Help the Aged: Notes on the "Oh Shits" of Oh Eight.

Full disclosure: prior to mid-2005, the only wrestling I’d ever watched was WWF, WCW, and ECW. There may have been a hazy J-Cup match or two at some point. I then downloaded Kobashi-Misawa '03 off of Soulseek, and the rest is noise. My “hardcore” fandom, to the surprise of many fans whose views I trust, is entirely post-Hashimoto. So I get lost when some of them tell me that McMahonless wrestling is collapsing, dead, dying, or at least unwell, even when the financial status of NOAH, CMLL, and other companies worldwide suggest they’re correct. With a short track record of being gaga enough to watch everything comes no first-hand knowledge of what early internet devotees, tape trading, or pre-ROH American indies smelled like. Maybe I’ll look back on 2008 fondly, and pity those ahead of us who weren't around to see it all live, or as live as message board patronage affords. Pity, as the ‘90s fans pity us, and as the ‘70s fans pitied them, on and on back to Depression-era rubes, adorned in the early 20th century equivalent of JNCO jeans, who rubbed their last Buffalo nickels together to buy drinks for Gotch and Hackenschmidt.

I continue to watch wrestling in adulthood for its rare moments that incite a gasp. If not a gasp, then the sound once emitted from a friend raised in Durham, North Carolina. He asked if here in the Northeast, we knew “Skew”. I told him I wasn’t familiar. “Son,” he explained, “that’s the loudest word you can say! Skeeeeeeww!” And on it went, for several seconds, a piercing sonic boom. Failing startled inhalation or a cattle call, a shocking wrestling moment will incite in me the unimaginative but instinctive phrase “Oh shit!” at a volume louder than is often appropriate. The first of such moments to come to mind is seeing a furious Tetsuo Nakano juke, jive, and bark indignation at Masa Funaki, the man who has just bloodied his nose in their 1989 UWF match. The second, from '82, is Dutch Mantell throwing an unfolded steel chair from the floor of the Mid-South Coliseum the full distance of the ring, with perfect accuracy cracking Jerry Lawler in the knees, sweeping his legs out from under him.

The third came this past March, in a smoke-filled room of hyenas, watching Floyd Mayweather tattoo the brand name of his brass knuckles onto Paul Wight's melon head. The righteous scorn with which the punch was thrown is now etched in memory. Every punch I've seen thrown since pushes Mayweather's a little further into the ether, further out of reach, until I can't remember if it looked anything like what I remember it as. I have not watched Nakano's dancing since first viewing it, so as to not dilute the fading recollection. Yet it remains one of those mile markers that makes obsessive-compulsive wrestling viewership worthwhile. Not even the embarrassment of explaining to friends why seven Herb Abrams productions clog our DVR, a girlfriend who sensibly asks what I keep typing over here, or immersion into a subculture mistakable for bridge trolls are capable deterrents. The search for shock and awe continues, helplessly.

Rookie and veteran wrestlers alike supply such moments. One ideal pairing of young and seasoned (as no one ever gets old in lucha) came on 12/7, when Ephesto, twenty-six year veteran formerly of the great Safari gimmick and garb, worked La Sombra, a 19 year old technico of still limited talents being billed as the next big thing. Comparisons to Sting and Cactus Jack’s series seem apt: Sombra the beloved babyface with solid if unspectacular flying body presses, Ephesto the mad-mane wild man doing his damnedest to make the kid look great. His damnedest, evidently, is this: a “Skew!”-worthy CMLL moment rivaled only by recently unmasked midget Shockercito being dropkicked into a guardrail while halfway through an Asai moonsault earlier in the year.

The insular nature of whispering “Oh shit” to myself while watching muted wrestling in a cubicle on YouTube is best seen in the scattered scraps of Black Terry and Negro Navarro’s “Americas Title” match from 11/1. To date unavailable in full, these clips from NWA Mexico harken back to the past’s greatest exchanges of matwork. Both Navarro and Terry seem intent on entering their primes in what would be the autumns of most American workers’ careers. Writing about lucha is often difficult as my Spanish is shit and my knowledge of obscure submission nomenclature even worse. So I will simply say that Navarro’s combined front facelock and grapevining of Terry’s leg, achieved while lying on his back, was remarkable. He appears to have lost some weight and is incredibly agile for 51, contorting himself into some unreal positions, with acute awareness of one’s location to the ropes and corners. The gasp comes with his diving, corkscrew variation on a spinning toe hold into an ankle lock. It is a maneuver that could believably snap a bone on impact, a remarkable blend of the grandiose and the genuinely violent, which is in a sense what the best wrestling tends to be.

Over the past month I rushed through 2008 et cetera that had eluded me until now, relief coming only in the five second intervals between one match watched and another being added to the running tally of unseen. It was during this surge that Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs. Satoru Sayama from Showa Pro's 12/18 stint at Korakuen made the rounds. Fujiwara's inspired entrance music of several decades, Wagner’s 'Ride of the Valkyries', felt like a dirge when blasted through laptop speakers on the grayest day of winter so far. If I’m to have an all-time favorite wrestler, Fujiwara, who turns 60 this April, is as strong a contender as any. This is his return match from invasive stomach surgery (Appendix? Liver? Exorcism?) What follows is twelve minutes of old men in the process of crusting, proxies for Updike and Mailer, or Walsh and Landry, or what you will. That one of these stand-ins is sporting a full-body tiger costume over considerable paunch doesn’t even cause me to blink anymore. Fujiwara has the advantage of looking like an old man since birth, more primordial than antique. His wizened eyes are crucial to his greatest asset as a wrestler: his talent for selling stiff body blows. With Sayama he presents a fight over the last oyster crackers in a soup deli, dueling Ahabs sinking beneath the Pequod. One day there will be sea shanties written of them.

Fujiwara at one point recovers from a mugging of knees to hit two charging head butts to a prone Sayama. He is holding Sayama down by the throat the second time, leading to the full-on Skew: use of the head butt as a battering ram to Sayama’s masked mush. Father Time causes this to become an even more pro wrestling infused version of their ‘84 take on shoot style, which even then included a tombstone piledriver: this time that same move is followed with a frog splash. Pained as much by the idea of his corner man Jushin Liger throwing in the towel as he is by the lashing he’s taken, Fujiwara displays selling that could sustain him as one of Japan’s great veterans for years to come. Finally leveled by blistering kicks, he exhausts the thesaurus with his reactions: he recoils, cringes, flinches, shudders, swerves, quakes, and jerks. He “plays it as it lays” to borrow Didion’s phrase on accepted hardship, and finally as he lays. Professional Wrestling it seems was never dead, just cut deep down the middle of the belly.