Fujiwara Family: RINGS Astral Step 2nd Aqua Heat 8/1/91

ER: I really loved our opening 5 minute video, giving us a cool background glimpse of all our fighters warming up in Osaka Prefectural Gym the after noon of the show, see Maeda getting his knee looked at, Vrij grappling in the ring, guys running the stairs, Chris Dolman and Willy Wilhelm sitting in the stands with their arms crossed over their barrel stomachs. Seeing Vrij grappling made him look like one of those guys training in a warehouse in an 80s action movie. I love these kind of calm before the storm videos, seeing these guys joke around and put on their gear, then seeing 6,000 fans as they file into the gym. 

Mitsuya Nagai vs. Herman Renting

PAS: This might be Nagai's first worked match (he doesn't have anything earlier on Cagematch) and he showed some of the tentativeness one might expect from your first match. I am used to Nagai just hurling reckless heat (he damn near killed Iizuka) but here the kicks are just kind of normal. Renting spent most of the match timing Nagai and taking him down when he left a kick out there. Finish was cool with Nagai spinning into an armbar, although it kind of went against the story of the match. Interesting curiosity to see a guy with such a long career in his debut, but outside of that this wasn't much. 

ER: This was very base level RINGS, and that's fine. It is cool to see baby Nagai, and I thought that while the match proper wasn't a super interesting format, it at least played out to a logical conclusion. Nagai was throwing fast full extension kicks, which kept Renting from getting too close. Renting would check leg kicks and then back away from a big sweeping high kick, like he was getting the timing down on a boss battle. Nagai outpaced him on the mat and drew two rope breaks and it seemed clear that Renting's only chance was to bait Nagai into a big miss and hopefully land a knockdown. He does catch a Nagai kick and then duck an awesome spinning heel kick from Nagai (Renting would have been faceless had he not ducked), but his lone advantage is fairly easily turned into a Nagai armbar. Again, base level stuff, but some of shootstyle is being enamored by the things that could have finished but barely missed. 

Chris Dolman vs. Ton Van Maurik

PAS: This was tremendous stuff, just a pair of permed dudes trying to absolutely liquify each other's internal organs with body shots. This isn't your slick submission master Volk Han stuff, it is phone booth pummeling.  Maurik unloads with combos to the kidneys which drops Dolman, and Dolman rag dolls him with judo and starts throwing these huge headbutts right to the chest and solar plexus of van Maurik, it looked like he was trying to bob for apples in van Maurik's chest cavity. You give me two big dudes hitting each other hard in interesting ways, that is all I want from wrestling. 

ER: If you're Dutch, you don't need a perm (seriously I'm pretty sure the Dutch have the world market cornered on citizens with very curly hair, it's one of their things); but if you're Dutch, you don't necessarily have to try to cave in a dude's chest with your head. This was all about Dolman being a patient bulldozer and Van Maurik tries to out quick him with leg kicks, but Dolman is good at catching leg kicks. Van Maurik has a less confident look in his eyes every time he gets stood back up after a rope break, and it's hard not to be intimidated by Dolman when you see him basically shrug off knees to the body. The great unexpected moment of this was Dolman keeping his face covered and being fine with taking leg kicks, but getting rocked by two unexpected punches to the gut. I loved seeing Dolman suddenly on the deep defensive, on his heels back to the ropes and knocked down with some well placed knees. But after Van Maurik goes for the ropes again to break a tangle, you can see in his eyes that he knows where this is going. Those rained down headbutts are super nasty, that's the kind of thing you deal with during a bear attack, specifically a bear attack that's going to leave you on the losing end. Dolman literally dragging Van Maurik to the middle of the ring for the heel hook tap was some savage business, made Van Maurik look like someone without a....Ton...of experience. 

Willy Wilhelm vs.  Pieter Smit

PAS: There was one really awesome moment in this match where Smit judo throws Wilhelm ribs first into the ropes and follows up with a rib kick. Looked super violent and Wilhelm sold it like he got hit in the side with a truncheon. Most of the rest of the match was Wilhelm taking Smit down, not violently but convincingly and eventually putting on a cool choke for the finish. As a match it wasn't anything special but it did have a couple of memorable moments which is enough for me.

ER: I liked Wilhelm's alpha bully attitude, looked like a Dutch Stan Hansen who learned judo instead of lariats. I don't really get as involved in the shootstyle matches that are just "one larger judoka using his weight to slightly bully another judoka", and it felt too similar to stuff that happened in the match right before this one. But there is always going to be some gold to mine from any of these matches, and Phil is right, that moment here was Smit doing a judo throw that comes close to tossing Wilhelm right over the top rope, sends him off balance and lands kicks right to the ribs. I also really liked when Wilhelm tried to get mount and Smit threw up a knee from his back right to Wilhelm's teeth (you could tell it really annoyed him). Also big ups to Wilhelm for locking in essentially a shoot Million Dollar Dream. 

Dick Vrij vs. Akira Maeda

PAS: This felt like the RINGS version of the first Sting vs. Vader match or the second Cena vs. Lesnar, where a beloved hero just gets overwhelmed and destroyed. It is the Empire Strikes Back of the series, with Maeda getting the first win last show, but he ends up in carbonite at the end of this one. Vrij just overwhelms him with his size and aggression, damn near knocking him out the ring with a high kick, and constantly putting Maeda on his back foot. Akira gets one knockdown with a nasty body shot, but Vrij gets back up and keeps swarming him. I couldn't imagine Maeda was going to get beat this convincingly on only his second show and I kept waiting for the comeback that never came. Eventually Vrij sweeps the leg with a nasty kick and while Maeda gets up he is a wounded antelope about to get picked off by the lion. Great match especially in context and I can't wait to see Maeda get his revenge. 

ER: After seeing the pre-show video that showed everyone on the show warming up or sparring, and only showed Maeda getting his left knee looked, I was wondering if this was how his match was going to go. And I'm still kind of surprised that was the match they worked, with Maeda clearly favoring a leg and standing on it as long as he could before Vrij effectively targeted it. Vrij is so cool at throwing big crazy kicks as a decoy, as a way of getting Maeda off balance so he could land a wicked punch to the body. Maeda was down bad, unable to put much weight on that left knee, so that even when he hit one of his best kicks of the match it still required him to put weight on that leg, and he went down with Vrij. Maeda still manages to bounce Vrij off the top of his head on a takedown, always looks like he's going to be able to outlast Vrij. That's probably because we've been conditioned from years of watching Fujiwara wait for his opponent to gas, or Ishikawa wait to catch an opponent's kick all of these sons of Fujiwara have us conditioned to wait for them to pull out a buzzer beater. And Vrij does indeed look like he's gassing out (his post-fight backstage promo where he can only get out literally one word is a testament to how gassed he really was), so it was easy to mentally keep Maeda in this fight. Vrij is just relentless with strikes though, a guy who knew he was tiring but correctly calculated that his opponent would go down before he tired out. Can't wait to see the rubber match.