Shuji Ishikawa vs. Mike Bailey, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Shinjuku (1/5/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

As with the other matches on this show, it is hindered just a little bit by setting. The small venue, single camera set up, somewhat subdued Shinjuku FACE audience, all of that. This is a match up that deserves a white hot Korakuen Hall crowd, and ideally, a main event slot for a title or something to really squeeze as much juice out of the thing as possible.

Like those matches, it doesn’t matter all that much, or at least, it doesn’t hold them back all that much.

Shuji Ishikawa and Mike Bailey may not be natural opponents in the sense of a kind of perfect physical chemistry or a shared ideology, but in 2018 at least, they share enough in common for that not to matter. You have a physically imposing hard hitting hulking ass big man near the peak of his powers, and one of the great underdogs in wrestling, capable of enough striking to at least believably stand a chance, and that’s enough. The simple fact that both men whip a lot of ass is enough tonight to bridge whatever divide there is between restraint and excess, especially when unlike the other great matches on this show, the Big Dog and Young Karate get exactly as much time as they need (fifteen minutes, as much as almost any match ever needs) to have the best match possible under these conditions.

Predictably, this is not some genius bit of innovation.

Ishikawa beats the absolute piss out of young Seedball, and he sticks and moves and picks his spots exactly long enough to hang around and stay viable, before ultimately getting caught again and pummeled into the core of the Earth.

There are nuances, of course. Broad concepts only get you so far.

Little things like the way Ishikawa yanks Bailey up real roughly by the arm for a series of short arm clotheslines and it never looks cooperative, or the way he kind of roughly puts him into holds. Big things like the obscene shots the big guy is firing out there with his elbows, knees, and lariats, or the absurd bumps Mike Bailey spends the entire match taking. The little twists and turns, cut offs and comebacks, the way Ishikawa reacts to every little comeback, the way Bailey gradually gets more and more in until he can actually come back. Even a problem like Ishikawa occasionally getting caught looking like he’s waiting for a piece of Mike Bailey offense turns around into these few moments where it looks like that, only for him to be setting Bailey up for a big counter or evasion.

Maybe most impressive is the way Ishikawa never once feels like he’s selling out his size for cheap pops, bumping more than the moment calls for, and always protecting himself not only as a star but as a heavyweight wrestler, but still delivers this cool and exciting match without eating Bailey alive either. It’s not the easiest balancing act in the world, a whole lot of wrestlers have fallen off of the beam trying it, but it’s something Shuji Ishikawa pulls off really well here. In the closing moments, the match creates drama not by going over the top or even selling out the big match offense of Ishikawa with a series of big kickouts, but instead by having Bailey continually fight out or slip away. Given other matches on the show with underdogs persevering in similar ways, it’s a nice little thing they do. It’s not enough to make a ”well, maybe” ever show up, but it’s an approach that I appreciate a whole lot, given that that question was probably ever going to come up at all.

The match ends as it was always going to, the big broad concept and easy equation getting solved real quickly. Ishikawa catches Bailey with another gross lariat and knee, and hits the Splash Mountain for the win.

It works for every reason it was always going to, for the reasons the D-Oh is real arguably wrestling’s best tournament. Hurl different kinds of great wrestlers at each other in rare combinations, get out of the way, things like that. More often than not, as seen here, it works. Wrestling isn’t math, it’s always been more art than science, but sometimes, the math is real easy. 

A great reminder not to fuck with the program.

***

HARASHIMA/Kazusada Higuchi/Jiro Kuroshio vs. Konosuke Takeshita/Shuji Ishikawa/Mike Bailey, DDT New Years Special (1/3/2018)

In a preview of the upcoming inaugural D-Oh Grand Prix tournament a few days after this, DDT throws six of the heavy favorites in the thing into a six man at random, and lets her rip.

The result, shockingly, is a match that is both real great and super interesting.

DDT’s a promotion with a whole lot to offer, and this is a match that shows the full spectrum of that. You have your big heavyweight sluggers in Higuchi and Ishikawa, weird stuff in Jiro, two elite kick artists with wildly different philosophies on wrestling in HARASHIMA and Bailey, and then, I guess if you’re into that sort of a thing, your classic mid to late 2010s vacant-eyed dullard would-be Ace figure (Okada, Miyahara, etc.) in Soup.

What this match — and this promotion — does so well is simply hurling all of them at each other.

Every match up in this is pretty great. You get some that are time-tested and assured hits — your HARASHIMA/Takeshita, HARASHIMA/Ishikawa, HARASHIMA/Bailey (not sure if there’s a theme here?), Higuchi/Ishikawa, etc. — but also some real fun new stuff. Takeshita and Higuchi haven’t fought all that much, but as a big dumb slugfest kind of a match, it is a blast. Higuchi and Bailey had a match in 2017, but it was in DDT’s smaller DNA project and felt somewhat held back in a way that their exchanges here do not. Takeshita vs. Jiro is also surprisingly fun, allowing Soup to slide into the role at which he’s best by bullying the nice boy a little bit, while also allowing Jiro’s whole deal to stand out a lot more by contrasting it against this absolute blank slate of a wrestler.

Mostly though, this is not a match about surprises.

Things go as they ought to. Everybody plays the hits, rotates the match ups around, and it is exactly as good as you’d want it to be, and exactly the sort of thing you should expect it to be. A twenty minute advertisement for a tournament over the next month, offering a bunch of different previews of set matches and potential previews of what the finals might be. As a certified DDT Freak, it’s not as if I need a reason to watch the tournament in full, but for the sorts of people tuning in for the first time, it’s as great as what it sets out to be as one might imagine.

Fireworks begin pouring down in the last third, and after a really beautifully constructed last minute or so of dives and counters, HARASHIMA gets Seedball in there on his own, and hits an especially emphatic Somato for the win. Go Ace.

A lovely riff session and as good of a DDT introduction in 2018 as you could ask for.

***

Tetsuya Endo vs. Mike Bailey, DDT God Bless DDT 2017 (11/23/2017)

Cool match.

***

 

Konosuke Takeshita vs. Mike Bailey, DDT Hello From Shinjuku Village 2017 (7/2/2017)

This was for Soup’s KO-D Openweight Title.

First of all, this is in one of my favorite smaller venues that DDT ever ran on one of these smaller shows in Shinjuku Village Studio C 106. It’s a nice looking tan room that doesn’t stand out a whole lot outside of that air ducts and high ceilings are interesting to me, but there is a staircase instead of an entrance aisle, and so every match begins with the wrestlers walking down the stairs and it has a real vibe of office workers going down to the warehouse to play ping pong or something. You can see it here, in an official picture of Mike Bailey moonsaulting off the stairs, or in a very brief shot of the champion first emerging to make his entrance before a close up, as seen below.

It’s a very interesting ambience and feel that DDT once again achieves through its selection of venue on a smaller show, and whether that is out of choice or necessity ultimately doesn’t matter all that much. It’s interesting in a way few other promotions regularly are in this area.

The match itself is pretty great.

Nowhere near as great as I remembered it, as I’ve gotten more and more tired of this sort of wrestling compared to when I first watched this match, but still great.

Once again, it is a Mike Bailey knee selling match.

For reasons that I do not understand and may never comprehend, outside of just a vague understanding through example after example of how wrestling in England a lot can make you a more thoughtless and worse wrestler, Mike Bailey became obsessed with matches like this in 2017. They are everywhere, all over his wrestling, and I think at this point there are more Mike Bailey matches like this in 2017 than ones not like this. At some point, this ultra likeable young man with some of the coolest offense and most reliably nasty striking in the world decided that almost all of his matches should be based around an idea that, in order to work, means he has to strike less and run less and do less. He is not exactly Toshiaki Kawada or Eddie Kingston out there when we’re talking about good knee sellers, and while he is functional and occasionally can be great, it usually comes in matches where he still does all of his cool moves anyways and has these long drawn out epics, like he thinks he can’t have a truly Great match without something like this added onto it, as if there is some formula for great wrestling in the first place.

It’s bad brained and depressing, perfect professional wrestling overcomplicating itself to try and fit into a box that isn’t real in the first place, no matter what its actual strengths and weaknesses truly are.

However, like the HARASHIMA match for this same title in January, this still mostly works, for most of the same reasons.

Bailey is a good enough limb seller, enough so that it never feels like time wasted on pointless filler so much as time misapplied. The match again does a pretty decent job of moving on and not doing more than Seedball can handle. Above all, it is still a real crunchy and spirited match, with enough really sensational fireworks to combine with all of the above to create a match that barely succeeds despite every error that it commits entirely of its own volition.

The match fall a little short in all the ways you’d expect on paper. Takeshita isn’t quite as good as HARASHIMA at anything, really, and that hurts. He’s especially not as good at moderating his knee work, so while it’s nice that they don’t spend a long time there initially, HARASHIMA was better at choosing more minor holds and stretches whereas Takeshita is all in for those few minutes. The main issue is beyond that slightly unfair comparison though, and it’s really just that they asked them to do twenty seven minutes here. The knee work Speedball match is so prevalent in 2017 that it doesn’t seem fair to put that all on DDT, but it’s a longer match than necessary, and that allows the sort of room for error that these guys made a whole lot of use out of.

Konosuke keeps a hold on the title with the BRAINBUSTAAAAAH, which both works as a nice finish against another French Canadian and draws a few real unkind comparisons for both men, given that El Generico would rarely have matches like these, and if he did, they’d be among the best of the year.

A worse version of a thing from earlier in the year, but I stand by the general idea expressed at the end of that review. This is one of my least favorite sorts of things Mike Bailey can do, an unforced error that makes his matches worse than they should be and part of why I don’t think he’s ever been better than he was in 2014-2015, but given all of those things, still a pretty great match as a result of force of effort and talent.

***

Mike Bailey vs. Tetsuya Endo, DDT King of DDT 2017 1st Round (6/2/2017)

As one might expect, this was a 1st Round match in the 2017 King of DDT tournament.

The match is great.

Specifically, it is great in exactly the ways that maybe only Mike Bailey could get a great match out of Tetsuya Endo in.

That is to say that, unlike a great story epic against Konosuke Takeshita or Shuji Ishikawa in 2016, in which Endo was set up to succeed only to eat pounds and pounds of shit in ways nobody would have ever imagined, or even HARASHIMA later in 2016 in a classical mid-level HARASHIMA match (in which Tetsuya Endo still eats shit, as HARASHIMA is not one to fuck up a good thing), it is simply Tetsuya Endo plugged into a Seedball ass Mike Bailey match.

It’s not that there aren’t problems with that, of course.

Most evident to anyone watching this is that Endo is not on the same level as Bailey, and yet the match lies and attempts to dispute that fact. In the sort of match that this is, a kind of all action movefest, there’s no reason given for why that is, simply Bailey doing his best to help out another guy in what’s become his home promotion here in 2016 through 2019, or thereabouts. It doesn’t totally work. Endo is not on Mike Bailey’s level, anyone with a keen critical eye can see that, and the match doesn’t TOTALLY succeed, given that this exact sort of Young Karate match has him playing the hits and then putting over the local.

Still, there are things here that simply work.

Bailey’s offense is still among the very best in the world. The kicks, the dives, all of that. Beyond that, he is also just such a skilled bump artist, and yet again gets the most out of a deeply flawed wrestler on the other end of this match. Endo can and does succeed in certain environments, but never without a truly exceptional talent on the other end to hold his hand through it, and that’s what Our Hero Seedball does for just about the entirety of this contest.

Endo wins with Tetsuya In The Sky (T.I.T.S) and that is that.

I don’t think there is a ton of overlap between readers of this blog who read reviews of just above three boy level DDT midcard matches and readers of this blog who enjoy a joke like that, but just in case there is anyone out there in the middle of this exact Venn diagram, there you go.

Not the greatest use of Mike Bailey OBVIOUSLY, but a match that succeeds in ways that Endo has only previously succeeded against other all-world level wrestlers in the past.

Do that math on your own.

***

Mike Bailey vs. Kazusada Higuchi, DNA 33 ~ KILL THE KING (5/10/2017)

I like it in life, generally speaking, when things are as I expect them to be.

People sometimes call that predictable and boring, and that’s fine. Generally speaking, I like it when things are as I expect them to be. Granted, some unpredictability or change from an expected routine is good. In a movie or a hard left in a great song, maybe in a night out every now and then. On occasion, when it works out well, I love to see it in a wrestling match too.

This is not that match.

This is a very very predictable match — quality, content, strengths, weaknesses, all of it — and I am perfectly happy with that.

Kazusada Higuchi and Mike Bailey spent nearly twenty minutes hitting each other incredibly hard with their hands, arms, feet, and legs. Young Karate moves around the big guy because he doesn’t have the firepower to stand and trade forever, he flies around sometimes, and winds up getting swatted out of the sky a fair amount by the end, before he’s destroyed at the finish. It’s the match one might imagine they have, in terms of the things in the match that happen, and the most sensible route for them to go against each other.

Beyond the content of the thing, speaking now about quality, this is a match that is EXACTLY as great as you’d think it would be on this stage.

It’s only DNA, and not DDT itself proper.

DNA’s crowd is smaller and much much quieter than you’d otherwise get out of either man in Korakuen Hall. This match and show is recorded from one singular static hardcam shot, meaning that visually, it’s a little more boring than usual out of either man. Single location shot matches are simply not as enthralling as ones with a camera that moves and follows. These things combine and so it is not as energetic an atmosphere nor as interesting a visual document as something like their 2018 D-Oh match, for example. (I would love to have more examples, but they only have a few matches together sadly.)

There are also the sorts of qualities here that one expects from Bailey and Higuchi both from time to time in an environment like this and at a point in time like this where it drags a little sometimes, they go a little long for the environment, and all of that. Again, something not solely confined to this specific match nor out of the usual for either man in 2017, especially in a lower energy environment like this.

Mike Bailey and Kazusada Higuchi have a better match between them, and that’s not conjecture, as their final singles match together will likely prove. However, as a smaller show display of offense from two of the best offensive wrestlers in the world, at bare minimum, it’s an easy hit.

Call it predictable, but with a match like this, I’d use a word that I like much more, reliability. That’s what these two display, not only in this match, but time and time and time again. It’s why they’re two of my favorites, and why this match is so easy to consume. Two of the world’s most watchable wrestlers have the sort of match you can set a watch to, and as you all also become old men, you’ll find there’s a real virtue in a thing like that.

***

Shigehiro Irie/Kazusada Higuchi vs. HARASHIMA/Mike Bailey, DDT Max Bump 2017 (4/29/2017)

This is certainly not the best version of this match up.

I wish it happened on a house show in a small town with 142 people in the crowd, so it would be the main event and they would have like twenty four minutes to riff it out with each other, rather than ten minutes on a midshow Korakuen Hall tag that’s cut down because of the excessive and, quite frankly, deranged length of the show’s main event.

However, great is great, and there’s just enough here and just enough casual force of talent to just get this over the line.

On one hand, it is your classic DDT undercard tag mix-em-up, and as long as there are names as great as these four to mix around and hurl at each other, it is one of the few absolute locks in all of wrestling.

Every combination here rocks, every moment of this match is good, and every single thing that happens is of a certain quality. From the loud strikes to the tight holds, from your classic pairings to the newer ones with Mike Bailey, from obscene Speedball bumps over the top to the more understated and quietly dramatic ones of HARASHIMA, it is simply all very good and it adds up as you’d expect it to. Even if the match is, to be honest, something of an underachievement as a result of choices the promotion makes, these four refuse to allow the match to be anything less than great, even if they have to settle for being just over the border line.

On the other hand, it is also more than just a little mix-em-up, even if it isn’t that long.

Following years of losses to DDT’s now former but still spiritual Ace HARASHIMA, Irie and Higuchi make an absolute mother fucker over a team, and gang up to get their revenge. HARASHIMA has lost the title and taken a step back, but just because God has been dethroned, it does not mean people like these two will suddenly stop trying to attack him. They spend something like two-thirds of the match going after Mike Bailey, and then zero in on HARASHIMA at the end. The first part of that seems to come about through equal parts choice and circumstance, it’s not as if they jump HARASHIMA to start and piledrive him on the floor or something, but the way things work out seems a little too near to chalk up to any sort of real coincidence, and that is the DDT magic. A clear story, without shouting in your face that this is what it is.

With the might of the superteam pressing down, Bailey finds himself a non-factor late in the match, hurled around and caught and battered into shit, unable to help the other half of this generational babyface dream team. HARASHIMA gets crowded and ganged up upon by the new team, and after Irie’s cannonball, Higuchi hauls him up for the Doctor Bomb to finally get him, with HARASHIMA barely even having a chance to try and end the match himself.

It’s not the greatest victory in the world, given the more restrained nature of the match, certainly. I would have preferred to make more out of this, but the HARASHIMA/Higuchi rivalry has always been one fans seemed to care more about than DDT itself. What makes up for it though is how god damned funny it actually is that things go like this.

Namely, that it is Kazusada Higuchi that does it, rather than the much longer suffering Shigehiro Irie. Even in finally getting something over on HARASHIMA, Shigehiro Irie finds himself leapfrogged by Higuchi in the process, someone who has simply lost to HARASHIMA in big matches for a few years, rather than Irie, who has had his mind destroyed for the last four years by his repeated failures, constantly coming up with what he thinks is the new weapon that will do it, only to fall flatter on his face and with more people noticing every time he fails to do it. Irie helps out, but the win goes to someone who’s suffered for half as long and probably only like a tenth as much, which all things considered, is probably why Higuchi was able to do it in the first place. A great and super interesting end to such a great match. It takes a generational loser to still feel like one in victory, let alone a victory like this, and thankfully for all of us playing along at home, Shigehiro Irie is that beautiful loser.

DDT, once again, in all its quality and efficiency, imperfectly encapsulated into one thing.

***

Shigehiro Irie vs. Mike Bailey, DDT Judgment 2017: 20th Anniversary Show (3/20/2017)

Bailey and Irie can certainly do better than a sub ten minute match on the first half of a major show, more than possessing the skill, talent, and chemistry together to do much more substantial and significant work than this. It’s not a new thing for a big venue DDT show to not have the greatest card composition in the world, at least in terms of what I like to watch from them, but here’s another example of that. Objectively speaking, it is a waste of talent.

That being said, this does rule.

Irie and Seedball have the exact sort of a match they were always going to have, and it goes roughly as well as it was always going to do, or at least as well as this version of it was always going to.

Bailey takes some really huge bumps, both guys hit each other remarkably hard, and it’s a classic and easy big vs. small story told. Bailey throws his shots out and takes risks to make up for all he lacks physically, and eventually, one of them falls short. Only then can the big guy get anything going, and after a Tazmission-plex, Irie backflips through back into the Tazmission and gets a long long long long long long overdue singles victory on a show that matters.

A wonderful little time.

three boy

ACH vs. Mike Bailey, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2017 Night One (3/10/2017)

This was a 1st Round match in the 2017 16 Carat Gold tournament.

Do I wish this didn’t start with a dance spot?

Yes. Obviously, the answer is yes. Song and dance indie wrestling is the worst shit in the world unless you literally just started watching, and even then, I don’t know how often you can see that before it loses all charm. At this point for me, I’m not sure I’ve enjoyed a dancing spot in close to a decade, and they certainly had more to them than just “do dance moves to start a match for an easy pop”, like La Parkita being drunk at CHIKARA in 2007 and dancing with fans. This is no threat to break that trend but also hardly a threat to ruin the match, a simple back and forth before they get on with it, a real oddity given how actually and obviously great both ACH and Bailey actually are. The briefness of it only makes it all the more strange.

Anyways.

Is this still a great match despite that opening moment?

Yes!

Absolutely, this is a great match, and the second best match on a really good show.

(There’s another great match on this show in the main event in the first really really great WALTER/Starr match. I reviewed it in 2019 when I first started this blog, and unlike some other 2017 stuff I’m re-doing with better writing, this is not one I’m going to revisit. If you want to read what I thought about it before certain things broke and when I was a worse writer, I’m sure you know how to perform a basic search. It’s really great and I wish it wasn’t still so great even in spite of the match no longer having a protagonist worth rooting for, and we can leave it there.)

Once the nonsense is over with and the actual thing begins, the match delivers exactly what it seems to promise on paper.

Bailey and ACH have a remarkably honest match, nothing more than a show of fireworks and more hostile artillery, and it’s a delight.

Two of the greatest offensive wrestlers in the entire world have a match that is all offense and succeeds wildly for it, and for how remarkable both ACH and Young Karate are both in terms of their execution and the composition and escalation that a successful match in this genre almost has to display to work. While not quite on the level of their 2022 West Coast Pro match as it lacks that aggression, it’s a real pretty and light sort of a thing that I appreciate a lot in this environment.

Not quite Hoot of the Year material, but like ninety-nine percent of the match one (or just me, I should stop ascribing my feelings and beliefs onto everyone, but I never will) expects and desires upon stumbling upon an ACH vs. Mike Bailey match they had totally forgotten about on a show they were going to watch anyways.

***

Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Mike Bailey, RPW Live at the Cockpit 13 (2/5/2017)

Another great match that very easily could have not been given the match they opted to have together.

Zack’s a great bully and Mike’s a tremendously sympathetic underdog, but stylistically, it is not a perfect fit. It’s the exact sort of match I feared these two having, and that honestly, I always fear Mike Bailey having from this point going forward, where the match insists on working Bailey’s leg so as to try and do Smart Wrestling, but forcing him to still use it all the time for everything. It’s the sort of match that tries to show off how intelligent it is, makes everyone feel like a smarter wrestling fan for recognizing it and going “yes, this is good wrestling”, but then still does all the big fireworks spots anyways. There are many worse things a match could be doing, but for people who can do so much more and have done so much more, it always feels like a step back.

Naturally, this is the match that they have.

Much like the HARASHIMA match a month earlier, it’s Mike Bailey in the sort of match I don’t like and that I don’t like seeing him in, as Zack spends so much of his time working on the leg. And much like that match, it is still a great fucking match through a pure kind of force of skill on both sides.

Zack, as always is a real mother fucker in a match like this. He’s naturally an unlikeable person (English) and takes real advantage of that. Not only in controlling someone as far as possible on the other side of the spectrum in Young Karate, but in getting real brutal with the knee while doing it. Zack’s no HARASHIMA in terms of utility and efficiency — this is yet another Zack match that you can lob a solid five to ten off of and lose very little of real substance — but he does so many different gross things. What he lacks in efficiency is made up for in hostility.

Bailey, for his part, brings to this match just about what he brought to that one, with one marvelous new wrinkle that’s allowed to him by the little staircases in the Cockpit.

It’s one of my favorite pieces of nerd bait ever, the self conscious version of the all-time great Steamboat apron sell from 1994. On its own, it is not the sort of thing that I love out of a wrestler like Bailey, there’s something about it that feels slightly off and performative, BUT AT THE SAME TIME, if you’re going to do something like this, you have to eat exactly as much shit as Mike does here at minimum.

The entire spot is reflective of why, despite my consistent misgivings about this match in a stylistic and ideological sense, these tend to work out when Mike Bailey’s in them. Because as that shows, he’ll commit exactly enough to make it all work. Both in terms of what he does for the rest of the match to somewhat limit the use of the leg by using the arms for strikes more, and in terms of eating enough shit and going above and beyond in his effort to make up for everything else.

Zack and Mike also have greater success with a match like this than usual on account of Zack keeping his focus in one place for the most part. The knee gets Zack everywhere he wants to go throughout the match, and it gets him the win as well, as he first debuts that positively nasty kind of Banana Split Stretch Muffler deal that I’m sure has some Morrissey ass song title about ideals only used to sell t-shirts, and it’s enough to get the win. It all goes down a little smoother not only because of Seedball’s commitment, but because Zack meets him there for once, and takes it to the most painful possible conclusion.

A match that’s less than it should have been, but still far more than it could have been. Not intelligent enough to avoid having a match like this (or dumb enough to want to have a match like this, dealer’s choice), but talented enough to fight their way out of that corner, no matter that winding up in that position was their choice in the first place.

***