Low-Ki Advent Calendar Night 6: 2005 NOAH Trios

Low-Ki/Bison Smith/Mike Awesome vs. 2 Cold Scorpio/Doug Williams/Ace Steel NOAH 3/20/05 - GREAT

PAS: What a goofy on paper bunch of guys to work each other and it was pretty fun to watch the match ups. You wouldn't think Ace Steel and Mike Awesome would have ever wrestled each other, and that is a fun matchup, I would have dug seeing a singles match. Ki and Scorpio have a couple of fun exchanges, and I clearly need to dig up their IWA-MS singles match up. I loved Scorpio trying to big time Ki at the beginning only to get lit up with chops and kicked in the face. We get a neat dive train and a fun finish run, all around good time although it never hit the top level which NOAH matches can get to.

ER: I love this era of NOAH, and love NOAH six mans, and I loved when NOAH or AJPW would seemingly throw nearly every single gaijin on the tour into their own match. Ricky Marvin was the only non-native on this tour who was not in this match, and it makes me wonder if any fans that night in Korakuen were entertained by this in the same way that a few hundred people were entertained watching Kaientai DX in some tiny town in Massachusetts. Ace Steel is a guy I always forget did several NOAH tours, and I liked him a lot here as "guy clearly taking fall" as he worked like a guy over his head with nothing to lose, so he was aggressive about attacking Mike Awesome and Bison but great at stooging when they would catch up to his initial surprise attacks. He hit a big missile dropkick off the top and got a few moments to shine. I'll always have a soft spot for Bison. I saw a bunch of his very first matches when he came up in APW, and was a big fan of his APW turn as Super Destroyer 2000, my friends and I all loudly whooping when he'd break out his heart punch finisher. So it was great to see him get such an extended run in NOAH, really one of the longer gaijin runs in history (which is nuts when you think about it). Here he was super generous bumping around for Ace Steel and gamely going along with and getting into position for all of Doug Williams "exact same order every time" World of Sport stuff, actually selling being off balance when Williams crawls backwards through his legs and schoolboys him. The dive train was nuts as there's just not much room between ring and guardrail at Korakuen, but Awesome hits his no hands dive, the camera misses Steel almost blindsiding Awesome with some kind of wild dive (no clue what he did but it sends him into front row laps), Ki does a big phoenix press that 4 people manage to miss, and Bison does a huge crossbody off the top to the floor (and watch Ki run the hell out of the way so he doesn't have to catch the big man). It was really cool seeing Scorpio and Ki go against each other as I had only seen them teaming in NOAH (looked it up, and this match is literally the only time they were on opposite sides in NOAH, and that's incredible to me! What a missed opportunity.). Scorpio amusingly asks for one of the big guys to tag in but Ki is totally cool hanging. NOAH six mans from this era are some of my absolute favorite junk food.


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE LOW-KI