Yoshihiro Tajiri vs. Super Crazy, ECW on TNN (1/21/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Hootsoot (riot). You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.

This was a Mexican Death Match.

Not that I wasn’t delighted to receive this commission, but I’ve always been a little bit afraid to watch this match again with a critical eye.

When I first watched, I did so without any real preparation for how much I might love it.

I came to ECW at, I think, the perfect time in a man’s life to watch ECW. Having seen some things on those 2000-1 DVD releases but mostly unfamiliar otherwise, I began it all on a challenge from a few people I’ve known online for a while (one of whom runs his own forum-style review blog you might enjoy) when my WWE reviews had caught up to the current timeline at the end of 2012, and I began in 1995 in the spring of 2013. As a college student, I had very little in the way of responsibilities and pretty much mainlined it over the next twelve months or so, mostly over the summer. I don’t mean to get philosophical with this, but ECW ought to be consumed both (a) in a row, without cherry picking, more than maybe any promotion EVER & (b) when you are old enough to have experienced some shit and also still young enough to not yet be a full human being, ideally like 85% of the way through that process. Anyways, at that time online, I was able to avoid a lot of opinion on what the Actual Great ECW stuff was and mostly come to my own opinions and beliefs.

Most of what I loved and felt lined up with some common beliefs. Shane Douglas actually kind of ruled from 96-98, Sabu and The Sandman are some of the best ever, the FBI is one of the best acts in wrestling history, Foley, Raven, all of that. Not everything lined up, I hate RVD/Sabu vs. Hayabusa/Shinzaki and the RVD/Sabu 1996 feud is not for me, but as one learns at some point growing up, a whole lot of consensus favorites — especially with a promotion like this — are that way for a reason.

An exception to that — although not the only one (feel free to drop in the Ko-fi with an ECW Dealer’s Choice offer) — is this match. While I had heard about Corino/Tajiri or even the rightfully acclaimed FBI vs. Tajiri/Whipwreck tags later in 2000, as this proof of how great Tajiri could be, along with this series and the three ways in general, talk of this exact match was something I never came across before I saw it.

I’m so happy for this, because it allowed this match to totally and completely blow me away.

Since I watched this, I have become something of an evangelist for it. If I ever considered you a friend on the internet, I have either asked if you’ve seen this, pressured you to see it, or in some cases, simply assumed that you had seen it before. I have extensively praised it in more public forums. I am not suggesting that I am the reason this seems to be held in higher esteem now, I am not (quite) that egotistical. I imagine many people have gone on comparable journeys to my own and had similar experiences to my own, there were perhaps others like me before I happened upon my road to Damascus that I did not encounter at the time, but truly, it is such a thrill to see this talked up more and more as one of the greats.

Watching it again, over a decade later, I’m still pretty sure this is the best ECW match of all time.

I’m not as sure as I was ten years ago. I think the gap between this and Tajiri/Corino is slimmer than I used to. Matches like the Bigelow/RVD switch or Douglas/2 Cold are up there somewhere, for sure.

However, the feeling is still here.

Yoshihiro Tajiri and Super Crazy combine to create not only their best match together, but one of the more transcendent pieces of violence in the entire history of ECW.

This is one of those matches that, if I began to list every moment of it that I loved, I might spoil the entire thing for anyone who hasn’t seen it before (go watch it). There are three or four spots that, not having watched it in years, were exactly as I had remembered them, having stuck in my head all this time. The missed decapitation attempt chair slides on a table that careened into the crowd at full speed, god bless ECW. The two double stomps it takes to put Crazy through a table, where nobody has ever put more into double stomps than Tajiri in these moments. Tajiri mocking the bleeding only to suffer himself. Multiple super impressive and ultra high risk moonsaults. A million gross kicks, and most of all, one of the best finishes in all of wrestling history.

It’s more than just that though, what they do.

Yoshihiro Tajiri turns in the greatest villain performance of his entire career, and to match him, Super Crazy delivers what has to be his career performance period. His selling is phenomenal, managing to be both dramatic and genuine feeling. His comebacks, although never lacking for energy here at his peak, have an urgency to them that the blood loss only helps in a visual sense. Nothing he does, outside his offense, is spectacular, but in terms of small things that make a high flier that much more likeable in a match like this, Crazy in this match ought to be studied. For Tajiri, it is obvious and easier, but also even more impressive in terms of the small things. Displaying Super Crazy’s bloodied face to the camera, getting on hi knees and mocking a genuinely good wobbling sell, all of that. He’s also even better in more dominant moments, coming off as genuinely impossible to kill, and when he gets up, especially at the end, there’s this kind of “oh shit” feeling to it. Tajiri plays a dangerous maniac, Gogo Yubari style, better than almost anyone I have ever seen, managing to communicate both an unhinged nature as well as this sort of dignified larger than life stature towards the end, better than nearly everyone else ever.

The ending, as teased, is one of the best ever as well.

Not just in terms of a bad guy getting what he has coming — both in terms of punishment survived and given out as well as a complex plot costing him in the end — but also simply in terms of beautiful bullshit and construction.

Tajiri puts one table on the middle ropes in the corner while Crazy puts another regular style on the other side. Tajiri stands on his to spray mist in Crazy’s eyes but when he leaps off, their familiarity becomes as much of his enemy as his own schemes are. Super Crazy catches him in the air, spins, and in the same sudden motion, powerbombs him through the other table to win. 

Something about saying “this is a match you HAVE to see” has always felt wrong to me. Everyone is on their own journey through wrestling (and through all media/art) and I never want to say you have to see something or else you’re a bad fan or something. I believe that, for the most part, if you are invested in these things, you will find them when you are ready for them.

Everyone is involved in their own process, and unless there is a greater trust, one ought not to get in the way of that. All things in due time, and all of that.

Having said that, there are very few matches that better communicate what it is that I want out of professional wrestling than this. It is bloody and violent, it is a story about good and evil and the mistakes evil makes that allows good to triumph. It is also sick as hell, full of some of the coolest spots ever, while also tight and efficient and so intelligently assembled. It is a character piece with large narrative function just as much as it is a pure lizard-brained delight. It is not everything I want out of wrestling, but save for some of the real epics out there, it comes closer to a personal mission statement than 95% of the genre could ever imagine.

One of the great spectacles of violence not only in the year 2000, or out of ECW period, but of the entire twenty first century to date.

****1/3

Steve Corino vs. Yoshihiro Tajiri, ECW Hardcore Heaven (5/14/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from longtime friend of the program and frequent contributor Tim Livingston. 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.

It’s a very rare feeling — not just as a wrestling fan, but as a human being — to experience the greatest ever version of something, or at least, what feels to you like the greatest ever version of something, especially for the first time. Those are occasions you remember, if not so much in terms of where you were or the exact date upon which it happened, the act of experiencing them and the feeling it gave you.

There are not a lot of wrestling matches that leave me in awe after the fact.

Not to toot my own horn, but when you watch a lot of wrestling, it is a harder and harde effect to achieve. It very rarely happens now (although, writing this in 2024, the year of Demus vs. Mad Dog, it is not impossible), but even ten or so years ago, when I first binge watched ECW when I was in college, it was not an especially easy thing to do.

Steve Corino vs. Yoshihiro Tajiri left me in awe, and every time I have watched it since, it has continued to do so.

I believe that, throughout the entire history of professional wrestling, there has never been a greater version of a former lackey getting revenge upon his former boss than in this match.

Part of that comes from everything before it.

Yoshihiro Tajiri had previously done what nobody else in The Network could do by winning the ECW World Television Title, only for that apparatus to also turn on him to gift it to Rhino, in the ultimate kind of expression of the idea that for everyone else, the people Tajiri represents, some things will be taken away from you the moment you have them because they are meant for a handpicked favored few. Of course, far more important than the context of ECW history, The Network, or Corino and Tajiri together, it’s the pre-match microphone work from Corino that gives this so much of the flavor that it has, in which Corino not only calls Tajiri an old-timey World War II era light slur beginning with a J, but upon a rebuke to an offer to rejoin him as an underling, drops in a “slant-eyed bastard” as well, before being immediately kicked as hard as possible in the face.

That’s so much of what I love about this match, I think.

Not only that it is this moment of revenge for a put-upon great and that this has been building for nearly a year, but also that it is one of the great morality tales in the history of professional wrestling.

In a medium that so often rewards cruelty towards everyone else, whatever group that might come to mind when you read that, this is both arguably among the most direct and inarguably among the most brutal cases of revenge for that ever caught on film. Wrestling is not short upon matches revolving around punishments for transgressions, but they’re usually bigger and more dramatic in scope, and I think there’s such a thrill in someone simply being this exact type of an asshole and being given one of the most horrific beating ever captured on film for it.

Part of it is also that, just as a match, it is one of the sickest and coolest and tightest matches of all time.

Every single thing to happen in this match rocks.

Corino and Tajiri pack this thing to the brim and then some with things to love. Not only all of Tajiri’s hard strikes — and this is a match with very possibly a few of his hardest kicks ever and what I believe is the most violent Karate Rush ever caught on film — but every bit of Corino offense is fantastic, every Tajiri attack feels like attempt on the life of Steve Corino, it also gets constantly meaner with every moment. It is, sneakily, one of the more hostile matches ever as well, with Tajiri taking more and more offense to every moment Corino sticks around, and feeling as if he’s constantly punishing him even further for refusing to stay down after all of the shit he’s pulled.

The other thing I love about this match is that — much like another all-time classic to also happen on May 14th including two wrestlers who are SO Corino-coded in different ways — it is one of the best ever examples of elevating and legitimizing a bullshit heel in defeat while never once making it obvious that this is what’s happening.

Obviously, yes, Steve Corino bleeds a whole lot, genuinely one of the more gruesome and impressive crimson masks of the 21st century let alone the year, and survives a lot after that, but more important is what he does for himself. His manager Jack Victory (high spot) is barely involved, and for the first time, what Corino has, he gets by himself. The match is smart enough to present him as an opportunist, lucky enough to be in good situations like in front of a table Tajiri set up in a moment when Tajiri gets slightly overzealous, but also always smart enough to make the most of everything. It’s the genius of a match like this done right, one that never yells at you that this wrestler is Great or that this wrestler is tough, but one that lays the seeds of admiration in small ways so that they can be harvested later while still feeling organic (in one of the best ECW segments in its final years, in which Corino of all people, is the first to interrupt the Justin Credible catchphrase and call it the lamest thing in the world to a huge pop).

What Corino gets in this match is all fairly basic, but because of the genuinely grotesque combination of what Tajiri’s done to him in terms of offense as well as the deep red covering his face and all that bleached hair, it’s all impressive. More than that, it is never so impressive that it turns the focus away from what is rightfully happening him towards what he’s fighting, and it is never so much — in terms of what he does nor what he recovers from nor how — that it feels as though he doesn’t deserve this.

That’s the magic here.

For all he gains in this match by taking this stunning beating, it is also always one that feels earned, and that also feels great.

Be it Corino’s luck, Corino’s toughness, or Corino’s mind, it all runs into a wall at the end, and that wall is Yoshihiro Tajiri. Corino cannot overcome the staggering amount of blood loss nor just how badly Tajiri wants to beat his ass, and steps in it further and further. Leaning on the edge of the table, he is perfectly set up for the best Tajiri kick of all time across his face, perfectly lined up on this surface.

Tajiri follows up by double stomping him through said table — and not just breaking it in half, but with the long edges still in tact somewhat, meaning he has literally put him through it — and gains the greatest feeling victory of his career.

Genuinely, it is one of my favorite matches of all time.

Some of that is, to be fair, the fact that when I first watched it, it had less the reputation as an all-timer and more so just as a late ECW highlight. I know I was never the first one to talk about this match like THIS, but as the years have gone on and more people have come around to this as one of the best ever, there’s a certain pride I’ve gained in being there earlier. The other part, independent of that and way way way way stronger than that, is that it constantly fills me with so much joy, and has become one of those matches I watch over and over again. I don’t do that a whole lot, it’s really like this and the FEAR main event and few select others, and like those, this has never once lost its charm to me.

I think it is the best version of this idea ever, the greatest coward heel legitimization ever, one of the great bloodbaths ever, one of the best matches ever in the history of one of the coolest wrestling promotions of all time, and, above all, one of those matches that I can and have and would recommend to anyone, no matter to what extent you are a fan.

Yoshihiro Tajiri vs. Steve Corino is professional wrestling to me, and few matches have ever felt better, both on the first time and on maybe, I don’t know, the twentieth.

The only reason I’m not 100% positive this is the best match in ECW history, is because four months earlier, it’s possible Tajiri had an even better one.

****1/4

Super Crazy vs. Yoshihiro Tajiri vs. Little Guido, ECW on TNN (4/14/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor RiRi. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.

This was a Three Way Dance for Crazy’s ECW TV Title.

Across the last two years of ECW’s wonderful life, there were a number of three way dances involving these three, occasionally broken up with wrestlers like Jerry Lynn (this made them worse) or Spike Dudley (in one case in late 1999, this made them much better), so much so that one could understandably lose track and tie them all together. Mainlining ECW from 1995-2001 across a span of a little over twelve months like I did, originally, from 2013-2014, it is very easy to lose track of them even further.

However, among all of them, this has always stood out to me as the best.

Part of that is, admittedly, the occasion, and what it allows them in a booking sense.

While so many of those three way were wonderful undercard window dressing, this is a real ass TV main event with the bells and whistles that come with it. Blood and multiple table bumps and, in the best way, all of the bullshit that goes along with it too. Bullshit often gets a negative connotation tacked onto it, but with ECW, I almost always mean it in the best possible way, and the same is true here. ECW had an eye and perhaps an ear for bullshit — the exact right amount in any given moment — that very few other wrestling promotions have ever had (given its short shelf life, one can say that in an absolute sense, rather than, like, “WCW 1996-7 had the perfect feel for it” or “the WWF in 2000-2001 had a mastery over bullshit”). There is enough put in the way of our heroes — the pure babyface Crazy and the about-to-turn Tajiri — to make their final half impressive, before more bullshit gets in the way of that, and at the same time, the bullshit provided is also always deeply impressive and impactful.

The other is what it allows them, in terms of the match itself, and what that brings out on an individual level.

So often in matches like these, there are limits or ceilings bumped into, but this is one in which all three get to bleed a lot and go through tables and have every single thing possible going for them. All three go completely insane, but underneath that, also hit everything perfectly, wrestle and conduct themselves in a way that feels big and makes the entire match feel big, and every single inch and centimeter of the match, on top of all it does right in a larger sense, is a delight.

It is also, absolutely, the Yoshihiro Tajiri show..

Near the middle of a career year that, with the exception of a rare collection (2000 [REDACTED + OTHERS], ’01 Austin, ’89 Flair, mid 1990s Kawada, 2005 Joe, 2006 Necro, 2013 Bryan, 2015 Roddy), few can come close to, Tajiri puts on another violent masterclass. It doesn’t hit the highs of either the January Super Crazy match that it obviously walks in the footsteps of, itself arguably the best ECW match ever, or of the Steve Corino PPV match this begins to set up a month later, itself among the greatest “punishment for a crime” matches in wrestling history, but it is a wonderful medium. Tajiri is involved at all points, while Crazy is out for a while in the first half, and once Guido is eliminated, and something like eighty five percent of this match runs through him. The sharp offense, the blood, the inventive weapon spots, all of it. It isn’t quite what I would call a masterclass, but there are few others in wrestling history who have ever felt like they had either a fuller command of a multi man than this, and even fewer to turn that command into a match as great as this.

What results is a beautiful and wonderful piece of blood, violence, bullshit, and nonsense, one of the great examples ever — and in terms of the TNN show, perhaps the greatest ever — of just what ECW could be when every single thing was working right.

Following Rhino’s interference with a Piledriver off the apron to Crazy, Tajiri wins the title, setting up something else entirely.

Not only one of the better matches in the history of television wrestling, especially through this point in time, but really really arguably also one of the best three way matches ever as well.

***2/3