Best of Japan 2000-2009: Naoki Sano vs. Minoru Tanaka, BattlArts 1/30/00

Naoki Sano vs. Minoru Tanaka, BattlArts 1/30/00

Believe it or not, years ago *this* match was my introduction to BattlArts. Not Ikeda or Ishikawa clonking coconuts and essentially signing verbal contracts guaranteeing that by the age of 50 they will wander the streets aimlessly, forget to pay bills and not recognize family members. Nope. When I first watched BattlArts my favorite type of wrestling was juniors wrestling. Phil and I have joked that we used to buy WAR shows for the Ultimo Dragon matches, now we fast forward through those matches to get to the old lumpy fatsos punching each other. But when I was a teenager, it was all cruisers. I heard of Tanaka and was into the idea of a cruiser that did a bunch of neato kicks and fast spinny matwork, and this was a match of his that was talked about a lot at the time. I watched it a bunch back then, but have not seen the match in probably over a decade.

And boy, for a match with tons of cool stuff, it does not add up to a very satisfying experience. There were tons of awesome moments. You could have made a killer 3 minute music video set to a Jim Steinman song (erm, I guess half of a Jim Steinman song...) and I'd think it looked like an incredible match. But there was just no narrative and nothing tying anything together. Tanaka is a guy with a couple of cool tricks (I remember how much I flipped the first time I saw Sano catch a kick, throw a strike and saw Tanaka catch the arm into a rolling armbar) but now it comes off more like a guy who saw a Volk Han tape, like when American indy guys saw their first T2P or Johnny Saint match. Sano looked great and attempted to keep some consistency, throwing out clues to Tanaka by stretching his knee or rubbing it, but Tanaka would just stick to randomly throwing out flashy submissions to any random limb, just because they looked cool. Sano had some killer stuff in this, including a spring-loaded missile dropkick that launched Tanaka almost into the ref, and THEE nastiest spin kick you've ever seen in your life, just perfectly catching Tanaka right under the chin in the most brutal way possible. And in maybe the perfect way to encapsulate the entire match theme, Tanaka immediately no sells it and goes for an armbar.


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