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.
We did not cover enough FUTEN the first time we looked at 2010 apparently, but that is fine. My ideal use of the commission system — outside of older stuff I genuinely have not seen before — is to look back at the best style of wrestling there is.
This is pretty good.
Nohashi is not the most impressive or spectacular wrestler there is. He’s a longtime M-Pro guy, but I would wager that most people who know him know him because of a run in the 2006 CHIKARA Tag World Grand Prix tournament as Shinjitsu Nohashi, where he was also not all that impressive. He has a willingness to jump the gun and hurl his head into the skull of Makoto Hashi, perhaps the strongest skull in the entire world, but other than that, I have nothing either positive or negative to say about him. He is here to fight, and that is that.
However, this is sort of the great thing about FUTEN (and also BattlARTS).
Everyone is welcome here, and it’s what makes this version of shoot-style my favorite. Everyone is not the perfect fighter with their prereq ten thousand hours that makes them great at this. Some people are great wrestlers from elsewhere trying their hand, some people are promising rookies, and others like Nohashi are weird journeymen seemingly giving this a shot because nothing else has really worked and a fight is a fight.
For Nohashi, it doesn’t work.
Hashi eats him alive once it becomes about who can sustain the most brain damage and keep going, and after all of that, chokes him out with a rear naked to win in three minutes and forty six seconds. The match is not as violent or wild as I sort of need for a match this short to really impact me as great, but I love it in terms of what it represents.
Taro Nohashi is the control group here.
So certain things stand out, a baseline is important. So often, these types of shows or imitations of these types of shows or promotions fall short because everyone is presented as capable of this. What I admire so much about this is that, because Nohashi makes a big mistake and gets owned, it shows how hard it is to fight like this. Makoto Hashi feels tougher and better as a result, and for the rest of the year, people who are better than Hashi feel even tougher and cooler as a result.
If everyone could do it, it wouldn’t be half as cool.
God bless FUTEN, man.
I do not understand every commission exactly, I am not overcome with a wealth of things to say about this, but I am more than happy to be paid $5 to watch four minute matches that are 50% headbutts and end with a CHIKARA alum being choked out by Makoto Hashi.
HANDWERK 