Masashi Aoyagi Got Pistols in his Pockets Boys

Masashi Aoyagi vs. Hirofumi Miura WYF 3/20/98 - EPIC

PAS: This is really the platonic ideal of an awesome Aoyagi match, a pair of guys in Gi's beating the every loving shit out each other with kicks and punches. Aoyagi comes into the match with a kneebrace and Mirura just lasers in on it with violent kicks and stomps right on the brace, one of the nastier limb destructions I can remember seeing. It reminded me a bit of the time when Great Sasuke was going to get knee surgery and he spent the matches right before it having Dick Togo senton full on his knee joint. Aoyagi was on defense for most of the match, but had moments of just unleashing hard kicks and punches to keep Mirura off of him, including just bisecting him with body kicks.  Finish was awesome with a limping Aoyagi just drilling Mirura with a check hook, knocking him stiff right before Aoyagi collapses in pain. It felt like a legendary UFC finish, with someone pulling out a KO at the last moment. Incredible stuff, man I love cool wrestling. 

JR: Sometimes it can be this simple. A man in black, sullen and petulant. Another man comes out wearing white. He’s already limping, sighing before he even gets in the ring. A sympathetic, beleaguered hero. Aoyagi, our hero here, sells his knee before the match begins. For Miura, his opponent, he creates a target. For the audience he creates a road map.

Miura attacks the knee with a sort of professional elegance. Until Aoyagi forces him to change, he will repeat his tactics over and over again. Miura looks great on offense here, finding ways to change angles to apply pressure to keep the narrative moving forward without shifting any focus away from Aoyagi’s knee.

Aoyagi, for his part, sells wonderfully. It’s so rare to see someone sell a limb on offense instead of just after offense is completed. It’s rarer still to have a performer find ways to let the audience see the wheels turning. Aoyagi’s first big offensive move is a rolling kick, a move where he has no plant leg. He wouldn’t even have to chamber his knee. Later, he does a big sequence while holding the ropes for support, ending with an axe kick. The kicks all have weight because we can feel how tired Aoyagi is. He’s swinging big, finding ways to end it. He knows he is fighting from behind.

Miura finds such simple ways to escalate here. Getting more desperate as his focus fails to yield results, he grabs at the knee brace of Aoyagi. This is brilliant. It toes the line of illicit and disrespectful, pushing Miura from a violent upstart into something much more villainous. Truly, wrestling doesn’t need much more than this. This is the monomyth of wrestling played out on so small a scale we are forced to focus on each detail; one man forced to confront his heroism while his body fails him while the other faces the abyss and finds himself reborn as something worse.

Of course, the hero triumphs. A true knockout blow. Aoyagi, surrounded by followers, sits over Miura. He is pulled off, rescued from without. He returns, weakened but victorious.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE AOYAGI