Nobuhiko Takada/Billy Scott vs. Kazuo Yamazaki/Tatsuo Nakano, UWFi Moving On 5th (8/24/1991)

After trying since the start, for the first time, the UWFi cracks the code and has itself a great shoot-style tag team match.

It is not always easy.

While today, nearly thirty years after the faster and more constantly strike-oriented style of BattlARTS and FUTEN blew the code wide open and made it easier, it seems obvious, it was not always the case. The slower more peaks and valleys style of earlier shoot-style made it harder in the sort of longer tags that were often attempted in the first year of the UWFi so far, and an emphasis on reality removing the classical heat segment and hot tag formula did them no favors either in terms of pacing.

This suggests though that the key all along was simply throwing the best guys in there, along with the most promising newcomer, getting a little anger involved, and hoping for the best.

All planets just so happen to line up, and it’s not only the best UWFi tag yet, but also just a genuinely great match.

Most of that just comes down to performance, as this is not a large narrative display.

Yamazaki and Nakano are who they are. Tense and a little mean, skipping bullshit pre-match handshakes, full of nasty shots and cool holds, and most of all, a ton of energy. The two most likeable guys in the company, when cast against two wunderkind clean style more promotional friendly guys, feel even realer and more likeable. There’s maybe not a desperation to everything, but there is a kind of understandable hostility there, and in a continuation of the “pro wrestling as real sports” idea taken beyond just the style of wrestling, nobody is ever so mean that you are forced to make any kind of a decision beyond the sort of guys you are naturally drawn too.

Billy Scott is also a major standout, here in his second match. As a former amateur and future Billy Robinson student (and catch wrestling instructional video coach), Scott is as great at the mat stuff as you might expect, but also way better on his feet than you might too. He’s an ideal rookie wrestler, presented as more than capable with the performance to match, but also so energetic and overzealous that he’s prone to mistakes of inexperience that give the match some juice beyond simply good action.

The same goes for Takada, who turns in his best showing of the year so far. Following a real loud and big kick across the body from Yamazaki early on, Takada wrestles angry for the rest of the match, as if he is suddenly a real person with real feelings and understandable behaviors rather than a bland corporate approved poster boy grown in a lab as he’s so often been. Yamazaki and Nakano were already two guys to regularly get more out of Takada than most, but with Takada actually bringing it and not simply being this statue, representative of a concept more than anything, the more action-centric bits of this are better than usual. Takada’s had better matches than this before, so there’s no need to get hyperbolic about it, but it’s my favorite performance of his in some time, as well as being the first in a much longer time to suggest that he might actually be able to pull this role off after all.

Combine all of that, mix up the combinations enough to make twenty eight minutes go by much quicker than usual in this style, and although it always kind of just feels like a teaser for other matches, it is always super interesting to watch, and often very exciting as well.

When tempers rise, the inexperienced Scott cannot handle it with the grace and relative caution of others, and simply charges right in. His shots have power, but without the on his feet finesse of a Kazuo Yamazaki, it is not all that difficult to top him. Yamazaki floats past and takes him into the crossface chickenwing for the win.

In something of a theme of these initial shows, and kind of all the 1991 shoot-style splinter groups post-Reborn (Redead) UWF promotions, it does not feel like the best anyone can do and feels a lot like everyone testing some stuff out, but there’s still just too much good to ignore. It’s all fun, a whole lot of it is exhilarating in its explosivity, andt when one matches up its quality to its runtime, it’s just a little too hard not to be impressed by everything that went right.

***

Gary Albright vs. Yoji Anjoh, UWFi Moving On 5th (8/24/1991)

Wrestling’s own version of the 1990s Big Red Wall, mother fucking Gary Albright, steps into UWFi for the first time, and the result is, barring some pure one-minute style trucking that isn’t really the style of the UWFi at present moment, one of the great beatings and squashes yet in this project.

It’s made all that much better by the fact that it happens to Yoji Anjoh, one of the all time least likeable immediately viscerally upsetting twerp ass goons of his day and time.

Barring the release, thirty years later, of footage of the time Rickson Gracie beat the shit out of Yoji Anjoh in a closed-door fight when Anjo came to Los Angeles to fight him instead of Takada (owing to Anjo’s supposed reputation as the toughest wrestler in the UWFi), it is likely up there with the most satisfying beatings that he ever took.

For seven and a half minutes, Anjoh tries and gets nothing. Kicks are checked, throws are so impossible there’s barely even an attempt, and on the rare occasions that he can grab a hold when the match goes horizontal, he can’t get any further than a simple grab. Albright smothers him to an extent that is delightfully embarrassing, blocking and cutting off everything, and then completely obliterating him after that. It’s one of those great dominations, not only awesome but interesting, pummeling him into the Earth slowly, before then suddenly so so so much faster.

The joy of the match isn’t just Albright’s stunning physicality so much as how he and the match uses it, creating a real suffocating effect from start to finish that, by the end, raises a real question of how anyone is supposed to beat him.

It’s also just a god damned BLAST, a match as enjoyable on a lizard brain kind of oooh’ing and ahhhh’ing at pure physical carnage level as it is as an emotional catharsis, seeing someone who annoys you on a gut level being rendered into dust and then knocked clean out.

After the second of his absolute God Damner level German Suplexes, Albright simply leans back from a frantic kick, before cornering and demolishing Anjoh with an elbow that also doubles as a body block. The ten count is a formality, and Yoji Anjoh is never even close to getting off the mat by the time the referee makes it to ten.

Gary Albright debuts, wastes no time, and not only bulldozes someone of stature, but makes a phenomenal show out of it all too, immediately putting himself up there with Yamazaki, Tatsuo Nakano, and baby Tamura as one of the best and most must-see wrestlers in the entire promotion.

Hardly the best anyone can do, but at the same time, unbelievably fun and an almost perfect debut match within this sort of system.

90s Nebraska really did have it all.

three boy

Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Yuki Miyato, UWFi Moving On 5th (8/24/1991)

This isn’t a great match, but it is a great opener.

Not to belabor the point again for all those who have read at some length before on this site about the role of opening matches in classically structured wrestling shows or shoot style shows (the trope breaking stuff is for the upper card, establish stylistic ideas in the initial matches for anyone out there seeing this for the first time, then it matters more later if someone breaks through it), but it’s sort of a square and rectangle thing. A great match in the opener will always be a great opener, but a great opener can be that without totally stepping over the line, in one of those situations where it simply does its job so well.

Case in point.

Kiyoshi Tamura and Yuki Miyato have a match that is exciting and fun and tight, and although it stops somewhat short of all that it can be as a pairing that likely has their best possible match either with five more minutes or simply more time under Tamura’s belt, it’s still a lot of fun.

There’s a loose concept and strategy to it that guides them through, with Miyato learning that he cannot win this fight on the ground, and spending the rest of the fight trying to avoid it. He throws him and tries to cheese Tamura out of the fight with repeated downs on spin kicks to the stomach, but Tamura is simply too good. In a show of progress, the wunderkind not only survives it, but counters everything Miyato does in the final third into the thing he wants to do. A judo takeover is blocked into a rear naked choke, and although Miyato escapes, Tamura keeps going back to it, and it gets tighter and more impenetrable each time. On the third time, Miyato gives up.

It’s a clean and tight little piece of work, an obvious and successful showcase of a rising star that shows why he’s rising in the first place.

To that point, this also rules because, holy shit, Kiyoshi Tamura.

He is not yet what he will become by the end of the decade, but I found him even more impressive here than on the first UWFi show, in a more lauded and better overall match. His striking is phenomenal and he’s as fast as he was before, but makes better use of it here going into holds, as cited above with the beautiful rear naked choke one. On top of that, his selling of the repeated body shots is genuinely good, something present for moments after, something that a whole lot of other great wrestlers in this style often don’t bother with. It’s one of those performances that, with the power of hindsight, you can look at and cite as things really beginning to come tgether.

Both in the pace and the individual performance of the better wrestler in the match, very much in line with that famous Kakihara match as an ultra impressive early Tamura display of professional wrestling’s technology of the future.

A delightful show of things to come.

Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Kazushi Sakuraba, UWFi vs. WAR (5/27/1996)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Eric T. 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.

Despite the name of the show, this is simply an opening match between two of the better ever in this style, as Sakuraba takes his third try at the burgeoning superstar following two three minute losses in March.

It’s very good, I am not going to lie.

Previously, I have gotten into the idea of just what an opening match means in different promotions, and for shoot-style it is a little bit different.

While a lot of wrestling in America by this point has moved on to what we might consider the modern Western view of an opener (Rey/Psicosis is like five or six weeks away from this, you guys can all fill in some blanks), Japanese wrestling openers still largely work under that old idea of teaching people the norms so that later on in the show when those are violated in one way or another, these things stand out and matter. With this particular sort of wrestling, there’s a real value in a great opening match, showing how things ought to go, the sorts of thing that are possible, how strategy matters, the way strikes can be caught and holds can be blocked or countered, all of those sorts of things.

Few pairings are better suited for that than these two.

Sakuraba and Tamura do not have the best match possible, but given what seems to be the on-paper (again, spend your money on jumping me up a few years if you exist, but I do not give up on projects) potential, it is still really really good.

While they keep it kind of surface level in terms of more basic holds, kicks, and slaps, yet again, it is the pure speed that I find just so impressive. Everything is unseasonably quick and furious, it feels like we are watching two super super equal (in terms of skillsets) fighters from the future attempting to figure each other out and catch something out of the aether and the mist, and likewise, when something breaks, it feels a little bit like either a miracle or the sort of accident that refined skill and practice often tends to make the most of.

A look at the future of the genre, as if a science fiction program leapt a decade forward in some world where PRIDE or other entities never exist to sidetrack either athlete involved with such a remarkable display, and at the end of what feels like it ought to be a hologram, Tamura catches a takedown into a flash cross armbreaker and that is that.

Not quite a great match, but a phenomenal example of a shoot-style opener, and a fascinating thing for Tamura to leave the UWFi on.

Kazuo Yamazaki vs. Yuko Miyato, UWFi Moving On 2nd (6/6/1991)

Following a surprise tag team win over the peoples’ heroes superteam of Yamazaki and Tatsuo Nakano, alongside Yoji Anjoh, on the first UWFi show, little Miyato now has to try that shit again on his own.

It doesn’t work, and there inlies the joy of this fight.

Put in the hands of a lot of other wrestlers, this sort of a thing — a deliberately non-flashy, eleven minute midcard shoot-style match where half the match is a not especially great wrestler — would probably not be all that interesting, let alone even good. However, in the hands of Kazuo Yamazaki, there is exactly enough meat on this bone for him to make something out of it.

That’s not to say this is some physical marvel, because it isn’t.

Miyato is not useless, being able to function on the ground and throw some solid kicks, and so they have a fine little mechanical match when Yamazaki can just kind of have a Yamazaki match around him without changing too much in the raw material.

It’s the other stuff that elevates a match like this though, even in a style that constantly attempts to trick people (and largely succeeds, even to this day) into thinking these things aren’t a part of this sort of thing. That stuff, in this case and in most cases around these parts now that Fujiwara is gone, is Yamazaki being one of the great character guys in the history of the style, with a real gift for making it clear why nearly every single thing in the match is happening, and thus putting a greater emphasis on strikes, holds, and overall moments than most others at this point can.

This is one of the better small examples of that.

Coming off an upset, Miyato is super cautious in the first half. Yamazaki checks almost every kick and pretty much blocks everything of note on the match, while also constantly backing him down and making these harsh but also sort of bored faces at it all. It all feels like an extended show of him daring the kid to do something already, and when Miyato finally does and gets him with something, there’s this great great little nod after being knocked to a knee. Expression get harsher, but that’s not all this has to offer narratively, because after easing off a knee once, when Miyato repeatedly kick Yamazaki across the stomach for downs (either to try to even up the score on points or because it’s the first thing that really worked), Yamazaki finally gets real mean and petty in response to teach the boy a lesson.

Yamazaki drops him and hurts him with a kick to the right leg, and this time, activated by Miyato also being a cheap little asshole, Yamazaki does what he probably wouldn’t do otherwise, and repeatedly kicks the little fucker’s leg out until he loses the match by TKO, before raising his arms right in eyeline of Miyato, unable to stand.

As a finish it’s the sort of thing I’ve complained in the past about when Nobuhiko Takada would use it to beat Fujiwara, but like everything else, context matters. As a main event face of the company, it’s a bad way to beat a main antagonist, but here, as punishment for similar behavior by a younger wrestler, it works. In other settings, it felt like some bullshit that everyone tried to pretend was fair and just, but here, it comes with this mental caption, based on the match and the body language of Yamazaki that, yes, he knows this is cheap, but he has nothing to prove and also, fuck him, he deserves it.

These things matter, they’re why Yamazaki is one of my favorite wrestlers ever, and why this was of any note at all.

Borderline great midcard shoot-style that takes one of the two available routes — packed full of remarkably sick and new ideas or character-driven piece — to put a thing like that on the right side of the border.

It’s not quite the route I prefer of the two, but given Miyato, the most likely to succeed.

three boy

Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Masahito Kakihara, UWFi Moving On (5/10/1991)

With the death of the second UWF, the UWFi rises in its place.

It’s not exactly the same.

The rules of the UWFi differ from those of its predecessor by giving each man 15 points to start (21 for tag team matches) and losing them for things like rope breaks and knockdowns and the like, as well as formalizing finishes into submission, knockout, or points-based victories, finally doing away with the pinfalls that were technically still allowed under the old banner.

Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Masahito Kakihara is the first ever match under the UWFi banner, and although these newer rules do not come in to play much at all (which I imagine is the point of rocketing it up to 15), the first match in a new promotion is always an important one.

It’s a mission statement, and in this case, a display of a faster and more energetic evolution of the older style, with more shots thrown at a higher clip, and with some transitions and escapes that aren’t at all common.

Kakihara and Tamura do a fantastic job with that.

That is absolutely not to say it’s perfect, as I think it’s far from that, especially if you actually watch a lot in this style, but that’s less the fault of either man and simply the result of how inexperienced they still are.

Shoot-style feels like the hardest style for a young wrestler to immediately be great in, and throughout history, it shows. The more pared down style cuts off young wrestlers from what they could do in other styles to circumvent a lack of mechanical brilliance, and the flourishes that do come into the style tend to come from a sort of personality that many young wrestlers in this style — or young wrestlers in general — do not have immediately. These matches are typically more about the basics, across any style, and here, it means a lot of slaps and kicks and basic holds, causing a lot of the underneath matches with newer wrestlers to blend together. In other words, the 10,000 hours idea might be bullshit, but shoot-style wrestling is one of those rare pursuits that makes it feel real.

It’s why matches like this — the ones that manage to overcome it or that are fun enough to move past it in some way — stand out like they do.

Nothing all that fancy happens. Kakihara has under a year in the ring, and Tamura has less than two under his belt. The advanced techniques are not there yet. What they have is a frenetic pace and blistering hand and foot speed. There’s a handful of remarkable dodges here that are even more impressive than moments when they connect, which they also make feel like bigger victories than one might imagine. The holds are not exceptional, either in design or in small details, but they’re put on and yanked at with such an urgency that it’s also a little less routine than usual.

In short, it’s a match that success primarily through ambition, a super admirable display of raw talent not entirely molded yet, and one that does just enough right to result in a great match.

Tamura counters a heel hold into one of his own to win.

A lovely vision of the future, showcasing very likely the best shoot-style wrestler of the decade, even if that future (thankfully) mostly does not happen in UWFi.

three boy

Masahito Kakihara vs Tatsuo Nakano, UWFi World Heavyweight Title Match (9/21/1992)

More Black Friday Sale commissions, this time from Parm. You too can pay me to watch and write wrestling matches or anything else over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match. DMs for discussions on anything else. 

For once, Parm did this right. Don’t tell him. Here’s hoping he doesn’t ruin the positive esteem he earned after paying for this match and not something bad.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: he did, within 24 hours)

It’s a five minute sprint, meaning less work for me on the front end of this process (watching) and somewhat under a words restriction on the back end (even when trying to live up to the idea that someone paid for something, there is really only so much to say about a four minute match), and a match that also whips a lot of ass.

The ideal commission.

Nakano finds himself in a familiar setting once again, facing a young super athlete who absolutely swarms him.

Within thirty seconds, Nakano’s nose has erupted into the Mt. Vesuvius of blood. Kakihara lights up him up with the fastest slap, punch, and kick combinations you’ve ever seen and makes it worse and worse. While Nakano can grab him and take him down, the blood never stops coming. At one point, he’s given a towel after a break and instructed to clean himself off. The towel winds up looking like the Shroud of Turin after pressed to the area where his nose is supposed to be for a few seconds at most. Nothing changes, except that he’s briefly cleaned the canvas for new blood to stain his face, chest, and legs as it cascades downwards. He covers Kakihara’s body every time he’s against his body for even a second, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Nakano delivers one of the great bloodlettings of all time in this match, made so much better by it not being planned in the slightest.

Kakihara continues to whip his ass and strike at will, up until one beautiful moment that ties the whole match together.

Being a younger and more impulsive man, Kakihara cannot help himself. The victory is within sight, as it’s been since Nakano’s nose went flying off his face and into the sea. Kakihara wants a victory as emphatic as the visual he’s created and it’s only there that he finally messes up. He tries a wild spin kick and with enough distance, our man Nakano is just barely able to dodge it and catch his leg as he lands on the ground.

Nakano turns him, with a stomp that might be the most violent single strike in the entire match added in as his sole receipt, before sinking back into a half crab for the immediate submission.

One of the great little pocket bangers of all time, as not only is it one of those classic Thomas Hobbes style matches, but every frame of this is a painting as well. One for the entire family, assuming you’re raising them right.

***