/Misawa match covered recently, also by commission, this is a match that isn’t without quality, but a match whose time has passed.

Partially, that’s because of booking. Two weeks away from a PPV and a very very very telegraphed and pre-emptively despised World Title switch to Jerry Lynn, it’s hard to believe that KENTA is going to win the ROH World Title (no matter how much more preferable such an outcome would be). There’s a lack of energy from Hammerstein here that’s troubling and also a sign of where ROH is at this point. The problems this has are mostly physical, but it would be unfair to say they were ALL physical when ROH’s incredibly lazy booking of Nigel’s last three to six months as champion (third Generico match, defenses against the likes of Brent Albright and D’Lo Brown in 2009, the infamous 47:00~ time limit draw) plays its own role worth remarking upon.

The time to run this in a physical sense was exactly 2007 or 2008, and that’s not because of any problem with KENTA. In fact, KENTA’s reliably great from like 2003ish through his departure from NOAH in 2014, and at the peak of his powers from 2004ish through his injury in late 2009. I’d even say that 2009 is his career year, and so while the match itself isn’t great, the version of KENTA we get in ROH in 2009 as a semi-regular guest is perhaps the best version of him that we ever saw. That’s not the issue.

The issue is that, a day before this, Nigel McGuinness suffered another arm injury, now to the one good arm that he had. This comes after wrestling with one bad arm already for the last year, and needing surgery and time off more desperately than anyone I’d seen at the time since 2004-2006 Kurt Angle (2021 Okada watchers may also recognize this description). Even before he lost his other arm, he’d looked tired and beat up for months now, largely resulting in not having had the same level of quality defenses in the last six months of his reign that he did throughout the first year. Ultimately, Nigel McGuinness’ greatness was a precarious sort of thing, as good as 98-99% of other wrestlers alive during a two or three year stretch from 2005/6 through the fall of 2008, and then never anywhere close to great after that.

It’s also not quite ideal as a story on top of that, refusing to go all the way in either direction, but still landing in some interesting territory. Everyone seems to know what happened and if not, Nigel’s left arm being almost entirely taped up and him barely being able to raise it at times spells things out. It casts him in a super sympathetic light, but as a double control segment, ROH refuses to commit to it despite teasing these issues early on. The problem created is that Nigel is still a real prick and so he does his own control work on the arm (not the best thing, as KENTA has never been an especially good limb seller), and so they wind up in this middle area, refusing to do the easy thing, but with the other route being impeded by the sympathetic nature of Nigel’s predicament. A piece of work but one also more sympathetic than his opposition. It’s interesting, sure, but it’s not an HBO show, it’s pro wrestling, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Ultimately, it can work, but it doesn’t work unless you have someone who fits on the other end, not this invading shitkicker KENTA being cast as the babyface in opposition. It’s admirable to refuse to change the story in spite of everything, but like many overblown reactions to the match, it would clearly have been better if they simply were able to admit the reality of the situation and adjust.

Despite a flawed foundation, there’s a lot to like here. Nigel not being able to use his arms much is an interesting bit, and one that does a lot for the match, both as an intellectual exercise and to inject this with a dose of the real shit. Nigel is exactly dumb enough that the times he teases big Lariats are easy to fall for, and he has a few nice moments having to use his head or his legs. They’re able to create a few nearly dramatic moments in spite of everything going against the match, they manage a few classic big ROH Title match moments in spite of the injury (although maybe Nigel didn’t need to do an apron Tower of London when he had no arms?????) and it’s neat to see Nigel have to return to just doing arm work for the most part, robbed of his greatest gift.

Unfortunately for Nigel, the actual most interesting story is that once again following in Bryan’s footsteps (ROH Title match vs. KENTA in NYC while having a bad arm injury), Nigel finds himself lacking quite the dimensions of Danielson’s clam diggers.

The match just simply winds up lacking. Nigel is out of practice with a match like this, KENTA isn’t at his best in a match like this, as on top of not being all that good at selling the arm, he’s clearly pulling some shots in a way that further undercuts what they’re trying to do. All of the issues are things that they really had no control over, to be totally fair. It’s a match in between a rock and a hard place, and I don’t want to be mean. Like KENTA, I find myself pulling shots. Nigel McGuinness doesn’t have arms, you know? At the same time, it’s a match that runs into the obvious limitations BECAUSE NIGEL MCGUINNESS DOESN’T HAVE ARMS, YOU KNOW? It should have been better, it’s nobody’s fault that it wasn’t, but it is what it is.

An impressive showing and an interesting intellectual exercise, but that’s really it.

Exactly as good as it could have been under these circumstances.

A dream match for fans discovering this stuff after the fact, to be sure, but ultimately one that I would have preferred to have stayed there.

Yoshihiro Takayama vs. KENTA, NOAH Accomplish Our Fourth Navigation 2004 Day Four (6/27/2004)

One last commission here, this time from Kai. You too can buy a review for a match of your choosing over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The going right is $5 per match, but if you want a full show or something deranged, hit up those DMs and we can talk about that too.

This was the fourth match in KENTA’s trial series.

I’ve written a few things questioning why someone would pay for a review of a specific match. Typically, the issue is that either it’s clearly something I’m going to hate or something that’s so middling that I don’t really have anything interesting to say about it outside of simply describing what happened, but that’s not really the issue here. The issue here is more that this is a match that I absolutely love but one that I have truly very little to say about.

Seemingly everyone with a platform has written or spoken about how awesome this is, it’s the sort of match you show a newer fan to show them what both men were at their very best. It’s the sort of match that translates to just about any wrestling fan ever who can be won over by something like this. Nothing I have to say, I feel, is all that novel or interesting, and I really doubt anyone to read this will be learning about this match and the deservedly sterling reputation it has for the first time.

All the same, it absolutely rocks.

Just a total banger.

The match itself is the easiest thing in the entire world, as a young shitkicker runs headlong into the greatest living shitkicker in pro wrestling and winds up getting his shit kicked. KENTA is full of a thousand tons of piss and either no vinegar or way too much vinegar (i don’t know the ratio here, never tried to mix the two, sorry), and strikes a beautiful balance in this match between constantly getting himself in way over his head but also only surviving as long as he does because he’s such a petulant little god damned buzzsaw too. It constantly makes it worse on him when Takayama can shut him down, there’s no real question that Takayama WILL shut him down, but the openings he does get are bigger and bigger and bigger. Unfortunately, on top of his lack of experience and constant failure of the Act Like You’ve Been Here Before test, the raw physical dimensions also doom him. Unlike Takayama who has distance on his side as a result of those long long limbs, KENTA needs to get close to Takayama to hit, and it always puts him in the kill range. He escapes a few times, but it’s always a gamble.

Eventually, the house wins, and Takayama removes his face with a knee strike to win.

Nothing all that complex on display, neither in concept nor in mechanics, but it’s perfect for this sort of a thing. Rarely has someone in this role ever been as good as KENTA in the first half of the 2000s, and similarly, few other wrestlers have kicked as much ass as Takayama did from 2002 through his injury a few months after this. If ever a match like this is going to excel beyond the usual for a trial series, this is the one to do it.

It’s just a match that works, and one that does so on every level.

Every second of it works. Every move is gross. Every strike is obscene.

Beyond the visuals themselves, it’s such a pleasing match. A full sensory experience.

Every sound in this is awesome.

A match that should be listened to just as much as it should  be watched.

***1/2

KENTA/Naomichi Marufuji vs. Takashi Sugiura/Katsuhiko Nakajima, NOAH Navigation With Breeze 2014 Day One (5/17/2014)

KENTA makes his final appearance in NOAH, with a farewell match to see him out.

It’s a bummer to have Marufuji in there with three of the best, since he’s so obviously the odd man out. However, his career is so tied to KENTA’s that it would simply feel wrong to exclude him and put someone else there, despite any possible improvements to the match itself.

Luckily, the same sort of mental sill that often makes Marufuji so unbearable when applied politically (outside of the invader tournament win over a company’s champion before mailing in when he has to return the win in a title match) makes him realize what the deal is, and he largely stays out of this. He plays a few hits and gets isolated, but is smart enough to let KENTA get to work one last time and to get the hell out of the way.

KENTA gets to work one last time and it’s a lot of fun. It’s not 2009 or anything, KENTA isn’t a top five wrestler in the world anymore, but he can kick and he can hit and he’s up against a guy who can kick and a guy who can hit. It’s KENTA playing all of his hits one last time against two of his best opponents ever. There’s nothing to it besides everyone having fun and riffing it out with the guy one last time, but there’s really not anything wrong with that, especially when the match is fairly honest about it.

The thing that I really liked about this match was how it handled KENTA’s departure. He’s never made to eat shit here. He does his best to make both opponents look tremendous, but it never feels like it’s happening entirely because he’s leaving the company. KENTA still whips ass. Outside of a part in the last third where KENTA and Sugiura trade slaps again and Sugiura is able to cut KENTA off here for the first time in a while in that sort of a section, there’s nothing here that seems like it’s happening just because KENTA is leaving. Even that small thing doesn’t totally feel that way, it’s just that a change happens, so you wonder about it, and re-establishing Sugiura as NOAH’s best striker one KENTA is leaving simply makes sense. It’s not exactly some major leap either.

The match also doesn’t bother with KENTA doing the favor on his way out and beating Nakajima with the Go 2 Sleep instead. On some level, Sugiura beating KENTA is probably the right move and there isn’t really any explanation for not doing that. On the other, KENTA beating Nakajima is way better than Nakajima beating KENTA, and the sort of thing that feels like the natural outcome from them as the final pairing. Nakajima beating him would have felt a little phony, as NOAH hadn’t done the work yet, and would have done nothing for Nakajima. It’s also a classic piece of NOAH booking, totally capable of something, but refusing to do anything hard.

It’s hardly the best anyone can do, but that was never the point.

I wrote already that Kenta Kobashi’s retirement felt like NOAH’s season finale. I can’t quite say the same here. I’m not sure Nakajima would be in such a match. But it’s a fitting end to this period of NOAH. It’s a finale for this post-peak 2009-2014 run that NOAH had, with Nakajima there in the place of Go Shiozaki. Not always great, but with the involvement and main event work of guys like Sugiura and KENTA, there was always still something there. With Sugiura scaled back to tag work, Nakajima still struggling to transition away from junior work, so much talent gone, and KENTA leaving…well, I think you can figure it out.

Things are about to get so much worse, both immediately and in the long term.

Still, eras rarely end with the sense of finality that this one did, and people usually don’t get to leave with the fanfare, matchmaking, and appreciation that this match gave KENTA.

***1/4

NO MERCY (KENTA & Yoshihiro Takayama) vs. Dangan Yankees, NOAH Global Tag League 2014 Day One (4/12/2014)

This was part of the Global Tag League 2014 tournament.

It’s a hell of a start to the first day, with a finals level match up, but with KENTA on the way out, you can use the finals for something more productive. It is what it is.

It sure doesn’t stop this one from ruling.

If someone wanted to, they could come up with some fanwank here. Something about Sugiura going outside of No Mercy for a partner, KENTA and Takayama not fucking with Tanaka and being way meaner to him than they are to stablemate Sugiura. You could do that and maybe it would make the match do even more for you. I don’t think it’s pronounced enough to really believe it, and it’s not the sort of fanwank that necessarily makes a match better or anything. The match works without it. It’s a whole lot of hitting for twenty minutes, and all of it rules. Sugiura vs. KENTA is especially spectacular once again, the best pairing of NOAH’s late independent period, but The Old Man brings a lot to this too.

The weak link once again in Masato Tanaka, who can hit close to as hard as No Mercy’s big three, but is never capable of bringing quite the same energy and emotion up to the surface when he’s doing it. It’s always been a problem of his outside of big matches, and it’s why the Yankees team is so great for him, because the emotive and constantly shouting Big Boss Sugi can always make up for that.

In the end, the superteam gangs up on the old man. KENTA can’t make enough of a difference to ever actually get in the match. Sugiura overcame his wrestling father nearly four years ago, and it’s nowhere near the struggle it used to be, sadly. Sugiura wins with the Olympic Slam, and it’s not all that hard once KENTA stops being able to run interference.

A match with all the limitations it was always going to have as a round robin league match in 2014, but one that still whips a whole bunch of ass regardless.

***1/4