All Time MOTY List Head to Head 2003: Ogawa vs. Kobashi VS. Lesnar vs. Mysterio

Kenta Kobashi vs. Yoshinari Ogawa NOAH 11/1/03

ER: In 2003. this match was embraced by the people who disliked Yoshinari Ogawa as a Great Ogawa Match. A lot of people actually disliked Ogawa in 2003. Half my lifetime ago, people actually got mad on the internet about Ogawa winning the GHC Heavyweight Title off Akiyama in under 5 minutes. Scott Keith called him Rat Boy and babies cried of cronyism. I was in college. I argued about it on DVDVR, using a Mitsuharu Misawa Emerald Green iMac in a campus computer lab. Sonoma State University's Information Center and Library opened in August 2000 on the very same day as the very first NOAH show, and that information center was filled to the brim with neon-colored iMacs that I employed to argue about pro wrestling for the next 2+ years. I believed in NOAH. I traded Galavision lucha libre for NOAH tapes on those emerald terminals. I watched that Ogawa Title win on a huge screen in a media lab in that same information center, in a room that I often reserved for the sole purpose of watching pro wrestling by myself on a large screen. Two different professors got mad at me for watching wrestling in a large media room they thought they had reserved for a class, but I had reserved it first so that I could watch new NOAH shows and 90s All Japan Comm tapes. 

I watched and argued about that Ogawa title win as a college student, and I watched this Ogawa title challenge as a college graduate delivering bottled water for Sierra Springs-Alhambra, in an apartment I shared with an Armenian girl. That was my year. The year before, I was there live when Ogawa wrestled his first ever match in the United States, and while he was wearing the GHC Title around his waist I watched him trip on the stairs walking to the bathroom. Is the man just a dweeb with a powerful friend? Or was he perfectly method in playing his dweeb character to the one other person nearby - me - who also happened to be walking to the bathroom? Obviously the latter. Since wearing the GHC Heavyweight Title and tripping while walking up stairs in a Fairfield gymnasium, the year after losing that title to Takayama was spent almost entirely in tag matches, getting a late 2002 GHC Title match against Misawa and only working a couple of singles matches in the entirety of 2003. A couple weeks before this title match, Ogawa - as captain - won a Captains Fall Elimination Match by eliminating Kobashi, meaning Yoshinari Ogawa was the first man in 14 months to pin Kenta Kobashi. Still, coming into this match, even as a former GHC Heavyweight Champion, Ogawa did not seem like - nor was he treated like - a man who could pin Kobashi in a singles match. 

Nobody, not even diehard NOAH lifer fans, were treating Ogawa as a serious title challenger. Nobody thought Ogawa had a chance at winning the title. Now I suppose that nobody expected Ogawa to win it from Akiyama in 2002, but nobody expected him to win it from Kobashi in 2003. This was never going to be a quick match, win or loss, as that just wasn't an option in a Kobashi title match. No, they needed to figure out a way for Ogawa to plausibly last 25 minutes in a Real Title Match against Kobashi, which is an interesting exercise. Ogawa felt like the first Kobashi challenger who might not make it past 10 minutes, and they figured out a very fun way to turn this into a 25 minute match. I also think that the strength and weakness of this match is that it's great that Ogawa essentially trolls Kobashi into working a full Kobashi title match with him, but by going so long it also felt too much like several people had sat down and mapped out exactly how they could plausibly have Ogawa last that long. 

Ogawa does not have offense that plays against Kobashi. His short jabs don't look like they could phase him, his body doesn't look like he could lift him or hold him down, and his chest is not a chest that can sustain more than a dozen chops, and they do a great job of building this match around those facts. Kobashi sells Ogawa's offense appropriately all match. Worked jabs, a standing double stomp, or a double leg cradled pin weren't going to cut the mustard, but attacking a dude's famously fucked up knees could. And after enduring two different corner choppings with his arms stiffened and his chest puffed out as much as possible, Ogawa goes after those fucked up knees. The first time Kobashi chops him down, he literally chops the man down to his back, with Ogawa taking the chops like a man trying to keep his footing as best as possible while having a firehose turned on him. The second time Kobashi gets him in a corner and starts chopping, Ogawa wisely just plays dead like Kobashi was a grizzly bear, and when enough time passed by he runs and dropkicks Kobashi in the back of the knee, and his window opens. You can basically divide this match up into two parts: Ogawa going after Kobashi's weakness that nobody is supposed to go after, and Kobashi paying Ogawa back for doing so. 

Ogawa's knee work is really tremendous, just relentless and varied and constantly advancing, never lingering on any one attack. After dropkicking the knee, he starts wrapping it around the ringpost, removing Kobashi's knee brace and pad, standing on it, jumping on it, pulling on his leg, jamming his own knee into Kobashi's knee, dropping an elbow onto it, digging his elbow into it, bangs it off the apron several times, dragon screws that leg, works a harsh single leg crab, locks a figure 4 around the ringpost. Every possible thing you can do to fuck up someone's leg in a wrestling ring, Ogawa does it all, in succession. Ogawa can't lift Kobashi's dead weight into a suplex so he shoves him Kobashi straight into the referee, kicks him in the back of the head, and finally hits the back suplex. While everyone is tending to the referee, Ogawa actually starts drawing heat by bashing Kobashi's leg with the ring bell multiple times, including once while the leg was against the ringpost. Ogawa didn't know that this was going to be the literal last time he would ever challenge for the GHC Heavyweight Title, but he knew the only way he was winning that title was by turning Kobashi's knees into bone broth and having the match stopped due to injury. It's a great plan. It could have worked, and it was working, but it only worked until Ogawa got his face bounced off the ringpost a few times. 

Kobashi was always going to catch him, and he does so invoking the power of Kings Road to let Ogawa run into a Baba neckbreaker drop. But yeah, then Ogawa gets his face bounced off the ringpost a couple times and Kobashi hits a spinning chop to the back of his neck to bounce him off it once more, and Ogawa gets busted wide open. 

When Ogawa gets busted open - a thing not common in NOAH 

Kobashi starts throwing punches - a thing Kobashi didn't do  

Karate chopping 

Right into Ogawa's cuts

Champion's Vengeance

You can even see

Him raising up his knuckle

As he's punching cuts

Kobashi holds Ogawa up, frozen in the coolest delayed sheer drop back suplex, an elevator stopping for too long before plummeting down several floors all at once. Ogawa is powerless to prevent the delayed floatover powerbomb, barely kicking out before Kobashi leans into him with a smothering sleeper. Ogawa has one last resort, and you figured he was going to go after the balls eventually, but it's kind of a surprise that he bothered to wait over 20 minutes to do so. Are The Balls Ogawa's personal moral line? We all have our own lines that we hold at certain distance, not thinking we'll be pushed over them. But are we supposed to think that The Balls That KENTA Washed are the line that Ogawa had to be convinced to cross 20 minutes in? He needed about three minutes to make the decision to go hard after the most famously crippled knees in the company for 10 minutes straight, but attacking The Balls are beyond the pale, and baby, you know Ogawa is pale. Kobashi has literally already established that he can miss several months after suffering very real knee injuries having his legs brutalized in one match, but Ogawa has no quandary trying to shelve the top draw for a year. 

And as I ponder this, I swear that Kobashi hammerfists his own nuts to...I dunno I guess get some ball feeling back? Once Michael Myers reveals that he has no balls, it's pretty much over. Those balls have been shot through with cortisone. You can break a cinder block over those balls, and it's not going to stop the superplex and Burning Lariats. 

Lesnar vs. Mysterio Review

Verdict: 

ER: This is a great match, but felt more like a clever exercise in what it would take to get Ogawa a 25 minute match with Kobashi, than it feels like a real title match. The knee work should have drawn way more heat, and Kobashi had to endure it even as the crowd viewed it as something that "just had to be done" to grow this match from 5 minutes to 25. Kobashi's vengeance should have been more violent, even though I like him using a lot of punches for the first time in god knows when. As much as I enjoy this match, at the end of it all I kept wondering was "If NOAH weren't such cowards about putting Kobashi in the ring with SUWA, imagine how incredible Kobashi/SUWA would have been?" Champ retains.