Thursday Night Digging in the Cates

Hashimoto would have turned 49 today. That's sad. Here's a weird match he was in.



Shinya Hashimoto & Shinjiro Otani vs. Atsushi Onita & Great Sasuke WEW 5/5/02

PAS: Fun inter-promotional Puro match which is one of my favorite types of Puro matches. One minute in Onita sprays Hashimoto in the face with mist and we get a DQ and a crazy brawl with the ring filling up with WEW and Zero-One trainees. We get some mic work and a restart and we get a solid match with Hashimoto doing some nasty pummeling, Sasuke hitting a couple of crazy dives and Onita and Hash having a charisma off. Onita gets DQ'ed again for a fireball, and unfortunately the youtube cuts out at the bell and we don't get to see much post match melee. Not a stone cold classic or anything, but the inter-promotional war is a venue which Hashimoto excels in, and this is a neat little seen example of that.

ER: This is pretty bad, but also not bad and completely worth your time. I love ring clearing brawls from Japanese sleaze promotions, and this one had one early. Onita tries like one shoulderblock exchange with Hash, it doesn't go well so he immediately mists him and tons of people in white jogging suits run in and everybody kicks the shit out of everybody. It didn't have quite the same fire as his own Ocean Pacific wearing FMW punks vs mulleted karate doofs from early FMW, but the sentiment was there. Otani has a good time here and Hash projects an attitude of "why the hell did I sign up for this match", just wandering around and throwing thundering left kicks to Onita. Onita is lean and ripped, probably due to his Japanese Diet (wakka wakka) and he seems plenty willing to get kicking and have his face stomped on. Sasuke is still a total nut at this point, doing two wild swantons from the top to the floor, completely 100% whiffing both of them. One of them sees Otani laid out on a table in the foreground, while Sasuke swantons to nothing in the background. Later on he wings himself off the top and crashes and burns to the floor again, right past his standing opponent. Moment and visual of the match has to be Hash beating Onita into the corner and hitting a wild kick, resulting in Onita spitting out mist into the air. Never seen a guy's mist attempt backfire and I loved the spit take visual.