2016 Hideki Suzuki Deep Dive

After reading some reviews on PWO I decided to check out some Hideki Suzuki. He was always a guy I dug fighting MMA guys on occasional IGF shows and have really dug checking out what he is doing now. With all of the BattlArts dudes AWOL, and New Japan pretty much being pin up models doing near falls,  Suzuki matches might be the closest thing to my kind of Puro out there.

Hideki Suzuki/Yoshihisa Uto v. Yasufumi Nakanoue/Yuji Okabayashi BJW 5/30

PAS: Not sure why Nakanoue and Suzuki want to murder each other, but they sure as shit do and this was totally awesome. They start potatoing each other in the aisle and can't be pulled apart with the ref throwing the whole match out 50 seconds in. They scream at each other on the microphone and they restart the match and they go back to beating on each other with concussion causing headbutts and leaping headstomps, eventually Suzuki beats up his partner because he was trying to keep him from slaughtering Nakanoue. I love this kind of stuff, felt like a classic WAR v. NJ match or a Kazunari Murakami fight.

ER: I couldn't begin to explain to you what exactly the hell is happening here, other than Suzuki looks like such a nice man in still photos - what with his parted hair and a little goatee like you'd typically see on that guy who wheeled the TV/VCR cart into your classroom - but he clearly has a major problem with possibly every man, and wants to elbow them hard in the face and then kick them  in the face like a real snot. Nakanoue, Okabayashi, his own partner Uto, random ring boys, his elbows want nothing more than to feel their faces. Okabayashi is a big dude and I loved him ripping apart Uto to end the match, almost taunting Suzuki (who was on the floor kicking face) and locking on one of the nastier camel clutches you've seen. This kind of match doesn't happen a lot so we should all soak it in when it does.

Hideki Suzuki v. Takuya Nomura BJW 6/29

PAS: Really fun kicker v. grappler match, Nomura has fast hands and nice kicks and Suzuki responds by just beasting him with wrestling. He has these great looking takedowns and amateur wrestling small packages, where he folds Nomura like a blanket he is putting in a hamper. Nomura had his moments, but this was all about Suzuki as an old school MUGA asskicker, headlock takeovers, Boston crabs and a backbreaker which looked literal rather then figurative, a little one sided, but cool shit. I am going to have to go on a Suzuki binge.

ER: Fun WorldWide match worked nothing like you ever saw on WorldWide. I like Suzuki putting a somewhat angry twist on young lion style. His elbows really rattle, his Boston crab made my back hurt (seriously if he had slipped and lost his footing it looked like he would have snapped Nomura right in half), and as Phil mentioned all the simple stuff like small packages just look so snug and more painful. He's like Osamu Nishimura crossed with Yuki Ishikawa, which made me kind of drool just by typing that.

Hideki Suzuki v. Takuya Nomura BJW 7/9

PAS: Ok I am in on this little mini feud. Nomura is a rookie and this is a nice progression for him after their match in June. Suzuki is still chucking this kid around, but he has a little harder time keeping a grip on him. Nomura lands some nice kicks, and there is a very cool counter where he slips an uppercut and gets a great backslide which Suzuki rolls through right into a Nomura kick. Nomura even survives the backbreaker which put him down. I am in the bag for Suzuki, and think this Nomura kid might get pretty good.

ER: Really fun rematch with Nomura coming back more aggressive, and the crowd picking up on his aggression and encouraging him. Suzuki is a bully to him without ever coming across overtly dickish, just holding him down with his weight advantage but not taking cheap shots. Felt like those old Pancrase matches where a guy could go for the kill but would rather have an exciting fight, and then almost ends up getting caught. Nomura having Suzuki scrambling for the ropes to break a sub was a great moment, a thing that took me from watching a match to see Suzuki administer a beating, to seeing a rookie pull off an upset. But Suzuki is too tough and you can see him kinda casually turn it into overdrive, laying back on that Boston crab and half crab, slamming that backbreaker, and then deciding things should just be over with a crazy swift and violent butterfly slam. I think I may be watching more Big Japan this year...


ER: Well, Phil went on a deep dive and he dragged me under the water with him. Suzuki really does scratch an itch. Evolve needs to start bringing him in, in a move that will surely sell few extra tickets. Anyway, the awesome and wild tag match landed on our 2016 ONGOING MOTY LIST. But if you got a spare 20 minutes, you'll be able to watch every match in this review.

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2016 Ongoing MOTY List: Hama v. Okabayashi

12. Ryoto Hama v. Yuji Okabayashi BJW 1/24

ER: I am a reputed fan of giant fat dudes in pro wrestling, and they don't really come fatter than Hama. Ryoto Hama is slightly shorter than me, but weighs almost 3x as much as me. If I one day decide to throw an additional 300 lb. on my frame, I would be Hama. I don't know how these guys do it. I got aches and pains on my body, just from life and sports and what not. But I don't have to deal with the knee/back/body pain that comes with carrying around extra weight, never mind a few hundred pounds of extra weight. Hama is limited but athletic, and a match like this will rely on Okabayashi being willing to get plastered with 450+ pounds of Hama splatting onto him. And thankfully for us, Okabayashi is more than willing. We laugh as Oka tries bullying Hama in the ropes, and Oka ends up standing to the side so all we can read on Hama's mawashi is HAM. And from there, Hama goes full HAM on Okabayashi. We get some big chops, though certainly powerful Oka's do not move Hama. We get some shoulderblocks which just seems like a death wish for Oka to attempt. Sure enough, he slams into Hama, gets knocked down, and Hama drops the biggest and best damn leaping elbow you've seen right onto Oka. Hama would continue his run of awesome giant fat guy offense, with a rolling senton, big butt offense, a huge sunset flip splat, but Oka starts turning things around after Hama misses his fast low splash. Oka starts in with big lariats but goes for one too many as Hama leaves his feet for a terrific crossbody. Hama punishes him with two splashes which I thought was certainly it. But he gets greedy and goes to the corner for presumably a banzai drop, leading to Okabayashi lariating him right in his giant butt before powerbombing him, then hitting two massive big splashes for the win, with Hama likely not able to roll over, like a centuries old giant tortoise. Okabayashi was a nut for taking all of Hama's excess fat guy offense, and I appreciate him for that. (also, might have to dig back and review all Akebono/Hama tag matches from earlier this decade).

PAS: Man alive Hama has gotten fat, I remember him as a regular sized fat guy and he is end of the road Yokozuna fat now. He is really great at using his fat, his elbow drops and barrell roles look like they are lung collapsing. I liked how Okabayashi sold each smush like he was going to throw up. He also knows that if you are going to hit a fat guy in the throat you had better hit him. I also totally bought the finish, Hama may be hard to knock down, but if you knock him down he is going have some trouble getting up. Really fun match.


2016 ONGOING MOTY LIST

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Best of Japan 2000-2009: Kintaro Kanemura vs. Ryuji Yamakawa, BJPW 2/22/00

3. Kintaro Kanemura vs. Ryuji Yamakawa, BJPW 2/22/00

Kanemura is always a sleazy favorite of mine and man he is a monster to start this one, doing the most plausible RVD "throw chair you catch I kick" possible, flattening Yamakawa with two nasty fat sentons (one big one off the top, the other off the top to the floor right after Yamakawa gets tossed from the ring through a folding chair fort). But Kanemura just plays big in general. He's like Adam Dunn in that he hits big when he hits, and misses big when he misses. Yeah he crushed Yamakawa with a couple sentons, but he also caved in his own chest on a missed turnbuckle charge and flew horizontally like a frisbee into the ring post in one of the greatest postings I've ever seen. Picture Sandman taking his trademark ring barrier bump, but into the ringpost. I need to start tracking down current Apache Pro.

There is so much brutality in this and like a total sicko I kept wanting more. Kanemura drops Yamakawa on chairs with the Axe Driver? Mooooore. Yamakawa gets powerbombed off the stage through a table below, except he's lined up poorly so basically only the back of his head goes through the table? Yesssss. I will rewind. Both men are savagely stupid in this, with Kanemura never quite topping his ringpost bump but still leaning way into clotheslines. Yamakawa throws one that really knocks Kanemura sideways, like a drunk guy running face first into a lamp post (and only kinda makes up for getting concussed through a table and getting dumped through tons of chairs). Aside from all his cool offense, Kanemura is also Necro Butcher-precise with his chair shots and table shots. For a man who looks like he has zero muscle, Kanemura swings a full table at Yamakawa's face with the strength of Giancarlo Stanton hitting a ball into the upper deck (jeez can you tell baseball season has started? Maybe these comparisons would fit better if I were reviewing Osaka Pro).

I was praying for some stupid spots and reckless behavior in this one, and it beyond delivered in stupid sleaze. And while the whole thing was overkill, it never felt like overkill to me. It felt like two freaks REALLY wanting to win and I thought the build was great. Plus there's just something beautiful about the waves created by a man in tight white pants getting thrown through dozens of shiny folding chairs.


BEST OF JAPAN MASTER LIST

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Best of Japan 2000-2009: Ryuji Yamakawa vs. Tomoaki Honma, BJPW 1/2/00

1. Ryuji Yamakawa vs. Tomoaki Honma, BJPW 1/2/00

This match was what got me back into death matches years and years ago. I'm pretty sure the first tape in most tape traders' collection was some sort of death match. Either the IWA Death match tourney, or some FMW tape, or a W*ing comp, or the Sabu/Funk Born to Be Wired match, or something like that. My first tape I traded for was a compilation of all sorts of death matches, from fire to barbed wire to one with a live snake. The tape blew my mind. I don't know what I was expecting, but the tape was weirder in ways I hadn't thought about. I thought the matches would be big spectacles, not sad little events in half empty gyms fought by pudgy guys in jeans, with no production value. It may have been foolish to expect glamour from something called "death matches", but somehow it was seamier than I expected, not so much due to the violence, but for the realization that the payoffs for rolling around in glass couldn't be that big when the promotion appeared to be holding its show in a parking lot and didn't seem to have an actual ring. So I had bought into the gimmick of death matches, and quickly realized it was a gimmick . Although good lord in retrospect I should probably be thankful I wandered into something as harmless as Japanese death matches. It's hard to say why death matches appealed to me yet something like Faces of Death or Mondo Cane sounds like my worst type of nightmare that I wouldn't be able to unsee. But whatever the appeal, it faded fast as the matches just didn't have enough substance to hold my attention. And then Yamakawa and Honma arrived and added death match insanity to the strong style of wrestling that teenage me was becoming obsessed with.

Feeling out process here is really good as they both really struggle around the barbed wire boards. Soon Honma gets thrown into one of the boards, but awesomely runs up the board and backflips away from it, then throws Yamakawa into it. Honma has a really great running elbow, too. We go wandering through the crowd for awhile, getting tossed into some chairs, wandering while grabbing each others' heads...and then Yamakawa gets powerbombed on the stage...and then gets brainbustered...and is busted open. And things are getting awesome. Yamakawa has really great kicks to Honma's dome.

Back in the ring and they fight on the apron, and Honma is great as he throws his full body into preventing his bod from getting suplexed from the ring to the floor, breaks free and blasts Yamakawa with a running elbow (all of Honma's roaring elbows were brutal in this, which is nice since I had no problem buying them as a finish) that sends him flying to the floor and Honma hits an out of control somersault tope. And we then get a series of absolutely insane spots, like powerbombs into barbed wire, Yamakawa takes a rana to the floor into barbed wire, a fucking rana off the top to the floor through barbed wire, and the whole time that giant nail board is looming at ringside. This whole thing is just nuts, and just as much fun 14 years later.


BEST OF JAPAN MASTER LIST

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Rifling Through the Trash: The Unfinished Segunda Caida

We here at Segunda Caida all watch a lot of wrestling. We also start a lot of projects. More projects than we can ever ever possibly finish. We start watching something, write about it, don't finish writing about it, and there it sits. We have about 80 unfinished drafts dating back 4 years. Some of them may get finished some day (IWA-MS show reviews, WAR show reviews), others are kind of pointless to ever finish (old CMLL TV write-ups, reviews of WWE Superstars episodes). Still these write ups all took at least SOME time out of our schedules, and it's only fair that we get SOME use out of them. I literally forgot Go Shiozaki was a person.



~Started (and not finished) by SLL on 6/1/08:

Takashi Sasaki, Abdullah Kobayashi, Shadow WX, & MASADA vs. MEN'S Teioh, Jun Kasai, Jaki Numazawa, & Yuko Miyamoto
BJPW - 1/2/2007 - Tokyo, Japan
Fluorescent Light Tubes Death Match

Oh God, this was painful. And not in the good "hot damn, Onita's dragging his back along barbed wire" kind of painful you want from death matches. This was more of the "hot damn, Zandig doesn't even know what a wrestling match is, does he?" kind of painful. Well, maybe not that bad, but still. I'd say something like "you know you're in trouble when MASADA is clearly the worker of the match" but....

1. I haven't seen a MASADA match since before he was in The Carnage Crew.
2. He was actually legit good here. In the midst of guys standing around to set up needlessly complex spots, odd patches of no-selling, and Abdullah Kobayashi throwing the shittiest strikes imaginable, MASADA actually comes off as a guy you want to see more of. Comes off as the guy you would actually need to be afraid of in a death match. He gets a lot of neat spots, including grabbing Miyamoto by the legs and dragging as back around on all the broken glass, and punching the seat out of a chair before using it as a weapon. I've written elsewhere about how the Finlay/JBL match from Mania was conceptually cool because they took the late-90's/early-00's "cookie sheets and garbage can lids" style of benign, mainstream hardcore wrestling, and made it look really hard and dangerous. Getting hit with just the seat of a crappy folding chair is about the same as getting hit with a garbage can lid (and the way Miyamoto no-sells it hammers that home) but the way MASADA sets it up by just punching the seat out of the chair makes it look like he's doing some seriously bad stuff. So there's MASADA's name next to the names of Finlay and JBL, for whatever that's worth.

Anyway, the rest of the match is pretty much ass. The post match with Miyamoto getting all up in Sasaki's mug and Sasaki beating the shit out of him, but Miyamoto refusing to back off, was kinda neat. Got me interested in their match later in the set. I didn't need to sit through Abdullah Kobayashi throwing punches that would make Rob Van Dam shake his head in disgust to get there, though.


~Snippets from TomK reviewing ROH "Take No Prisoners" (left unfinished by Phil on 6/23/08):


Tyler Black v. Delirious v Claudio Castagnoli v Go Shiozaki

TKG: This is a four way for a title shot at the end of the show. Not normally a fan of this type of spotfest four way and so came in with some trepidation. Shocked by how effective this was. Delirious who gets shit on a lot lately really looked like the best guy in this match and everything he did looked solid, but that was beside the point. Whole thing was aimed at getting Black over and no-one was trying to upstage him. Black had two big spectacular spots. The dropkick attempt landing on his feet was especially cool. Unlike most of the time with this match format, there wasn’t any excessive kickouts and match ended in a real satisfying way right when it felt like it should.

Notes for Phil: If you can’t come up with anything else leaving you to talk shit about the everyone stares into the mic and cuts a promo shit, or Nigel on commentary.

Kevin Steen v Roderick Strong

Notes for Phil: Them stealing your idea for how to ue Kevin Steen from DVDVR 166:

I haven't had much to say about the IWS guys before, and I have actively hated Steen, but he seems to have ditched most of his crap and just become a fat asskicker. With his bad skin and flabby body he does look like every single guy in the audiance though, I am guessing ROH books him for the same reason you book Pedro Morales in NYC, he is the regional babyface for fat wrestling dorks. With that I think this match was hurt a little by him working heel, you don't book Putski as a heel in Pittsburgh.


~Snippets from Eric reviewing random matches from 2009 (left unfinished 1/15/10): 


1. Roderick Strong vs. Necro Butcher (IWA-EC, 2/4/09)

I don't really know what the internet opinion is of Roderick Strong. I don't know if he gets talked about as "good" or "bad", or if I would actually trust the opinions of the people that would be calling him good or bad. I know he's blandish, but he's a guy I really don't mind. I can picture him walking down the street wearing khakis and a letterman jacket and some white sneakers, and not everybody can pull off something so clean cut All-American like that. Of course depending on what state you might be in, Necro is also a pretty accurate representation of American society. This isn't about all that, though, this is just two dudes hitting each other pretty darn hard for a good 20 minutes and I really can get behind that.

Roderick takes Necro's corner "punch/chop" combo in the corner better than anybody I've seen. Instead of just flexing up his chest like he's taking Kobashi chops, he acts more like Ali on the ropes [match review just sorta...ends there]

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