Celebrating All Japan Veterans on Veterans Day

Haruka Eigen/Masa Fuchi/Motoshi Okuma vs. Giant Baba/Mitsuo Momota/Rusher Kimura AJPW 2/26/90

ER: We don't always appreciate every blessing that life hands us, but it is a real gift that someone used nearly 30 minutes of camcorder battery to film an old man match curtain to curtain, entrances and exits. If the man recording this had children then you can guarantee he never accidentally missed a recital. He almost surely did not have children because he wouldn't be filming entire All Japan house shows if he knew the touch of a woman, but we thank his life choices for giving the Battery Life knowledge to get this gem. We've been going through a big batch of All Japan handhelds - which are my favorite thing - and when Matt saw there was a 20+ minute old man match he let me know that it was "an Eric kind of match". Not something that we would do for Found Footage Friday, but an Eric match. And so, I oblige.  

Because the thing is, 1990 was an incredible year for old man All Japan matches, mostly because they weren't all that old yet. Being an old man in these matches was more of a vibe than an actual number, because everyone except Baba was still in their 40s. Masa Fuchi was only 36, but he was someone who was always facially a 60 year old Salary Man with the crotchetiness of an 80 year old. Momota was my age, Eigen a bit older, and Rusher Kimura only 48. These men are my peers at this stage of the Old Man Match, but I don't think anyone would ever mistake Rusher Kimura for my peer as he was already spiritually an old man. 

Everyone in this match could still go. All of them were actual workers and the comedy was a bonus that was perfectly integrated into the stiffness instead of leaned on as a crutch to avoid taking too many bumps.  Their bodies may have been more stiff, but they could all still kick ass and lean into strikes. And this match had a lot of stiff strikes. 

Okuma, Fuchi, and Eigen come out in matching black tank tops, and the black tank crew starts the match by putting the damn boots to Rusher. Fuchi chokes Rusher over the ropes and goes after his ribs with a Bob Barker-like run of 20 straight hard kicks. Okuma comes in for some kicks, then Eigen comes in and adds 15 or so, then Fuchi comes back and starts it all over. Kimura does this amazing bit the entire time he's getting beaten to death, as he keeps slumping slightly farther and farther over with each kick until he was completely slouched in the ropes. That's the key to a lot of the comedy in this era of Old Men, where the joke is the result of actual stiffness and violence, their old man reaction to a real ass kicking. It's the way Baba would break up pins or submissions by walking slowly across the ring to throw a hard kick into someone's spine. It plays as physical comedy the entire time while also delivering a size 34 boot into Fuchi or Okuma's shoulder blades. Baba gets laughs by selling Okuma and Eigen's headbutts with exaggerated grimaces, rubbing his head like a bear who ran into a tree branch. His physical selling is very funny, but also very accurate, and also he is taking real headbutts from two guys who can throw headbutts. 

There is a headbutt exchange between Rusher and Okuma that starts out getting laughs, with Kimura doing silly little bunny hops into hands-free headbutts, but keeps progressing until it ends with Okuma headbutting him in the teeth three straight times. Eigen and Rusher might make funny faces while chopping each other, but Eigen is chopping the hell out of Rusher. You can see how hard Eigen's chops are landing thanks to the nice framing by our childless bachelor cameraman. Eigen isn't swinging through Rusher, he is swinging into Rusher, and since Rusher never moves at all while taking strikes he is just absorbing all of the impact. 

Speaking of good camera angles, we get a head-on view of Eigen when he inevitably spits onto the fine people and derelicts of Kashihara, right towards our lonely but fulfilled cameraman. Isn't it interesting that almost all the handhelds we have show the side view of Haruka Eigen spitting into the 2nd row. We don't get one head on nearly as often, and we almost never get one facing away from the camera. This gives us a new data point to add to our Eigen Spit pie chart, which is heavily dominated by stage left spitting. 

Momota and Okuma really up the speed, going at an unexpected juniors pace through some spirited quick exchanges, kind of quickly running through some bigger offense that you don't get in Old Man matches even just two years later. We're talking an Okuma piledriver leading into Momota doing a back suplex just a moment later, and all of that coming in the middle of other hard quick bumps. Momota was still a spry 42 - a young guy exactly the same age as me, a very young guy in his prime - but even I was surprised by some of his agility. He had a really smooth sunset flip out of the corner, and then an incredibly slick backslide to reverse a hiptoss. Wrestling in 2023 is all about athletic guys doing the same offense in athletic ways, but I don't think even the best of the modern quick Athletic Guy wrestlers (Ricochet, Mustafa Ali, any of the 40 AEW guys who work that style) could have made this backslide look as good as Momota did. Mitsuo Momota had a finisher worthy backslide that looked cool enough that I watched it back several times just to see his body physics. 

Everybody bumps big for Baba, of course. You're an incurable idiot if you do not run as fast as you can into Baba's giant boot and every member of the black tank crew knows this. We get some great moments around that boot, like Fuchi dramatically holding onto the ropes to avoid running into one, or Eigen doing the exact opposite and getting a full head of steam to run directly into it with seemingly no other plan. But nobody bumps bigger than Rusher Kimura, who absorbs a real impressive beating over the course of a long match which saw him involved more than anyone. Okuma and Fuchi and Eigen all hit him hard the whole match, but Okuma takes it up a level when he throws him through the ropes to the floor - a big bump for anyone but a bump Rusher shouldn't have been taking - and then throws him into and over the guardrail and beats his ass in the crowd. My boy Rusher eventually hobbles back to the ring holding his shoulder, and his body had to have been bruised up like a running back's. 

This was the best era of Old Men: the perfect mix of actual funny comedy and actual good wrestling, and when we get over 20 minutes of that it needs to be celebrated. These veterans are the true heroes.