William Bologna

Akira Taue vs. Johnny Smith (AJPW Champion Carnival 04/20/1994) It's the last day of the Carnival - let's see if things have gotten any better. What a relief. It's only six minutes, but it's good. They work some cool headlock/armbar sequences. Taue DDTs Smith outside the ring, and it felt like it was too soon to escalate to that point, but that's before I knew it was only six minutes. Back in the ring, Taue works one of the only abdominal stretches that I've ever liked. They keep getting lower and lower and he winds up pushing on Smith's face in a Tenryu-esque dick move. Smith comes back and shows some fire - it's really a pretty good comeback except that he keeps throwing these lame, short guy lariats. Not a good part of the repertoire. The fisherman's suplex was cool, though. Taue puts him away with a great chokeslam, and I'm no longer worried that I'm going to have to hit the eject button on this thing. Here's my theory about why the Kawada match was so bad: Kawada didn't care. Smith was rusty. That was the first date of the tour, and if Cagematch is to be believed, he hadn't wrestled since July of 1993. Hell, maybe Kawada was rusty too. He had had a couple weeks off. We sign off to some slow motion replays of the action from this and the Carnival final between Kawada and Williams. You're reminded that these dudes are working so stiff you can watch it in slow motion without worrying about exposing any daylight.

Toshiaki Kawada vs. Johnny Smith (AJPW Champion Carnival 03/19/1994) You can tell we're getting a sprint because Smith comes out hot, hitting a dropkick, a German suplex, and a dive to the outside immediately. They get back in the ring, and he sets in to grind down Kawada. Smith's in his element now. Time do some real crafty English stuff and really make his joints scream! Well . . . not quite. Smith should have Kawada right where he wants him, but his matwork is awful. He sits in a chinlock for a while before procuring a lousy bow and arrow. Then we get a front facelock. What happened to the guy who flipped Alan Kilby over by grabbing his wrist? Kawada, meanwhile, looked bored - he didn't evince any peril while Smith was half-heartedly manhandling him - and acted bored after he went on offense. Kick. Stomp. Chop. Smith eventually runs through some bad power moves and bad flying moves (including a twisting top rope body press that would have sucked even if he hadn't overshot the target). They do the one spot they worked out beforehand - Smith kips up into a facekick - and very nearly blow it completely. Then Kawada hits some kicks and wins with a stretch plum. What a letdown. Here's the subject of this thread in a singles match against my favorite wrestler, and this is all they can muster. What is Smith doing? We've seen him work an arm before this match, and we've seen work one afterwards. Did he forget how to do it for a couple years? And he certainly wasn't good at anything else. What is Kawada doing? I realize that the Johnny Smith match isn't something you circle on the calendar, but this wasn't some spot show. It's in Korakuen, you're the second match from the top, it's on TV, and it's the first night of a Champion Carnival that you're going to win. I would have expected some effort.

Alan Kilby vs. John Savage (World of Sport 1985) Kind of a guess on the date, based on Kilby being British Light Heavyweight champion and Savage being 19 years old. I've never seen any of this World of Sport stuff, and I can barely see it now - this is some rough video quality. They're big on telling us where everyone's from. Savage, "The Manx Man," is from the Isle of Man. Kilby is from Sheffield. The referee is from Croydon. There's a Welsh bloke in the front row. Savage of course is Johnny Smith. Alan Kilby is the champ and is deaf (announcer: "All the calls for Alan. But unfortunately he can't hear them."). They do a little bit with this - at one point there's an exchange of gestures that's apparently funny, but I can't make it out. And the ref has to come get him when the round ends because he can't hear the bell. Round 1 is all holds, and it was nifty. You can see where Smith learned all that stuff he did to Akiyama. Kilby is definitely smoother here - he gets an advantage and immediately moves to the next hold. Smith will do something cool (like flipping Kilby over by his wrist) and then pause for a moment. We come back from break and it's a different match - lots of strikes, rope-running, and wrestling moves, and very little of the matwork. Smith gets a pinfall with a sort of bodypress off the second rope, which was either a botch or too clever for me to figure out. Kilby evens it up with a vertical suplex. We head into the sixth and final round when disaster strikes: An attempt at a vertical suplex sends both men spilling onto the ringside tables. It really does look like a catastrophe. The tables are right up against the ring, and they don't look prepared for this to happen. Double KO. This was pretty cool - definitely a nice change of pace, although neither guy showed a lot of personality. I did find the switch from holds to moves to be abrupt and, well, fakey, but I didn't get the whole match, so maybe it looked more organic if you saw the entirety. Smith is only 19, but he already knows what he's doing.

Dynamite Kid vs Johnny Smith (Chain Match Stampede 02/17/1989) We're told that they're calling this the Battle of Britain. I'm skeptical, but I'm no expert on what was popping on the streets of western Canada at the end of the 80s. They chain the two Brits together, and they proceed to have just a terrible match. One of them stomps and punches, and the transitions are that every so often the other guy stomps and punches. We don't get a move for three and a half minutes, when Smith goes all the way to piledriver. Dynamite bleeds from the forehead, and Smith rakes the chain across the wound, but it's not nearly as violent as it sounds. There is no intensity and no pretense of building to anything. Five minutes in there's a commercial break, and we come back to . . . the announcers standing in the ring telling us what happened. There was, according to Ed Whalen, a real hot angle involving Bob Brown and Davey Boy Smith and a stick, but instead of seeing it we get to watch a very boring man explain it to us. What in the hell kind of wrestling show is this?

Mitsuharu Misawa/Jun Akiyama vs Johnny Smith/Wolf Hawkfield (AJPW 11/15/1997) It's the first night of the 1997 World's Strongest Tag Determination League, and we get one of the favorites to win versus perennial midcarder Johnny Smith and Wolf Hawkfield, who is not only a perennial midcarder but also pretending to be a video game character. Should be an easy two points for the home team, right? We join this about twenty minutes in, which on a normal night is enough time for Smith and Hawkfield to lose twice. But tonight is full of magic - Johnny Magic! Smith and Hawkfield have a plan: Akiyama's the weak link on his team, and the arm is the weak link on the Akiyama. Smith pins his arm under him for a body slam. Hawkfield stomps the arm. As things heat up and we head toward the terminal 30 minute mark, Smith busts out all this fancy English arm stuff. He winds up in a cobra clutch; Akiyama hip tosses out of it, but Smith holds on and kicks Akiyama in the knee to bring him down. The crowd is getting hot because they sense an upset and because that sequence was awesome. They only get hotter as Misawa comes in to break up the pin . . . and gets booed. Korakuen is completely on Team Johnny here. Eventually Misawa's cheating puts his team in a position to win. Time is running out, but Akiyama has taken the virtua fighter out of the action, and Smith is primed for the Tiger Driver. If Misawa hits it, it's over. He tries, but Smith gets a knee down. After a few elbows, he tries again. Again Smith takes a knee. One more elbow and Misawa hits it. Hawkfield is being held back on the outside. It's all over for the underdogs. One . . . two . . . Johnny Smith kicks out of a Tiger Driver. This must be the biggest pop of Johnny Smith's career. They're going nuts. I'm going nuts even though I've already seen this ten or twenty times. Time runs out. Smith and Hawkfield get one point for a draw, but it feels like a victory. This match is the reason I've always been interested in Johnny Smith. The 1997 tag league was the first Japanese wrestling I ever saw, and even though I was un- or barely familiar with the participants in this match, I immediately understood the storytelling. Smith is just great in this (his work on Akiyama is superb, and Akiyama is superb at getting worked over), and I thought to myself, "Ah, here's a guy to keep an eye on as you continue your puroresu journey." How young I was, and how little knew! Anyway, maybe the first twenty minutes of this were terrible and it's actually a bad match, but the last ten minutes are great and I never get tired of watching it.

No one cares about Johnny Smith. Here's a guy with a 20-year career spread over three continents. A headliner on some poorly-attended Stampede shows and a bystander to some of the most talked-about wrestling that ever happened. Sure, he looked like Murray from Flight of the Conchords years before that could do you any good, and sure he was saddled with the most nondescript name a wrestler could possibly have, but he wrestled a lot of matches, he hit Dynamite Kid with a chain, and he got Korakuen to boo Misawa. It doesn't seem that anyone noticed any of it. Check out the Greatest Wrestler Ever subforum on this very site - barely a word about him. Danny Spivey has a thread. Takao Omori's merits are discussed. We are asked to consider B-Boy. Is it right that Johnny Smith is less worthy of consideration than Kaz Fujita? Is he unjustly obscure, or is he just regular obscure? I mean to find out. We're going all over for this one. We'll go from golden age All Japan undercards to the desolate moonscape of a promotion so bereft of talent they put Johnny Smith in a title tournament. We'll bear the bad video quality and worse announcing of late 1980s Stampede. World of Sport. A couple ECW shows. Mostly All Japan, though (thank God).

Final Thoughts: I have watched more Fujinami than any other wrestler by now (I don't think it's even close), but he still feels like an afterthought. I'm going to be pretentious and quote Borges: “The Quixote,” clarifies Menard, “interests me deeply, but it does not seem— how shall I say it?—inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe without Edgar Allan Poe’s exclamation: Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted! or without the Bateau ivre or the Ancient Mariner, but I am quite capable of imagining it without the Quixote." I cannot imagine the universe without Inoki or Choshu or Tenryu, but I can imagine it without Fujinami. I chalk this up to two things: 1. Booking. He was simply overshadowed by Inoki and Choshu. He was the champion six times, but was he ever actually the top guy? NJPW World doesn't give you a good sense of title reigns, but you never get the sense that Fujinami was doing anything but barely holding on. I watched him lose two non-title matches while he was champion - that never happened to Misawa. He won with rollups rather than ruining people with dragon suplexes. His penultimate reign was a fluke - Hashimoto beat the everloving hell out of him but got rolled up. He won it back in six minutes. 2. Work. He just didn't carry himself like a top guy. We all enjoyed the old days when he was the junior heavyweight ace. He got to have hot matches and do cool moves and show a little bit of fighting spirit. But when he moves up and he's standing next to Inoki, you just forget about him. As good as he was, I do not count Fujinami among the all-time greats. Consider: Like any member of the solar system other than the sun, he needs an external source of heat. He's at his best when the other guy is being vicious. Dynamite, Tenryu, Murdoch, Hashimoto - hit him in the face and you get something to work with. Blood helps. I don't know when New Japan stopped blading regularly, but it really hurt Fujinami's work. That first bunch of matches have blood all over the place, and as barbaric as it is, it is a good substitute for personality. Cheating helps. Fujinami comes off as a straight-shooter, so when Jose Estrada or Roger Smith bend the rules you get some virtuous anger. He'll get fired up against outsiders. Hence the UWF feud being the high point of his career, and the WAR and Heisei Ishingun issues producing some good stuff as well. And these aren't guarantees. There's a Choshu match where he gets so mad that he gets himself disqualified, but it's just not in him to act that angry. Flair gave him chance after chance to do bigtime babyface stuff, but it's not part of his repertoire. There are some technical problems - he really does screw up a lot of finishes, and it's not something he grows out of. He's doing it in the 80s, and he messes up the rollup with Hashimoto in 1994. His dropkicks have at least a 33% chance of whiffing. He's better than most people, but his case rests on work because his character is lacking, so any ding to his work is pretty damaging. He got hurt in 1989 and was out for a year. It's funny - I couldn't point to anything in particular that he couldn't do when he came back, but the matches just got lousy. I think it's a general loss of explosiveness. He used to run the ropes so damn fast, and in the 90s he usually seems to be coasting. So that's Fujinami. He's not perfect, but he did a lot good stuff, and no one ever looked better running the ropes.

Five Worst Wrestlers: 5. Masahiro Chono - His first match, when he challenged for the title in 1991, was really good. But the rest of the 90s were a dispiriting slog, and Chono was in a lot of those matches doing absolutely nothing. Yeah, he got injured, but who didn't? 4. Bam Bam Bigelow - He had two matches against Fujinami. In the first one he fell off the top rope and lost, so of course he got a title shot. He worked light as a feather and lost. This poor bastard teamed with Vader, who looked just like him but was way better? That's like having Bruiser Brody and John Nord team up - obviously, Bigelow and Brody are going to look terrible. 3. Bob Backlund - How in the hell did this weirdo ever headline anywhere? He's possessed of an intense anti-charisma. You want to look away from him. 2. Roland Bock - Bock's untrained and awkward moves could have been really effective if he'd been at all interested in what was going on, but his sad sack demeanor ensured it didn't work. His match (Inoki/Fujinami vs. Bock/Hansen) was a fascinating example of a wrestler trying to carry a teammate rather than an opponent. Hansen tried his damndest to get Bock through the match, but even Stan is capable of only so much. 1. El Solitario - Seriously, the dude looked like Jerry Lewis in a mask. Absolutely the most puzzling, most incompetent opponent Fujinami ever had.

Lists! Top Five Tatsumi Fujinami Matches That I Watched for This Thing: 5. Tatsumi Fujinami vs Riki Choshu 4/3/1983 - This was the one with the clean finish. They always worked well together, and I really liked two of their million matches (this and the one where Choshu won via countout). Choshu did not win me over in this project, though. He's a dude where you overlook the actual work because he's got presence, and I just didn't find his presence compelling. He's no Tenryu. Also he and Fujinami should never have teamed. It just looked wrong. 4. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Vader 4/24/1989 - Fujinami thrived against wrestlers who weren't like him. Vader was a great opponent for him because he was a big spherical American monster, and because he could stiff the hell out of Fujinami. None of the Vader stuff was bad - Fujinami was just too good at guiding him through matches - but this is where he had it all figured out. 3. Antonio Inoki, Tatsumi Fujinami, Kengo Kimura, Umansoke Ueda, Kantaro Hoshino vs. Akira Maeda, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Osamu Kido, Nobuhiko Takada, Kazuo Yamazaki 3/26/1986 - The UWF invasion is best thing that happened to this project and one of the best things ever in wrestling. This was just great, but I almost feel like I should take points off because it's so easy to be great in this context. One of the things I liked about it is how it underlined the strength of the bench. Kimura was a hell of a worker, but you never hear anyone talk about him. I had literally never heard of Hoshino in my life, but he steals the show. Kido was one of my favorite guys throughout this thing - he never looked less than great. 2. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Yoshiaki Fujiwara/Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Akira Maeda 5/1/1986 - These were part of the same 5 on 5 elimination match, so I'm putting them together. While watching all these 80s matches, I had my suspicions confirmed about a few guys I'd read about but hadn't watched. I figured I wouldn't like Bruiser Brody, and I didn't. I figured I'd like Dick Murdoch, and holy crap that guy is awesome. I'd heard a lot about Fujiwara as a dark horse best wrestler ever, and his performances did not argue against it. He and Fujinami had a tiny masterpiece here. It was bloody and intense and it made perfect sense, setting Fujinami up to get kicked into Hell by Maeda without making him look weak. Maeda doesn't have a lot going on except for kicks that he absolutely cannot control, but it turns out that you can get a lot out of that attribute, including two of Fujinami's better matches. Fujinami's the best wrestler in the world when he's getting hit hard. 1. Tatsumi Fujinami vs Dynamite Kid 2/5/1980 - Speaking of which! It bears repeating: Fujinami seems kind of mild-mannered, and he doesn't bring the intensity you want unless someone is forcing it out of him by cheating or being really large or stiffing him. Dynamite Kid is a bad guy - that's a shoot - but he doesn't cheat. He's just a dick. The beating he lays on Fujinami won't be matched until Hashimoto gets a hold of him, and it doesn't help that Fujinami comes into the match with a bandage on his head. That's just a bullseye to Dynamite. So you've got a compelling dynamic, flawless work, blood everywhere, and a beautiful finish.

'84 Bloody Fight Series August 24, 1984 Korakuen Hall Tatsumi Fujinami & Seiji Sakaguchi vs. Roger Smith & Duke Myers I almost missed this one thanks to NJPW World's shoddy metadata - there is not a Fujinami tag on this match. I was poking around the bottom of the tags list to see who had one match on the service and happened to click on Roger Smith. I don't know anything about either one of these guys. They have a look to them, though. A look that says, "These men have been yelled at by both Ole Anderson and Jim Cornette. There are certain counties they avoid entering. Best practice is not to give them their twenty dollar payoff until after the match because they might run off." They're great! A lot of their offense revolves around combinations of headlocks and punches, and they make it work because their punches are superb. They act as sleazy as they look - Smith gets frustrated and punches Fujinami in the dick, and then atomic drops him for further dick damage. He presses his advantage with a feet-on-the-rope pin attempt. Fujinami wins with a backslide, and what a fun note to go out on. Our boy won the last match. He almost screwed up the finish but didn't quite. We're back in 1984, and everything's better. People throw great punches, and Fujinami isn't a decrepit wreck. So that's it. The last of . . . what, 120 matches? I wasn't counting. It only took a couple years. I'll have some closing thoughts in a bit.

Tatsumi Fujinami, Mitsuya Nagai & LEONA vs Shiro Koshinaka, Akitoshi Saito & Taniguchi (NOAH 10/1/17) Welcome to Pro Wrestling NOAH's Great Nepotism Voyage in Yokahama. On this card, we have: Two modern Von Erichs Razor Ramon's extremely tall son WWE Hall of Famer Tatsumi Fujinami teaming with bizarrely-named son, LEONA I don't know why Fujinami named his child after disgraced American hotelier Leona Helmsley. Maybe the kid's mother insisted. Whatever the case, here he is playing the paint-by-numbers young lion role that you can see three or four times on an average New Japan card. What little you hear about Fujinamito makes him sound like the poor man's Daichi Hashimoto, so I wasn't expecting much. He comes off fine, though. He doesn't look like much - he resembles his father neither in face nor physique - but he throws some good elbows and a couple mean-looking dropkicks. His father, meanwhile, has settled into a pattern. He gets in a multi-man tag and doesn't do anything until he comes in, dragon screws two guys, and puts on a dragon sleeper. He does it every time, and it's usually all he does. The rest of the crew works around the legend, and this winds up being a fun match. Shiro Koshinaka turned out to be one hell of an old man wrestler. He's been solid in every one of these geriatric showcases, which I guess is why he's usually in them.

JYUSHIN THUNDER LIGER RETIREMENT MATCH Ⅰ Jyushin Thunder Liger & Tatsumi Fujinami & The Great Sasuke & Tiger Mask vs. Naoki Sano & Shinjiro Otani & Tatsuhito Takaiwa & Ryusuke Taguchi Fujinami's really slumming it here. In the previous old man exhibition matches, he was surrounded by fellow champions. Here he tags in Great Sasuke for what I'm guessing was the first time in his career. It's also a lot better than the other ones. A lot of these guys can still go, but sadly Fujinami isn't one of them. He comes in, does a couple dragon screws, and then nearly fails to apply a dragon sleeper. That's about it. The other guys pick up the slack. Otani's great, especially when he boots Sasuke in the face while doing his boot-scraping bit to Liger. Sasuke tries to kill himself with a top rope flip to nowhere. Sano stiffs Tiger Mask with a spin kick, and Takaiwa crushes him with a to rope elbow drop. Tiger Mask is used the best way possible: Getting stiffed and crushed. Two more matches to go, and then we can put this thing to bed.

The Destroyer Memorial Night Nov 15,2019 Tokyo・Ota City General Gymnasium 2ND MATCH Shiro Koshinaka & Jun Akiyama & Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Hiroyoshi Tenzan & Satoshi Kojima & Hiro Saito Fujinami got old. It was bound to happen, I suppose. Here he is heeled upon at the start and comes in for the finish, but he spends most of this holding the tag rope and watching Akiyama have a house show match with Tenzan and Kojima. Our man is still muscley as all hell, but his movements lack any fluidity. Koshinaka still looked OK, at least. So this was kind of a downer. Ashes to ashes.

POWER HALL 2019 -New Journey Begins- June 29,2019 Tokyo・Korakuen Hall THE FINAL RHAPSODY Riki Choshu & Shiro Koshinaka & Tomohiro Ishii vs. Tatsumi Fujinami & Keiji Muto & Togi Makabe Isn't this a pleasant stroll down memory lane? Aside from the two youngsters (both in their 40s), we've got Muto, who's popped up three or four times in this thread (he was pretending to be a demon from hell one of those times, but it still counts). Koshinaka's had a few appearances. And of course Riki Choshu holds the unbreakable record for most times wrestling Tatsumi Fujinami. Fun fact: Riki Choshu has been in nearly as many Fujinami matches as Fujinami himself! It's a retirement match full of grandpas, so I wasn't expecting much. Everyone looks pretty good, actually. Choshu's in pretty good shape, and his lariats don't look any worse than they ever did. Muto can only move in short bursts, but he looks fine when he does. Fujinami does almost nothing, which makes me wonder if he's not in as good shape as he looks. We have at least two more of these geriatric spectacles ahead of us, so I guess we'll see if he's got anything left. So obviously this wasn't any good, and it ends after Makabe knee drops Choshu four times. So long, Riki! I'll always remember that time you pinned Fujinami clean in the middle ring. If I recall correctly, it's the only time anyone did that to anyone in New Japan throughout the entirety of the 1980s.

Brady Fight Series August 30, New York, USA Madison Square Garden 1982 WWF International Heavy Gino Brito vs. Tatsumi Fujinami I don't know what "Brady Fight Series" means. Brito is the WWF International Heavyweight Champion, a title represented by a belt made of cardboard and tinfoil. It looks like the first backyarder title. We get a lot of armbars and shtick, and I guess I wasn't in the mood. The idea is that Brito keeps trying to punch Fujinami, which is against the rules. Deliberations over this last for 12 minutes until Fujinami wins, setting the stage for him and Choshu to fight over this hideous belt 138 times over the course of the early 1980s. I was bored for all of this. The Diamond match was all about workrate, and it was OK. This was about Brito heeling and stooging, and I wasn't going for it. The guy's apparently some kind of strongarm loanshark in real life, so he was playing against type here. In both cases, Fujinami gets a huge pop when he wins. Were they sweetening the audio, or was he really over in MSG? I could see the crowd being won over in the Diamond match - they worked really hard, and it was probably a breath of fresh air to a crowd accustomed to various Strongbows, but I don't see this one making any new fans.

New Year Professional Wrestling Special Dec 29, 1980 Madison Square Garden Tatsumi Fujinami ＶＳ Don Diamond We're getting to the end of this thing. All that's left is stuff from the beginning and the end, so now we travel back to 1980 to see young Fujinami back when he used to go to New York all the time to defend his WWF Junior Heavyweight title. Howard Finkel gets us started by introducing "Bad News" Allen Coage - he gets the full real name plus nickname. I don't know what he's doing there, but he points at Fujinami, who almost hits him. We then get ten minutes of gentlemanly grappling. Two handshakes, a lot of rolling around, some head-scissors and a lot of arm drags. Fujinami wins abruptly with a German suplex. The match has Japanese commentary. It's too bad - I was looking forward to Vince telling us what a scientific matchup this was dozen times and saying "look at this!" every time they did a move he didn't know. This was fine, but it didn't really do anything for me. Neither man showed any personality. Most of what they did looked fine, and they did a lot for it being 1980, but they could have switched places and it wouldn't have made any difference. I was able to find very little about Don Diamond, who wrestled for five years and then disappeared. He's kept a low enough profile that you start getting DDP and a guy from F-Troop on the second page of Google results.

Yeah, I didn't find the Cornette/Russo stuff too bad in the Montreal episode, but it was a bit much this time. It wasn't the best use of their talent. Jim Ross turns into a complete idiot when discussing Steve Williams. Jim Cornette turns into a maniac when discussing Russo. Vince Russo should never be spoken to. So no one was at their best. Bart Gunn looks like 90s Bart Gunn with aging makeup. I'd have thought it was fake if I didn't know he was that old.

1986 Other matches July 25, 1986 Akita prefectural gymnasium IWGP Tag Championship Tatsumi Fujinami＆Kengo Kimura VS Kendo Nakazaki＆Mr.Pogo KY Wakamatsu is here, complete with Mr. Pogo-style face paint. He never tried to look like a Strong Machine. Kimura spends a lot of time getting beaten on. They double-team him, beat him up outside, exploit his bandaged flank. Lots of teased tags - they even do the thing where Fujinami gets tagged in and starts kicking ass (nearly literally), but the ref didn't see it and cuts him off. Then they do it again! It's really strange how much time Fujinami spends remonstrating with the ref. Pogo and Nagasaki are secondary opponents - the referee is the real enemy. This is pretty corny, but it's also effective. The crowd is going nuts throughout, and the Akita Prefectural Gymnasium is filled with "Kengo!" chants. Fujinami finally gets in, but we eventually return to our main event of Fujinami vs. Ref as the villains resort to choking Kimura with wrist tape. The ref ignores it and again pushes Fujinami back into his corner when he tries to do something about it. What's going on here, ref? Did Wakamatsu get to you? I mean, Nagasaki is choking Kimura with a foreign object in the middle of the ring, and you're pretending you can't see it even as everyone is pointing it out to you. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Things wind up getting really out of hand. Fujinami piledrives one of them onto a chair. Wakamatsu gets in there and winds up getting whipped into Pogo. It'd bedlam until Fujinami pins Pogo after a clothesline. This match was a lot of fun and a good example of getting the most out of what you have. Nagasaki and Pogo aren't any good - they look like old men, Nagasaki likes rest holds, and Pogo throws the worst clothesline I've ever seen. I can't imagine they were perceived at having much of a chance to win the titles. But they get the crowd involved by working a different kind of match and adding a subplot about an incompetent referee.

Tatsumi Fujinami (C/V7) VS Jerry Lawler '89.3.16 [IWGP Heavyweight Championship Match] Lawler, in full royal regalia and bearing the USWA title, really underlines the incoherence of New Japan Pro Wrestling's rules. He throws punches. Lots and lots of them. Regular standing punches, punches off the top rope, punches from every position. And nearly every single time he does it, the ref admonishes him. What's the point? We all know Lawler's not getting disqualified for this. He even makes a face to that effect - "Can you believe this guy?" I haven't seen much of Lawler's work, but here he reveals himself to be a regular Tennessee Tenryu: lots of punches, big personality, and a certain awkwardness when he tries anything that isn't punching. He seems to be making some of these moves up as he does them. He, like, drapes Fujinami's back across his back and drops to his knees. I'm not describing it well, but I don't know who could. Fujinami spends much of the match outwrestling Lawler but being outpunched. The coolest transition comes when Lawler tries a fist drop from the top, but Fujinami catches his fist, which is goofy as hell, and then Lawler makes this amazing cartoon face to demonstrate how discombobulated he is at this development. Fujinami then proceeds to Lawler it up in the sense that he's all awkward all of a sudden. He puts on a figure four like it's his first time, and he gets the pin on a less than smooth vertical suplex rollthrough. It was fun to see Lawler in this context. The fans didn't seem to know who he was or think that he could win, which took away from things a bit.

Tatsumi Fujinami (C/V3) VS (C) Kerry Von Erich '88.12.9 [IWGP & WCWA Double Heavyweight Championship Match] We pick this up in progress. They spill outside and Kerry applies the dreaded face claw. I'm surprised at how downright Abdullish he was acting here - he even bit Fujinami's forehead. The bell rings, but I guess they both want to keep going so the ref lets them. After some regular wrestling, Kerry claws Fujinami to the outside, and then they really start brawling. Von Erich misses a chairshot, but Fujinami doesn't. I've never seen him act this violent, actually. He hits Kerry repeatedly with the chair, leaving him clinging to the ring apron with blood pouring down his face. When another Von Erich (I don't know these guys - he looked like Tony Hawk) rolled him back into the ring, Fujinami commences to stomping the head wound until the ref pulls him off. Both the ref and Tony Hawk Von Erich try to stop Fujinami from kicking the bleeding man in the head, but Fujinami will not relent. What has gotten into him? Finally the ref calls it, and Fujinami is briefly the WCWA Heavyweight Champion (he gave it back, I guess after his berserker rage subsided and he realized what he'd done). This was really something, and I want to thank @paul sosnowski for the tip. I would have liked to have seen the whole match - did they gradually build to all this violence or was it on from the get-go? The former could have made this really great. It's so odd. I've repeatedly criticized Fujinami for not bringing intensity when the situation calls for it, but here was gleefully getting Kerry Von Erich's blood all over the bottom of his boot. I guess those face claws really pissed him off.

IWGP Champion Series June 1986 6 days Sapporo Nakajima Sports Center IWGP Tag Championship Tatsumi Fujinami＆Kengo Kimura VS Jimmy Snuka＆Wild Samoan They're calling him Wild Samoan, even though it clearly says "Samu" on the back of his jacket and on his pants. It's a little dehumanizing. The man has a name. So anyway, these two dudes with perms and no shoes get a shot at the tag titles, but Snuka doesn't seem all that interested. He spends an awfully long time sitting in headlocks. Then he'll throw a couple chops and do a half-assed high spot and let Mr. W. Samoan take over. Samu puts in the effort, but he seems to be out of his element. Fujinami tries to start out slow with some armlocks and stuff, but Samu resorts immediately to bodyslams. That feels like more a five-minutes-in move. He does some nifty, fast-paced stuff (including throwing himself over the top rope in order to bounce Fujinami's throat off it), but he didn't impress. Finally Kimura hits a couple leg lariats and pins Samu, and everyone goes home. Forgettable.

85IWGP Tag League match December 10, 1985 Aichi Prefectural Gymnasium Tatsumi Fujinami VS Bruiser Brody Brody's a wildman! He throws the ref out of the ring before the match starts, which brings no repercussions. Honestly, New Japan Pro Wrestling, that's just going to encourage more wildness. I know Brody's an intimidating guy with his fur vest and fur boots and standard-issue K-Mart gym socks, but you have to stand up for yourself. I tried to keep an open mind, but Brody saved me some time by being annoying immediately. The ref tries to get Brody's chain away from him, and as Bruiser stomps away from him, Fujinami attacks him from behind. But it doesn't hurt Brody, who can't even bother to look inconvenienced before applying the chain to Fujinami's throat. But - and I hate to admit this - Brody actually uses his invulnerability for something useful in this one. Fujinami gets a long stretch on offense, and Brody very gradually feels the effects. He drops to one knee. Fujinami hits him again (mostly enzuigiris) and he drops to both knees. He stumbles. He staggers. Finally Fujinami takes him down with a backdrop, and the crowd is going wild. Everything after that is a letdown, as they rush to the DCOR and then brawl outside basically forever. The whole thing's only 10 minutes, and maybe half of that is the bell-to-bell match. It was almost really good, as Brody was downright Andre-ish in his role as a giant being gradually chopped down. ADDENDUM: I was in a hurry when I wrote this, and I've been thinking more about this match, which is an impressive feat of storytelling. These dudes had five minutes, and they told a damn story. It had well-defined characters and an arc. It started and ended poorly, but all the lame stuff was maybe a minute long, and the people who paid money to see it liked it anyway. They had not been conditioned to sit on their hands because they knew nothing of consequence would happen in the first 20 minutes.

Challenge Spirit '85 September 18, 1985 Fukuoka Sports Center Antonio Inoki＆Tatsumi Fujinami VS Giant Machine＆Super Machine With special guest referee Lou Thesz! I guess this match is a bigger deal than it seems. Super Machine is Bill Eadie, they tell me. He's not any good. Andre's not any good in this either, and he's usually awesome. The match isn't any good. Inoki isn't any good. There are about 40 seconds combined of cool stuff here, which I'll get to in a minute. The Machines, who are really missing Hirata here, spend most of their time holding Inoki and Fujinami down and doing unconvincing rest holds on them. It felt like a WWF match - Andre even busts out the double noggin-knocker (they no-sell it). Fujinami is just great when they let him do anything. He takes over on the smaller but still pretty large Machine and starts going a mile a minute like he did back then. Top rope shin drop, explosive drop kick . . . and then he's stymied by a bear hug. As if that weren't bad enough, Andre shuffles over and they do the worst double-team maneuver I've ever seen. While Super Machine holds the victim in a bear hug, Giant Machine waves his mighty arm vaguely in Fujinami's direction. Come on, Andre. I know it's a lot of effort to get yourself in a position whence your arm can reach the guy, but it would have looked a lot better if you had. They then do it to Inoki, and it doesn't look any better. Pretty disappointed in Andre here. I guess he figures we won't know it's him because of the mask. So that earlier cool part was 35 seconds, and the other 5 comes at the finish. Andre and Inoki brawl outside, and Fujinami backslides Eadie for the win. It was fast and crisp, and everyone was so excited afterwards. That was cool. The rest of this was garbage.

1985 Other matches August 3, 1985 Aloha Stadium Tatsumi Fujinami＆Kengo Kimura VS Gene Lewis＆Gary Fulton Whole different feel here as the Fujinami Show goes Hawaiian. This is a big NWA show (Polynesian Hot Summer Night! - Here's a newspaper article about it) in Hawaii, and I wondered about the crowd. They give the swole ref a nice hand when he's introduced. They boo the Americans and cheer Kimura and Fujinami. They even seem to know who Fujinami is - they pop when he tags in the first time. So I don't know. Were they just polite, or was the crowd full of tape traders and vacationing Japanese? Is Giant Baba there? Is Maunakea Mossman? Actually, there's a pretty good chance Mossman is there, right? He's nine years old at this point. Curtis Iaukea was apparently his uncle, so he was wrestling-adjacent. I guess Taiyo Kea isn't a big enough deal that we get the Mick-Foley-watching-Superfly treatment when something like this happens. I detected a styles clash. I think Lewis and Fulton were trying to make Kimura the face in peril, but he decides it's Fujinami's turn and just walks over there while Lewis is beating him up. I think he was supposed to make that a little more dramatic. The result is that they're both faces in peril. The vast proportion of the match is the Americans beating up on one or another of these guys. They're in full heel mode, using the rings ropes as a garrote and yelling at the fans to shut up. Bad 80s finishes aren't only a problem on one side of the Pacific, it turns out, as we brawl outside and the bell rings. Everyone looks confused until the ring announcer comes in, mumbles something, and points at Fujinami and Kimura. Hail to the victors! This just didn't quite work. It was almost a traditional FIP-style tag match, except the faces weren't on board. The bad guys took almost all of the offense, but it didn't work as a giant vs. underdog thing because they weren't giants and cheated the whole time. If these guys worked together regularly, they probably could have done something nice. No one looked terrible, and there flashes of a good tag match. This probably wasn't the match that inspired Maunakea Mossman to be a pro wrestler.

Burning Spirit-in-Summer August 1, 1985, the two countries Kokugikan Tatsumi Fujinami VS Jimmy Snuka I'm kind of punting on this one. Snuka skeeves me out out, and I don't like looking at him. Even if I didn't know he was a (alleged) (probable) murderer, he's just off. If you pointed him out to me and said "Hey, that guy killed someone," I'd be all, "The roided out guy in the leopard print underpants and no shoes with the gross perm who's making weird faces that suggest he doesn't perceive the same reality that the rest of us do? Yeah, I can buy that." So I spent most of this match looking at a different tab, but it didn't seem like anything special. They roll around on the mat, and then they do some stuff. Snuka flexes and makes faces. This does give us probably the worst-botched Fujinami finish, and that's far from an empty category. It's supposed to be the old top rope bodypress rolled over into a pin by the other guy. I can't even describe how they mess it up. Fujinami lands on Snuka, but his momentum takes him too far. He has a slide back over while Snuka clings to his legs. Fujinami makes a bridge over him for a moment before Snuka rolls him over and gets the pin. I'm glad I wasn't enjoying this match, because that would have ruined it. It's weird that Fujinami, who's so good at so many things, has all these awful screw-ups at the ends of matches.