William Bologna

94WRESTLING DONTAKU IN FUKUOKA DOME May 1, Fukuoka Dome, 1994 IWGP Heavyweight Championship bout Tatsumi Fujinami vs Hashimoto Shinya One month later, Hashimoto gets his rematch. He's not wasting any time, either - he picks up where he left off in April, jumping the champ before the bell and kicking his ass right out of the ring. He proceeds to kick Fujinami about three hundred times. Fujinami gets a lil tiny comeback and puts Hashimoto in some holds, but he's just killing a couple minutes before Hashimoto kills him. Which is exactly what happens - lots of kicks, a DDT, and Hashimoto has his title back. This was six minutes long, which is not something you expect from a title match; especially in these days of interminable main events and Meltzer giving stars based on mileage as much as anything else. It was a hell of a six minutes, as Hashimoto really brings out the best in Fujinami. His relentless stiffness forces something compelling out of Fujinami, who's all too willing to go on autopilot when he's not being repeatedly potatoed. As far as Fujinami's opponents go, Shinya Hashimoto is truly the Hulk Hogan of wrestlers.

1994 Battle Rush April 1994 4 days Hiroshima Green Arena IWGP Heavyweight Championship bout Hashimoto Shinya vs Tatsumi Fujinami This is a title match, but I don't know which one is the champion. For some reason, NJPW World isn't big on showing us entrances. It's been a while since we've seen Hashimoto, and I never noticed how much he looks like Jack Black, star of such motion pictures as Nacho Libre and School of Rock. He's also had quite a recording career as one half of Tenacious D, whose albums include The Pick of Destiny and Rize of the Fenix. But enough about that; it's time for the ring announcer to make the introductions. And this guy is in such a cheesy red velvet tuxedo that he looks like a nightclub entertainer in the hit film Goodfellas, which I still can't believe lost out on the Best Picture Oscar to Dances with Wolves, which Kevin Costner adapted from the memoirs of one of the early Dudley Boys. Our competitors spend some time circling and looking for the advantage, accomplishing little except making Hashimoto jiggle. At the six minute mark, though, they set the tone for the rest of the match: Fujinami commences to slapping Hashimoto in the face as hard as he can, and his opponent responds by kicking Fujinami right in the back over and over. At this point I was marking out like David Arquette and Scott Caan when they met Jimmy King in Ready to Rumble. We get the best Fujinami in this match. As I already mentioned, he's hitting Hashimoto really hard, and then he does a magnificent job of conveying that he's in danger of losing not just the match but also some brain cells and years off his life. He's slumped in the corner and almost out when he mounts a comeback and locks in a dragon sleeper, turning crimson from exertion and trauma. They reenact a couple of those Maeda matches from the 80s - Hashimoto keeps kicking Fujinami, who staggers and falls down. We get a little extra spice as the ref keeps trying to keep Hashimoto off of his comatose opponent, even jumping on his back at one point (this prompts Hase to jump up on the apron and get ref-kicked off - Hase hasn't been having a lot of luck on the apron lately). More kicks, and Fujinami's close enough to dead that Hashimoto can't even pick him up. When he finally does get back up, Hashimoto comes off the ropes to administer the coup de grace only to get caught in a cradle, which Fujinami screws up just like back in the day. He can't get his arm around Hashimoto's expansive waist, there's an awkward pause, and they're under the ropes as the ref counts three. I haven't enjoyed something so much only to be let down by the ending since the 1997 Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cop Land. Hashimoto is just as annoyed and stomps the victor before being peeled off by his corner men. We don't get entrances, but we get to see Fujinami getting a belt and a trophy and a microphone with which he can make a speech. This was great. I can't remember the last time Fujinami looked so good; his intensity made this compelling.

NIPPON REGULAR ARMY VERSUS HEISEI ISHINGUN SINGLE SEVENTH GAME (ROUND 7) TATSUMI FUJINAMI VS SHIRO KOSHINAKA WAR went home, so we're back to the phony-baloney Heisei Ishingun fake-ass outsider faction faux invasion ersatz bogus feud. Heisei Ishingun is the Monkees to WAR's Beatles. Which makes Shiro Koshinaka the Michael Nesmith to Genichiro Tenryu's McCartney, Lennon, Harrison, and what the hell Ringo too. As cynical as I am about this, the crowd is at a fever pitch as we head into the climax of a seven match series to decide once and for all if Heisei Ishingun, the Bush to WAR's Nirvana, is better than New Japan (Great Kabuki is Krist Novoselic in this metaphor). The result may surprise you. We're all tied up at 3 following what I'm assuming was a clutch performance from Osamu Kido in defeating Akitoshi Saito (we'll just say he's Micky Dolenz). Fujinami whips off his shirt and away we go. The story they told was that Fujinami kept trying for his dragon-prefixed finishers, while Koshinaka was focused on his opponent's shoulder and arm, which were covered in tape. They told it well, keeping the fans on the edge of their seats during the dragon suplex teases. Koshinaka's anti-arm offense was pleasantly unboring. And they weren't just wasting our time with this stuff, either. The finish comes after some extracurricular activity, as the New Japan team gets so frustrated that Fujinami is enduring a number of armbars that wouldn't look out of place on Chris Jericho's printer paper that a couple of them hop up on the apron. Koshinaka is forced to slap Hiroshi Hase around a little bit, and he follows that up by hitting Fujinami with a sloppy 1988-style powerbomb and then locking in a final armbar. Heisei Ishingun, once considered the Crazy Town to WAR's Limp Bizkit, has proven itself to be the greatest faction in pro wrestling history.

FIGHTING SPIRIT '94 February 1994 5 days Sapporo Nakajima Sports Center Tatsumi Fujinami & Osamu Kido VS Akira Nogami & Takayuki Iizuka Nogami and Iizuka have dopey-looking matching tag team pants with fringes on them, and I don't know which one is which. I used to recognize Iizuka because he wore pink, but he traded those in for the fringes; at the turn of the century he was the guy who looked kind of like Dave Grohl who stood next to Yuji Nagata; now he has a metal hand and is in obvious pain when he moves - I recognize all of those guys, but not this one. I couldn't pick Britt Baker out of a lineup either, though, so maybe it says more about me than about these losers. They're really playing up the tag team thing here. In addition to the matching outfits, they do all kinds of lame double-team maneuvers. There's a double clothesline, a double dropkick - they're the poor man's New Rockers! They do all this stuff to Kido and then hit him with a body press, but Fujinami comes off the top with his shin attack, hits one of them (which one? who cares?) with the backdrop into a backbreaker, and puts him to dragon sleep. This accomplished very little other than making Nogami and Iizuka look like jobbers.

94BATTLE FIELD IN Tokyo Dome January 4 Tokyo Dome, 1994 Eighth game single match Tatsumi Fujinami vs Hulk Hogan I realize that whenever one of these Hogan matches shows up I'm the victim of my low expectations, but damned if he isn't one of the Fujinami's best opponents. When they last hooked up, back in 1985, Hogan was so good that I had to re-examine a number of my long-held wrestling beliefs. In the US, Hogan was the examplar of style over substance wrestling - a man capable of nothing but posing, someone who needed the full force of the WWF's media machine behind him for anyone to like him. But in Japan, he brings the goods. His charisma is effortless; he doesn't need Rick Springfield to get over. And he's not out of place when it comes to the work - he runs fast, hits hard, and only occasionally looks completely embarrassing on the mat. I realized that Hogan's US work wasn't lazy, obvious, and predictable because that's all he was capable of; it's because he knew that that's what the people wanted. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid: that's the philosophy behind Hogan's work in the WWF. And in Japan, the people need to see you wrestle if you're going to get over, so that's what Hogan does, and he's really good at it. Hulk Hogan makes being Hulk Hogan look easy. Examining his work quickly shows that it's anything but. This is a typical Hogan in Japan match. He does all the matwork, and I enjoyed it. It's strange - when he's on the receiving end of the takeovers, he's downright graceful. When he's the one doing the taking over, it's noticeably clunky. But there's some good stuff in here. He and Fujinami do a long headlock sequence that's really impressive Eventually they get up, and goddamn does Hogan have some good offense when he's in the Tokyo Dome. He axe bombers Fujinami onto that walkway leading the ring, and Fujinami lariats them both back into the ring. At one point Fujinami's trying to sink in a sleeper, and Hogan backs him into the corner and just wrecks him with back elbows. These were seriously stiff. Fujinami briefly pretends he has a chance by kicking Hogan in the leg a few times after a missed legdrop, but Hogan hits an axe bomber in the corner and then another for the pin. The (reasonable) criticism here is that Fujinami got eaten up and was merely a bystander in the match. That happens to him a lot, particularly against the iconic champions of 1980s US wrestling. But - and I never thought I'd think this - the Hulk Hogan show is good enough for me. I'm probably overrating this because I saw Jimmy Hart there with his megaphone . . . and he never used it.

G1 CLIMAX August 7, 1993 Ryogoku Kokugikan Tatsumi Fujinami VS Hiroshi Hase This was an interesting study in Fujinami working a more modern style. When I saw the roster for this one, I thought there'd be a lot of matwork to endure. That's Fujinami's MO, and I figured Hase would follow the older worker's lead. Instead, we got a very 90s-ish moves-based match. Fujinami goes so far as to take a couple of his old-timey submissions and turn them into moves - an abdominal stretch becomes a German suplex, and a dragons sleeper is turned into some kinda slop drop-looking thing. Hase takes the advantage by hitting two Rocks Bottom (that is the correct plural - it's like attorneys general) outside the ring and proceeds to work on the old man's back. Fujinami regains the initiative by booting Hase in the knee, and then we do sit in holds for a while. Hase hits all his big moves, including a dragon suplex and a northern lights suplex, but he can't put Fujinami away. The veteran takes over with a pair of his own Rocks Bottom (not quite as cool-looking as Hase's but not bad) and gets the win with a deathlock of the scorpion variety. It turns out (I didn't know this until checking Wikipedia after the match) this was the finals of the G1, and Fujinami wins! So belated congratulations, old-timer. I liked this a lot - it's the best Fujinami singles match we've seen since . . . I don't know, maybe Vader? He was in his element working with Hase, who's just great.

WRESTLINNG DONTAKU IN FUKUOKA DOME May 3, Fukuoka Dome, 1993 Antonio Inoki & Tatsumi Fujinami vs Riki Choshu & Genichiro Tenryu Wrestling Dontaku used to take place in a dome. New Japan's 2010s resurgence is great, but don't get carried away with how much they've resurged. I'm sure there's some kind of interesting backstory that explains how these teams came together, but I don't know anything about it. On a functional level, this is the final result of the problem that's bedeviled every instance of this WAR incursion: WAR only has one guy. Who can stand next to Tenryu and main event a dome show? Scan the lineup of in the last three matches in this thread - you don't main event Wrestling Goddamn Dontaku with Koki Kitahara. So it's Tenryu and Choshu vs Inoki and Fujinami, which highlights how much the ring attire game changed in the 90s. These 80s relics are all wearing black trunks. Imagine trying to keep it straight if you weren't a puro obsessive who already knew all about them. It's . . . uh . . . the short one and weird-looking one against the ugly ones - the guy with the perm and the other one with the mullet. It winds up being exactly the kind of personality-reliant New Japan main event that made all the tape-traders love All Japan. It's not bad or anything, but the work's not compelling enough on its own; it relies on you being really invested in these dramatis personae. It's your typical lay around on the mat and then every so often get up and stiff one another kind of match. It's the game Tenryu was born to play, but Fujinami's not great at it - once again he doesn't have the presence to stand out in this company, and he's not one of these fighting spirit tough guys who can get over by standing motionless and trading punches. Inoki, on the other hand, is just great at it. It's really a shame that he spent so much of his career rolling around trying for octopus holds, because even I marked out at the end of the match when he's aiming these deliberate, dramatic punches at Tenryu's face. With his stiff strikes and awful-looking enzuigiri, he could have been the rich man's Tenryu. Choshu just doesn't work for me. I get that he has charisma, that people buy into him. But the highlights of his matches are supposed to be when he lines it up and levels some chump with a lariat, and his lariats are just terrible. They do not look like they hurt, and there's no excuse for it. Is he not hitting guys hard enough? This is a main event in Japan - you can hit them as hard as you want! I guess my advice for three quarters of the participants in the match is: Be More Like Tenryu.

Tatsumi Fujinami & Riki Choshu & Osamu Kido & Hiroshi Hase & Takayuki Iizuka vs Genichiro Tenryu and Ashura Hara & Takashishi Ishikawa & Hiromichi Fuyuki & Koki Kitahara 2/16/1993 It's all hands on deck in this installment of the NJPW vs. WAR feud. Fujinami gets top billing for the home team, while Tenryu gets a bigger pop than anyone during the introductions. The crowd is beyond excited for this; they roar every time a new contestant enters. Even Fuyuki. Even Iizuka! Inevitably, Tenryu is the MVP here. He's menacing, well-permed, and hitting people just as hard as he possibly can. But it's Choshu who wins the glory: We get our first fall when Fujinami hits Ishikawa with a couple enzuigiris and tags in Choshu, who lariats him for the pin. The second fall sees Kido (who's just great in this, as is almost everyone else) (not Hara, whom we haven't seen since 1980 and who got old in the interim) as the surprise hero for New Japan. He's been pulling out these super nifty armbars all over the place, and one of them takes Tenryu out of commission for a while. Kitahara eats a uranage from Hase and then a lariat and deathlock from Choshu. New Japan presses their power play advantage and wins in two straight falls. This was great. Everyone got to shine, even the pack of nobodies backing up Tenryu. The New Japan guys were surprisingly generous with their opponents, although I guess it's easier to be magnanimous when you're winning in two. Iizuka and Hase did a lot of the actual wrestling for their team, and they were certainly up to the task. Fujinami once again doesn't get treated as a legendary main eventer - he got beat on as much as anyone. But this was about building Choshu back up, and it did that. It looks like we only get one more match in this WAR feud. I'm going to miss it. Programming notes: During my post-G1 wrestling fatigue, it appears that Gedo sneaked in and added a bunch of matches to the Fujinami categories. The good news is that we get some Dick Murdoch. The bad news is that this is never, ever going to end. The damn thread turned a year old on Thursday.

Just trying to figure out why you think you know so much about everyone's business that you can summarily dismiss the idea of strategic leaks to Dave. Is fantasy booking contract negotiations a thing? Is that what you're doing?

You just restated my premise there, so the answer is yes: They couldn't have leaked that information because that's not how you would have handled their contract negotiations.

Is your argument that they couldn't have leaked this info because that's not how you would have handled their contract negotiations?

This was exactly my experience with this match. I don't like Kenny Omega. He embodies a strain of pro wrestling I don't enjoy, and frankly I find him odd and creepy. But damned if I wasn't completely enthralled by the end of this.

I lean more towards the "New Japan is really good" camp rather than the "We're all obsessed with Japanese girls vis a vis our dicks" school.

Page is one of the guys in this thing I hadn't already made my mind up about, so I've been watching him pretty closely. He's a really appealing natural babyface, but I agree that his moveset is pretty goofy. He'd be more effective if he stuck to basics. Which I think also applies to Jay White. He's been great, but he could get all his heeling done without throwing half a dozen suplexes per match.

It's not just Omega's work either. It's not my cup of tea, but I can understand why people like. He's very good at that sort of thing if you like that sort of thing. But Meltzer's over the moon about everything else too. He loves Omega's promos. He breathlessly recaps his YouTube videos. He's a complete mark for the guy, and I just don't get it. I like Meltzer a lot - I think he's a pretty straight shooter, and he knows everything. But I find his preferences regarding modern wrestling to be pretty goofy.

Can we default them to newest first? I spent the week thinking there was nothing new for this month because it was all on the second page.

I guess I like Jay White now. This was not as good as either man's previous match, but I'm still not tired of White being sadistic. It was too long, and White going and getting a chair made absolutely no sense. He had Tanahashi down and ready for the finish, so he gets himself a weapon that will disqualify him if he uses it. It seemed perfunctory - "I use chairs now, so I'd better get one before the match is over."

Tatsumi Fujinami VS The Great Kabuki 2/5/1993 We again run into the thinness of the WAR roster, as this match is all about convincing us that the Great Kabuki has a chance against Fujinami. Fujinami has a young Yuji Nagata and Hiroyoshi Tenzan in his corner, as well as a middle-aged Riki Choshu. I never accepted those two working together after wrestling each other three hundred and twenty-four times in 1983, but I kind of buy it now that there's an external threat. The story here - and I liked it - was that Kabuki's cornermen kept distracting Fujinami and/or the ref long enough for Kabuki to do something dastardly, which is his specialty. It worked quite a few times, but I'm unhappy to report that in most of these cases Kabuki didn't do any more than put Fujinami in an armbar. The other story is that Kabuki wants the match to take place outside the ring, where he has help. We're used to Fujinami bleeding all over the place when he goes out there, so it makes sense when Choshu takes it upon himself to roll his compatriot back inside when the WAR guys are threatening him. Business picks up when Kabuki takes advantage of the referee's inattention to spit mist in Fujinami's face. Our hero looks like he's covered in pesto and in real danger. He kicks out of Kabuki's attempts to pin him and tries a dragon suplex. Kabuki pops him pretty hard to get out of it. Fujinami tries a rollup off the ropes, which doesn't work, and a rollup off the shoulders, which does. This was almost really good. I liked Kabuki's presence. You could tell the dude was a cheater, and it brought an interesting dynamic. But other than the cheating and the finishing sequence (which was a lot of fun), this wasn't much of a match.

I really enjoyed this. It had good character work and violence, which are the things I want out of a pro wrestling match. Jay White did a whole bunch of little things that I popped for (replacing the ring apron, for instance). Did you ever see the Tanahashi vs Taiyo Kea match from 2007? I watched it a year or so ago, and there was something about Kea's offense. He wasn't doing anything fancy, but all the stuff he did do just kind of looked like it stung. He was quietly cruel. It wasn't the outre, supervillanous sadism of Minoru Suzuki, but he was hurting someone and taking pride in his work. Jay White had that going on - everything he did looked like it hurt just a bit more than I thought it would. My only complaint is that Okada couldn't muster enough violence. White was being such a bastard, and I wanted to see him punished. I thought I would when Okada started laying into him with elbows, but after a couple of those he awkardly called a spot and they started running. I liked this Okada better than the titleholding version, but I wanted more viciousness than he brought.

Elgin is terrible at every single aspect of pro wrestling other than being strong (and look, he's got barbells on his gear!). I sincerely believe that he is the worst guy on the NJPW roster.

I tracked this down because I wanted to see Tenryu pin Baba, and I'm glad I did. This was a masterclass in working with limited opponents. What do you do when half the participants in a match are old men who can't do anything convincingly? You stiff the hell out of them. You get blood on the face in peril. You bump like crazy during the comebacks. Great, intense match.

Tatsumi Fujinami vs Takahashi Ishikawa 1/4/1993 After one whole match, we set aside the feud with the fake outsiders for a feud with real ones: This year's January 4th Tokyo Dome show is headlined by back-to-back NJPW vs. WAR clashes! (Heisei Ishingun is all the way down in the second match, behind a bunch of WCW guys.) A rivalry with WAR is a difficult thing to book. At the top, you have Genichiro Tenryu. He's won the triple crown. He's pinned Baba. He's got a pedigree, credibility. So you match him up with Riki Choshu at the top of the card (it wasn't any good, but that's not the point). If Choshu's #1, then Fujinami's #2, and he gets . . . Takahashi Ishikawa. That's the problem when you're dealing with Tenryu's vanity promotion. The talent thins out real fast after you get past Tenryu. I knew nothing about Ishikawa, but he looks like Tenryu and Arashi had a kid. Hell, I read his Wikipedia article and I still don't know much about him, which makes me think that there's just not that much to know. But here he is the semi-main of a sold out Tokyo Dome show, so let's see what happens. Fujinami comes out hot with the boxing. A dropkick sends Ishikawa outside, and he follows up with a tope. At this point the crowd is going apeshit. Then Ishikawa takes over, and we sit in a headlock for most of the rest of the match. Whew! I was getting a little overexcited there. Eventually Ishikawa escapes two dragon sleeper attempts by kicking Fujinami in the face (that was cool). He hits two powerbombs and goes to the top after Fujinami kicks out, but our hero follows him and suplexes him. He hits three Inoki-style enzuigiris and locks in the dragon sleeper for the win. This was OK. The body of the match was dull, but not so dull that I'm mad or anything. Ishikawa did not appear to be on Fujinami's level, either as a worker or as a believable competitor. I think some of the subtext of the work was lost on me - in addition to Fujinami's alluding to Inoki with the kicks, Ishikawa tried a dragon sleeper of his own and a scorpion deathlock. I guess they were doing a thing?

Tatsumi Fujinami & Riki Choshu & Osamu Kido vs Kengo Kimura & Shiro Koshinaka & Masashi Aoyagi 8/15/1992 Here we have the debut of Heisei Ishingun, a faux outsider faction that kicked around for most of the 90s and never accomplished much. You've got Kimura trying to get out from under Fujinami's modest shadow; Koshinaka (now in black pants!) using his ass attacks for evil; and Aoyagi, who likes to kick it. He's a karate guy. It's funny Aoyagi showed up here - I just started listening to Bahu's magisterial history of FMW, the early part of which is all Onita vs. Aoyagi and various other karate guys. Never heard of the guy in my life, and here is showing up twice in a week. The idea here is to get the HI faction over as a threat even though no one in it was previously perceived as such, so everyone's selling like crazy for these guys. In particular, Kimura's spamming these leg lariats and the boys in black trunks are acting like they're devastating. There's some good heat here. Before the match begins, Fujinami strolls over to have a word with Kimura, but Koshinaka steps in and slaps him across the face. There's also a yelling match with one of HI's corner men (I think it's Akitoshi Saito, but he doesn't have completely terrible hair so I can't be sure). After ten minutes or so of fast-paced action, Kimura pins Fujinami after one of those leg lariats. Then everyone runs in and we have a brawl. This was cool. I went back and looked up the Heisei Ishingun stuff after the match - while I was watching it, I had no idea why these people were teaming or what, in general, was the beef, but I liked it anyway.

The interview with Juice was fun. He just seems like a good dude. Jay White was dull. Cody was a pretty interesting overview of the business and WWE's writer problems. The Tanahashi one was a little painful since the guy doesn't speak English and Dave absolutely refuses to stop asking paragraph-long multi-part questions in those situations. He confirmed that Kenta Kobashi is a nice guy. It was interesting that both Juice and Tanahashi expressed some reservations about the current style ("Too much moves"), and then Takahashi goes out and breaks his neck the next day.

The two best heavyweights in New Japan having a title match in England. Not only a fascinating example of professional wrestling in our time, but also evidence that Rev Pro's booking is better than New Japan's.