The Briscoes vs. Katsuhiko Nakajima/Kota Ibushi, NOAH Shiny Navigation 2008 Day Nine (9/6/2008)

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This was part of the 2008 Nippon TV Cup Junior Heavyweight Tag League.

Additionally, as the second to last match in the tournament, with the Briscoes at 7 points and the retroactive dream team at 8, the greatest tag team of all time has a chance to spoil the party for the superteam, as well as simply putting on a big showing in the Nippon Budokan.

Really though, you’re here for the fireworks, and they waste no time.

Not just in the sense that, as with many great Briscoe matches, there is little pretense of attempt to lie about what this is and an uncommon respect for the audience, but also, literally, they pretty much skip right to all of the cool stuff. On top of that, there is so much cool shit. Kota Ibushi hasn’t quite yet become a great wrestler overall, and as a singles, one could argue that he was barely even a very good one just yet so much as a guy with some phenomenal highlight reel stuff, but like in his ROH excursion in April of 2008, Jay and Mark plug him in better than just about anyone can. The same can’t entirely be said for Nakajima, but this is a match that again asks him to do very little aside from kicks and suplexes, all while the masters pretty much plug these two into a stellar formula with the ease that almost every other team to even just dip their toes into this sort of wrestling lacks.

Of course, the Briscoes being the Briscoes, one of the best teams ever at adding basic narrative to matches like this, that isn’t all there is to it.

The work is simple, but even something as loose as the idea that Ibushi and Nakajima aren’t a polished team and can only succeed when they finally begin working together has a way of unifying things into something with a little more clear shape and form to it. Doubly so when the Briscoes constantly make their point with these cut offs and double teams and periods in control, on top of individual offense that do what they’re so gifted at, being rough and domineering in control, without it ever feeling mean, and preserving, as weirdly as it might read, this respectability that goes such a long way. Add in a less obvious thing that still caught my attention, like how Nakajima’s striking power lets him stand and bang with the Briscoes, but how at a smaller size still, Ibushi needs either the distance to fly or the chance to use his speed, and whenever either Briscoe fights him in a phone booth, they get the best of him, and there’s even more to it. It isn’t complex, but it leads to these moments where these things are paid off — Ibushi and Nakajima getting moving when they finally work together, or Ibushi managing to get his stuff off in the second half when he focuses on the advantage he does have — and it’s much more interesting and organized than just a collection of cool ideas.

Again though, the ideas are pretty fucking sick also.

Jay and Mark power through this brief show of unity at the end, and Our Heroes manage to ruin the day for these weird little ghouls with two different Doomsday Devices in about a minute’s time to win, with the final coming on little Kota Ibushi, once again outmatched in a display of pure force.

Not the greatest possible show for the others, but one more example out of what feels like a thousand of the greatest tag team of all time at work.

***1/3

Kota Ibushi vs. Taichi, NJPW Climax 30 Day Seventeen (10/16/2020)

Commissions continue, this one from Ko-fi contributor SoundwaveAU, who just fucking loves him some Taichi. 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 an A Block match in the 2020 G1 Climax tournament.

While not QUITE the half-hour of mind warfare that Go Shiozaki vs. Kaz Fujita in terms of the strangest and most delightful matches of 2020, specifically the post Rudy Gobert months, is is way way way high up there for being one of the most interesting matches of the year and decade.

Previously, when discussing the Taichi vs. Minoru Suzuki match a few weeks earlier from this tournament, I mentioned how the pandemic crowds — especially in Japan where only clapping was allowed in terms of a reaction — have a way of draining on a match. You can especially feel it in a match like that, or more narrative-driven ones, which gain a lot from audible reactions and the sort of atmosphere constant noise and the visual of clear excitement can create.

However, as the best wrestlers either immediately knew or eventually discovered, there were ways to break through that.

Either something so great that it didn’t matter as much, like the Reigns/Bryan matches or Bryan/AJ or Mox/Darby, or the sort of wrestling that feels so genuine and/or hits on such a visceral level that the crowd doesn’t matter, but in a totally different way. That could mean the grittiness and pared down hostility of those Lorcan/Thatcher NXT matches or something similar, or as was more common and shown here, by simply hitting really hard, on top of doing something really interesting.

Kota Ibushi and Taichi wrestle each other for seventeen minutes, and it is all kicks, most of them to the hamstrings. Some to the face and chest and back and head, the love is spread around, but the dick measuring contest at the start goes on to define the entire thing. It sounds like hyperbole, but no, literally, the only move used that isn’t a kick is Kota Ibushi’s Kamigoe at the end of the match, even itself still a leg strike. Their arms and hands are only ever used in this match as support mechanisms. To pull themselves up off of the mat, to grab the ropes to stay standing, or late in the match, to grab onto each other to stay up while continuing to trade.

It maybe sounds silly.

Mentally, I always had this down as The Kicking Match, the one where they only kick, but firing it up again, I assumed I had just overblown it in my head. Kobashi and Sasaki eventually moved past the chops, even if that’s the part you remember, and I figured this was basically the same thing. `

No.

Kota Ibushi and Taichi literally only kick each other, and it fucking rules.

The thrills this match offers up — two men kicking each other incredibly hard for minutes on end — are simple, but they work as well as anything else. Sometimes even better.

As always with these sorts of strike-heavy (or strike only) matches, the actual shots themselves, while important, are only like 40% of why this is so great.

The match succeeds first because of construction. How the kicks evolve from the shots to the hammy to the face Yakuzas, ones to the chest and back, all of that. Not only that they change which ones are thrown, but how they keep up the trading of each individual shot for like two-thirds of the match, resulting in a moment where Taichi lands a few in a row for the first time genuinely feeling like a big deal. The pace of the kicks and the hardness also shifts and changes to make the back half far more dramatic than it might be otherwise. Most important, they’re always selling these shots. Neither is usually great at this, but there is always a slight limp at least in the last two-thirds or so of the match. They aren’t hindered exactly, but it very clearly does combine with the slower and weaker kicks to show that this all has taken a toll.

Really and truly, it feels like one of the only matches since to actually look at why those Ishii/Shibata match were so great, and to apply those lessons to a match like this, while also taking the idea of the style to a genuinely hilarious conclusion by having a match where they literally only hit each other and do nothing else. The idea is hilarious, and the fact that it also rules makes it maybe even funnier.

Genuinely, one of the most fascinating matches of the 2020s, not because of what they did, but because of how well it worked.

Because it worked in the first place.

Nobody here is reinventing anything, it is hardly one of the like twenty five matches of the decade or anything, but at a point where so many wrestlers in this company had little concept of how to adapt this sort of wrestling to the new way of things, not only a great little oddity, but a clear path forward. Few actually followed it, 2020s New Japan continued to be deeply boring even when crowds were allowed to make noise again, but that’s probably one of the reasons this match still stands out like it does.

That and all the kicks.

***1/4

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

Kota Ibushi/The Young Bucks vs. Rey Mysterio/Rey Fenix/Bandido, ALL IN (9/1/2018)

ALL IN, famous landmark theoretically self funded wrestling show that eventually led to AEW, was a real big deal as everybody knows at this point, but the secret behind every “spirit of ALL IN” post is that, as a wrestling show, ALL IN kind of sucked. Constructed more around Youtube vlog bits, highlighting at least two sexual predators in big spots, and generally, just not creating a show with a lot of good wrestling matches on it. It valued moments over everything else, with little behind them in terms of the actual wrestling meat and potatoes part of the equation, which is maybe a point about that fanbase best expanded on at another time. The end result is a show that I (a) missed at the time, and after having now finally watched the big stuff on it (NWA Title, Hanger/Janela with the dick spot rapist resurrection angle with cock druids, Kenny/Penta, and even Okada against the bird pervert), (b) I am not exactly sad that I waited this long to see.

This is the exception, because this fucking rocked.

I know what you’re thinking, and as always, I also imagine what you have to say to me.

“Wait, isn’t this the match that got cut down to like twelve minutes because the match before it needlessly went twenty-six minutes/because they were clearly laying out a show for the first time?”

YOU’RE GOD DAMNED RIGHT.

This is not a great match that unfortunately got cut down to twelve minutes, forcing them to only hit the biggest and wildest spots that they had planned and cutting out much of the material in between those high points.

It is a great match because it got cut down to twelve minutes, and they were forced to cut so much out of it.

Now, it’s not to say a fifteen or even twenty minute version of this is not also great. It probably is. Maybe the connective tissue here that got shredded to pieces would have been really really good. The thing is though, this is not a match with a ton of narrative weight to it, and it is not a match where I am positive what we lost was anything with preserving. What we lose is, seemingly, the least essential stuff, leaving us with a pure highlight reel from six of the best highlight reel wrestlers in the world. The only real problem with what happened is (a) someone being caught saying to go home and then the pace rapidly increasing & (b) some clear communication at points, clearly about what gets cut out. Otherwise, it’s a ton of unbelievably spectacular things in a row, and because of their need to fit this into a rapidly closing window, the match accidentally has a real sense of urgency to it at a few moments near the end.

Everything about ALL IN, to me, exists in the greatness of this match. An incredibly cool line up that found itself in the most slam dunk can’t miss format possible because of the rank amateurism on display in virtually every other spot on the card.

The happiest accident possible, cutting down a main event epic that could have been either just barely great or not great at all, and turning it into a Nitro or 1997 WCW PPV opener style display of only the wildest stuff they had to offer, with no room for anything else.

***

Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Kota Ibushi, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Final (8/12/2018)

This was the finals of the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

Like any truly great tournament final, it is also about so much more than just this one individual tournament, and before the bell even rings, is a display of some real quality booking, both in simple pro wrestling terms, and also on a level beyond the basic.

It starts on a smaller level first, with the individual stories of our two block winners.

Kota Ibushi and Hiroshi Tanahashi have, as is often the case with the real outstanding displays of tournament booking, both been on outstanding runs through their respective blocks, not only in terms of match quality, but narratively speaking as well. For Ibushi, it’s very clearly the year that he becomes an actual main eventer, stepping above the mass of mid to upper card guys and standing up there with the clear Big Four. Avenging a loss from the New Japan Cup against Zack Sabre Jr., beating the two midcard champions in the block in Juice and Ishii, beating Naito for the first time, and of course, beating the actual IWGP Heavyweight Champion the day before. For Hiroshi Tanahashi, the G1 in 2018 is, improbably, a story of rebirth. After a down few years following passing the torch to Okada in 2016, and especially a less than successful first half of 2018, Tanahashi surprisingly came to life again in this year’s tournament. Not only avenging his own early year loss, this one to Minoru Suzuki, but going through the tournament with only one loss despite a clearly injured leg, ending with a draw that felt like a victory.

If Ibushi getting here is itself a major step forward, then Tanahashi is right there with him, setting a new block record in the twenty man G1 era with 15 points on a 7-1-1 split. The last G1 block that saw anyone do better than this (with 2014’s 22 man G1, there are a few with 16 points, but they had two losses, and Tanahashi had a higher percentage this year) was back in 2005, where funnily enough, old Tanahashi enemy Kazuyuki Fujita went 7-0 (before winning a semi-final and then losing the final), but that was in a block with two less matches, and where one win came by forfeit due to injury. (Others, such as Tenzan in 2006 or Nakamura in 2009, also went undefeated in blocks, but those were smaller than Fujita’s, so he would be most successful.) While Kota Ibushi is doing something he has never done before, Tanahashi is doing something that, in this format, simply has never been done before, which is a really interesting way of evening it out given Tanahashi’s long history of G1 finals before this.

Tanahashi and Ibushi also just so happen to represent more than just themselves, an idea illustrated as clearly as possible by their choices of seconds.

Kenny Omega stands in the corner of Kota Ibushi, a clear symbol of progress, but sometimes simply for the sake of progress itself. On the other hand, Tanahashi’s second is long time rival turned partner Katsuyori Shibata, making his first public appearance in a year, and his second since what was thought to be his retirement, following the best match of 2017, one in which he stood for a lot of the same things as Tanahashi does now, but wasn’t quite able to succeed.

As much as any other match in recent New Japan history, perhaps only topped by the match it eventually led to, it feels like a battle over what New Japan stands for, what it is, what it can be, and along with the battle for the soul of Kota Ibushi also being waged here between his tag team partner on the floor and idol across the ring from him, what it one day might become. Not so much between cool moves and scientific wrestling, but between occasionally flawed wrestling but with a heart and soul and blood pumping through it against a kind of spiritually vacant but mechanically pristine factory line professional wrestling. This match is less explicitly about that, about right vs. wrong, than the match it leads to will be, but it’s hard not to see it here too, somewhere off in the background.

Narrative heft and pure feeling aside, the match also just fucking rocks.

The mechanics of the thing are pretty great. That’s the least important part of this probably, the simple execution of moves and the reactions to them, but they are great, and they’re great in a match up where that was not always the case.

Following their third match together near the end of 2017, it feels like Tanahashi and Ibushi have finally figured each other out as opponents, and grown in certain ways so as to accommodate the talents of the other. For instance, as opposed to their first match together, Tanahashi is not going to go all knee attacks on a guy in Ibushi who is just going to do that. He does some, but it feels like a part of what they’re trying to say in the match, this usual old-school Tanahashi-ism that Ibushi can easily push past. At the same time, Ibushi has improved significantly as a seller of the knee, even when doing his stuff, to a level I would never have expected for him even three years prior. He does his stuff, but because of the level of work Tanahashi cuts it off at, and because Ibushi always finds a way to move in a way that expresses some background level of pain and always holds his knee and the way he never 100% forgets about a hurt limb, it makes it work. There is always what feels like a cost, even for an attack that stopped working some ten to fifteen minutes before the end of the match. That’s the quality that this, and their Power Struggle 2017 match have that, before you get into anything else, really makes this work.

With them having figured this out, more or less, they are free to have the absolute biggest possible version of that match.

Above all, what works so well for this match is the way that it is constructed. Part of that is how the knee work is handled, that it never gets a real run to work like classic Tanahashi knee work does, and the ways Ibushi cuts it off in ways the old man would never expect, but it also just comes down to how great every individual thing is beyond that, and the general escalation of every single piece of offense put out there, getting bigger and harder and more frantic and desperate as the match continues. Not every shot is great, Tanahashi is Tanahashi, but each shot gets progressively harder and feels like a bigger deal than what came before it. The match is spectacular at teasing just about every major move, so that in the back half when ninety percent of those are eventually hit, they feel like accomplishments in and of themselves. The match is also simply just full of some truly horrific stuff from Ibushi, such as his nastiest cut off palm strikes ever, the always nasty battering ram into the middle, and especially, the most grotesque possible WK9 style middle rope deadlift German Suplex, hurling Tanahashi on his neck and shoulder with absolutely zero grace. A lot of people take that bump and make it look sick as hell, but Tanahashi looks like someone who is being given this move against his own will, and that is the difference. That is always the difference.

So, these are the reasons this match is great. It is a collection of wildly different genres of awesome stuff, assembled as coherently as possible, with the mechanics and engineering to support all of their ambition.

These are not, however, the reasons it is this great.

With as much respect paid to what happened and how much it both made sense, was intellectually and viscerally appealing, and just flat out whipped ass, what matters in a big Tanahashi match like this the most is how it happened, why it happened, and the feeling resulting from the how and the why.

Ibushi, once again, is at his best not when cast as the central figure of a story, but as an obstacle for somebody else to overcome. As was the case with his other greatest singles match ever, seven and a half years and change before this, Ibushi is at his best when acting not just as an obstacle, but a symbol of this unchanging and unfeeling fact of life that a past-his-prime veteran has to first reckon with and then find a way past. Doubly so here, with a history of their matches behind them, so it has even more value when a knee attack that did work in their last match fails to work even half as well here, along with all of these other failures in the place of previous successes, allowing Ibushi not only to work as a symbol of the thing, but to express that idea through the construction of the match just as much as his individual performance.  Ibushi is not a total dead-eyed emotionless void as he is in a lot of the better matches like this, breaking out things like the Boma Ye and the bigger offense with some feeling behind it, but in its own way, that also works, because it feels like the performance someone might give in their big moment, so it does create a real feeling of doubt, strong enough at the initial moment I saw it on stream that a ghost of that brief feeling of terror has a way of sticking around.

Still, even coming as close as ever to simulating genuine human feeling, Kota Ibushi is a player in the Hiroshi Tanahashi story, and that is great news, because in 2018, that is the best story in wrestling.

As great as the three Okada/Tanahashi matches in 2018 are, Tanahashi is nearly just as great here.

He doesn’t get to go into the sympathetic leg selling here and this match up does not have quite the same weight of history upon its back, and so the comebacks are not quite as moving and celebratory, but they’re maybe even more impressive because of that. Once the last half or so hits and Ibushi begins unloading, barely phased by a Tanahashi attack that in their last match at least paused him enough to let Tanahashi work, every Tanahashi comeback feels like a monumental struggle. Not only between Tanahashi and Ibushi, but between Tanahashi and himself, between the heart and the brain on one end and his failing body on the other. There are these moments when Ibushi is absolutely dismantling him with slaps and kicks and elbows where Tanahashi either falls down or stumbles back and just barely stays up, where he begins nodding and slightly pumping his arms, and it’s the best expression of the idea of someone willing themselves to keep fighting as I’ve seen in wrestling in years.

In the end, that’s what happens.

For all of the horrific violence and imaginative offense Kota Ibushi has, Tanahashi has the quality that matters the most. He’s just always there. He manages to avoid the Kamigoe all match, even when it isn’t at all pretty. He never outstrikes Ibushi, not really. There is no one moment, like even the Okada draw two days prior, where you get a sense for the thing. Tanahashi just hangs around and hangs around while Kota Ibushi empties the arsenal, and in between avoiding the big shot, and grabbing anything that even comes close to him in the final moments, it becomes enough.

Tanahashi continues the rally, stringing together a rare combination of the High Fly Flow to the back, a High Fly Flow crossbody, and finally the original recipe classic, and gets the win.

One of the two or three best matches of 2018 at worst, and one of the best in the career of either man (for Ibushi, almost definitely number one as a singles). It is the ideal meeting in the middle for the styles of both, a huge and bombastic Kota Ibushi fireworks show, but with the thought, care, and feeling of the very best Hiroshi Tanahashi matches ever. A match that works on every level, the sort of thing that shows the best of pro wrestling at this point in time, and one of the most purely satisfying things to come out of New Japan in some time. A grandiose epic, and at the same time, something wonderfully human.

Wrestling, when done correctly like this long-term post-Ace Hiroshi Tanahashi story from January 5th, 2016 through January 4th, 2019 (which is to say with very little nonsense, with characters you believe in, matches that whip ass, and the time and care taken to get as much out of every element of the process from start to finish over a several year span), can be cooler than sports because of matches and moments like this, the one two days prior, and the other major matches that make up this Tanahashi comeback run in 2018.

Real sports are full of times when Our Heroes hit the wall, and cannot do the things they used to do anymore. They lost their lift up or their burst forward, and beyond winning, cannot do the things we’re used to seeing. As one of the greats and most frequently quoted pieces of work on this blog says, the cruel randomness of the sport is never in flukes, but in how much changes, and how quickly. It’s no fun, but you watch enough, and you get used to it as an inevitability, and a fact of life. Time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses, it only marches forward. Nobody catches it, but for a moment at the end, Hiroshi Tanahashi is able to keep pace with it, like nobody else can. That’s pro wrestling to me. If not always stylistically, this is the sort of thing, narratively and emotionally speaking, that pro wrestling ought to aspire towards. The ability to see things you cannot see but badly want to see in real sports, the end result of being able to manipulate these contests to create something like this, the most stunning, dramatic, and emotionally satisfying version of events possible. 

The magic we wish we saw elsewhere exists in the ring.

Go Ace.

****

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

Kota Ibushi vs. Tomohiro Ishii, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Ten (7/28/2018)

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

As always with these two, long before this match and for several years after, it whips a whole ton of ass. It’s one of my favorite matches that New Japan can run at this point. Ibushi vs. Ishii is the sort of match that, like Sabre Jr. vs. Ibushi, I kind of just expect to see once a year at minimum, except that unlike Zack and Kota doing their thing again, the thing these two have together is the sort of thing that makes me sit up off of my couch or desk chair at home, slap my hands together like a feral seal or pump my fist in the air on raw instinct, and hoot and holler as if against my own will. It is beautiful wrestling.

You could say, at the same time, that like a lot of match ups both men have that get repeated a lot, it does not offer up anything new. 2017’s match between these two already saw the payoff of Ibushi pushing past a guy who he couldn’t out-crazy years prior, aided by his new heavyweight size and continued mental decay, and as a match up past the point of a payoff, this does not have anything new to offer up this time around, narratively speaking.

That’s not unfair to say.

However, unlike an Ishii vs. Goto for example, there are just enough changes and shifts from match to match to keep it interesting.

Also, with all due respect, if you are watching Kota Ibushi vs. Tomohiro Ishii for a display of character advancement and narrative grace, I am not sure what we are doing here.

This is not to say they cannot offer that up in moments, as this match has a few great displays of pettiness and anger that spring up from nothing, Ishii is again a tremendous bully and Ibushi gets into some of that himself, and this is not a match with no flow or form, of course. It is to say though that you, me, and everyone here has their eyeballs tuned in here for the other stuff. There are matches about the big dramatics and then there are matches about two maniacs using their bodies to do incredibly gross things and push the limits of this corporeal form in any number of ways from striking each other unbelievably hard in the trachea to diving off of large balconies, and Big Tom and Ibushi do those sorts of things, respectively (although, God, imagine), better than a whole lot of other wrestlers.

When the match gets past the acrobatics and mid-level shoving around and it becomes time for violence, these two more than deliver. The usual shots are great, but where this match has always stood out in my mind is when they aim a little lower than the jaw and a little higher than just the chest. Ishii gets real mad at Ibushi starting to cop an attitude and slap him around some, and aims his chops right near the throat. It’s not entirely new for Ishii, but it’s something that he uses sparingly enough that it always feels extra nasty to me. Even nastier is that, for once, someone responds in kind. Ibushi bursts out of the corner with a series if punches and/or palms right to the throat to shut him down, and an absolute all-time screamer. It is the Throat Punch Match, and while you can absolutely fairly mock how much more rope I give this than a lot of other matches with similar qualities, to be entirely fair, not a lot of those other matches have throat punches that look as good as these or feel as violent, spiritually and physically, as these.

Big Tom’s surprising second flurry gets cut off in a new and more brutal way than Ibushi’s shown before (and one that may be accidental and that he probably cannot do to most taller wrestlers), with a head kick right to the top of Ishii’s forehead, going right into the Kamigoe for the win.

Once again, a delight. Big Tom and Ibushi deliver a torrent of activity, all either stunningly violent or impossibly cool, with just enough different to still feel novel. One of the company’s best matches unsurprisingly does it again.

***1/4

Kota Ibushi vs. Toru Yano, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Six (7/21/2018)

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

It is another incredible Toru Yano outing.

While the usual Yano match in the tournament thus far has revolved around his attempt to be more serious and show his old amateur wrestling roots, the bit has been (and will be in the future) that he is eventually dragged there. Either through something being too hard and unwinnable through straight wrestling, an opponent not believing him and cheating first, or an opponent being a rotten little bastard and cheating from the start to try and out-Yano the master, Yano still always ends up being Yano in the end.

The joy of this is that after like thirty seconds, Yano does not even try and pretend.

Maybe, on only the third Yano match of the tournament, is a little too soon to hit this bit, the match where he abandons the pretense and immediately goes for broke. That’s not unfair, and I probably agree, but against Ibushi, it is perfect.

There may be no better way to get Ibushi over as a true main eventer, short of repeatedly cleanly beating other main eventers, than this. The idea of someone being so good — so fast, so precise, so energetic — that Yano does not even play the game with them, but rushes them in what is actually his match, it speaks volumes. Not only is it an easy thing to read, but it is such a different way of communicating the same idea that it has a way of standing out so much more.

Beyond the exceptional booking, it is also just a whale of a time, and a perfect example of the usual sort of great Yano match.

Yano removes every turnbuckle pad, tapes Ibushi’s hand together (after revealing Hidden Tape in his boot after Ibushi previously threw another roll away), and Kota has to wrestle entirely with his feet and the occasional double sledge style club. It’s like nothing else in recent history for Ibushi, and even beyond how interesting the match is from afar, super memorable as an actual moment-by-moment wrestling match too. Ibushi stays alive longer than most, is still lethal with the kicks, and Yano has to get into even deeper levels of bullshit.

One of the better referee bumps of the year is manufactured, with Yano schoolboying Ibushi back after putting his arms around the referee to send him over with them, lands a low blow, a real motherfucker of a diving chop block, and then a schoolboy to finally get the win.

This is what I want out of the G1 Climax.

Not just the great matches, but the unbelievably fun and weird ones too, and ones that even in their own bizarre little way, have these character beats that have value. You might look at this and ignore it, call something else Real Professional Wrestling, but this is the good shit. Not only something with real value and utility, this intersection of two great storylines in Serious Yano and Ibushi’s rise up the card, but doing something with this much substance in a match that, on the surface, is all bullshit.

The handy little thing to remember is this.

We are watching professional wrestling. It is all bullshit. Nobody does more with that idea, while still preserving that bullshit does not ever have to mean phony or stupid, than Toru Yano does.

Incredible professional wrestling. Nobody is doing it like Yano in this tournament.

***