On Brand Segunda Caida: Late 90s Kawada!

Toshiaki Kawada/Masao Inoue vs. Kenta Kobashi/Yoshinobu Kanemaru AJPW 1/2/98

ER: I love these Kings Road hierarchy tags, where there's typically no doubt about who is eating the pinfall, the veterans appropriately sell the young upstarts' offense (i.e. not much), it's always fun to see how the vets work their young charges into the match, and the crowd ALWAYS responds to them in big ways. This is not a great match, but the crowd is on fire by the end of it, fully invested in seeing young Kanemaru get more offense in a match than he'd probably ever gotten at this point in his career. The meat of the match is Kawada and Kobashi throwing heavy leather: boots to the face and heart stopping chops; but the fun of the match is seeing Inoue and Kanemaru get involved, seeing them get minor success against Kobashi and Kawada. Kanemaru isn't quite good at this point of his career, but I like that he tries a lot of things. A lot of it lands pillow soft, soft moonsaults, light crossbody, diving lariats that we all know were supposed to be lariats but would have a hard time explaining to non-wrestling fans who don't know wrestling body language. But he busts open Inoue's mouth with a missile dropkick and that only makes Inoue's inroads look more awesome. If you're ever triumphantly yelling about something, it's going to look exponentially cooler if you're doing so with a mouthful of blood, darkening your teeth. Minutes later, when Inoue throws a couple of hard lariats into Kobashi's neck, blood dripping down his chin, it adds so much more to those lariats. This whole match is such a simple formula, and this kind of All Japan match is something I'm always going to be in the mood to watch. I mean, just look at Inoue snap off that Argentinian backbreaker on scrawny, barely adult, mushroom haircut Kanemaru. It's the stuff that joy is made from.

Toshiaki Kawada vs. Yoshihiro Takayama AJPW 7/17/99

ER: In retrospect it's weird how more of us weren't big fans of Takayama until 2003 or so. He was a guy who worked UWFI and All Japan during a really fun era, but he really wasn't spoken about nearly as much as his peers. Then he got his face turned to lumps by Don Frye and suddenly does a G1 and we all loved him. Going back and watch a lot of these underdiscussed late 90s AJ guys and it's pretty clear we took a lot of their skillsets for granted. Now that puro isn't something I actively seek out the way I did in '98-'08, it's shocking to see how much better 1998 Jun Izumida looks than many Japanese wrestlers who get a lot of hype today. I was there when people really started talking up Takayama, and nobody was into Takayama in 1999. See Honda, Tamon. These guys were hiding in plain sight in the promotion we were all getting tapes of. Maybe it was Takayama's lumbering horror movie monster awkwardness that made him invisible, but this match is the kind of gem you hope for when you click on a link. This is a 7 minute slugfest that sees these two throw the gnarliest knees to the guy you've seen and ends with Kawada kicking Takayama's ass so hard that he falls to the floor and gets counted up, and it feels like an appropriate ending. It feels like I really wouldn't have to write more than that last sentence to convince anybody who was GOING to watch this match, to watch this match. Takayama gets a cool showcase for his horsey lumpishness, and his kneelifts are truly all time great, here and after. Every one of them looked like Kawada would get his feet lifted off the mat, and Kawada did a great job of conveying some actual concern that this big goon was going to smother him. So we had some good grappling and good struggle, and it wouldn't have been a stretch to see some insane Takayama upset here with how effective Kawada was selling for him. We even got a great moment where Takayama punches Kawada right across the cheek and Kawada plays the greatest hit and drops down to his butt in pained disbelief. You knew Takayama wasn't coming out on top here though, and soon enough Kawada is throwing his own knees and kicking Takayama's ass to the floor, dropping him with a heavy as hell backdrop suplex and throwing more strikes, and Takayama ends it with this great awkward corpse bump, rigidly falling onto the bottom rope before spilling to the floor. This is great, one of the coolest sub-10 minute matches around.