joeg

Hope its alright that I start a new topic being a new guy. There is no Ogawa thread on this board and he's one of my personal favorites. He was involved in probably my favorite fued in NJPW with Hashimoto. He had a handful of random awesome matches with different people in the early to mid 2000s in NJPW, Zero 1 and Hustle. He was a legit shooter. A legit badass in an age when MMA was becoming a thing and legit tough guys in puroresu were scarce. His heel work against Hashimoto, Misawa, Kawada, etc is awesome. He just had that presence. He had an ear for the crowd. Also his gaga/ crowd work was outstanding. He oozed charisma. Just imagine how big he would have been had he not lost to Fedor in the mannor in which he did. I know he was no longer the draw he once was at that point, but losing in a minute to Fedor stripped him of his baddass aura. Anyways I'm a fan. Many people are not and throw around sayings like "cancerous to the business" Just wanted to see where people here stand. Recommend watching- 4/12/97 vs Hashimoto (debut) 3/5/97 vs Hashimoto 1/4/99 vs Hashimoto (this one turns ugly) 10/11/99 vs Hashimoto 1/4/00 w/ Murakami vs Hashimoto and Iizuka 4/7/00 vs Hashimoto 4/18/01 w/ Murakami vs Misawa and Rikio 6/41/01 vs Fujiwara 5/2/03 w/ Hashimoto vs Muto and Kojima 7/6/03 w/ Hashimoto vs Muto and Kawada 12/14/03 vs Kawada 1/4/04 vs Goldberg

I'd rank them Misawa, Kawada, Kobashi, Taue. I would have all 4 as top 10 to 20 all time.

Hey, I'm Joe. puroresu.tv died. So I went to WKO and puroresufan but those are dying slow deaths as well, so I've come here. I grew up watching wrestling. Was fortunate enough to have attended a few ECW shows at the arena back as a teenager. Went to a lot of indy shows as a teenager, back when Dragon, Ki, Spanky, Daniels, Joe, Punk, etc were breaking out on to the scene. I'm a fan of pretty much anything and everything.