William Bologna

It’s seems like there’s one guy per episode that comes off as completely untrustworthy. I didn’t believe a word Mansfield said. He didn’t have FBI guys on the plane. No one planted coke on him. I didn’t know anything about Schultz except for the Stossel incident. He was fun. And back in the day he looked just like Steve Austin in a wig made of ramen.

Stan Hansen/Mike Barton/Johnny Smith vs. Toshiaki Kawada/Genichiro Tenryu/Nobutaka Araya (AJPW 8/20/2000) Johnny's contributions to this match - which I'm sure were spectacular - are left on the cutting room floor. The other guys manage to do some good stuff. Barton holds Araya up before suplexing him and manages to get a hand free so he can give Tenryu and Kawada the finger. They get him back with a really cool enzuigiri/ganmengiri combination. You don't notice how bad Tenryu's kick is when there's another, better kick happening in front of it. But the only really notable thing about this match comes at the end. Barton shrugs off a couple more face kicks to give Kawada a punch in the gut and a powerbomb for the win. See what I mean about AJPW at this point? It's a whimsical, magical place where Bart Gunn can pin Toshiaki Kawada. I'm not sure what's missing with Barton. He's a big guy, he does some really athletic stuff, and he made Jim Ross cry in the Brawl for All, but his work just doesn't register.

Steve Williams vs. Johnny Smith (AJPW 07/02/2000) Oh man do I love All Japan right after everyone leaves. The promotion had lightened up a little bit over the course of the 1990s, but it remained the most staid, hidebound wrestling company in the world. Then - POOF - almost everyone splits, leaving Kawada, Fuchi, and a bunch of foreigners. What had once been the most stable roster around turns into a collection randos putting even weirdest WAR card to shame. Gran Naniwa's there. They dust off Fujiwara and Kim Duk. Remember Dan Kroffat? Well here he is again. Tenryu's lumpy cronies are moving up in the world. And with all but one creditable wrestler gone, that means there's room for advancement. It's time for Johnny Smith to shine! A little bit. Briefly. We start here, on the second night of the new All Japan, the very night that Tenryu makes his unthinkable return. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when they booked these shows. It can't have been easy, and it wound up weird. Korakuen gets five matches, and four of them are singles. The main event has George Hines in it. There are twelve wrestlers, and two-thirds of them are foreign. Williams vs. Smith is our semi-main, and we get the last four minutes of seventeen. Once again, Korakuen is cheering for a Johnny Smith upset (though not as loudly as back in '97). Smith, selling his leg so hard it interferes with his kip-up, is on the ropes. He fights the doctor bomb, but that leaves him open for a pretty great finish: Williams punches him right in his goddamn face and backdrops him. I guess Williams was inspired by Tenryu's presence - that punch was really something. So I guess Smith isn't headed to the top just yet. This was short and even so had a couple obvious screw-ups, but the finish was cool and I wasn't the only one cheering for Johnny, so I liked it. It is perhaps merciful that we didn't get the other thirteen minutes.

Owen Hart vs. Johnny Smith (North American Title Stampede 04/29/1988) I had to date this by the announcers mentioning the death of Tiger Joe Tomasso. That was kind of morbid. We join this in progress just before Makhan Singh interferes and KOs Owen on the outside. Smith takes advantage by doing a shoulderbreaker and stomping Owen's arm. Puzzling. Owen wakes up, and we are told he is furious. And thus we find something Owen Hart is bad at. He doesn't look furious, and his punches on a prone Johnny are pretty embarrassing. You forget how bad they are a moment later when he tries choking Smith. I mean, you always hear that Owen was a really nice guy, but too nice to pretend convincingly to beat someone up in a wrestling match? Makhan hops up to distract Owen, and Smith rolls up Hart only to be rolled himself. Six minutes revolving around interference from Bastion Booger. If I were rating these, I wouldn't rate this.

Owen Hart vs. Johnny Smith (Stampede 08/18/1989) The quality on this one is rough. The video is good enough that I can see Johnny Smith has the worst haircut in history (short on top, shaved on the sides, endless mullet). But the audio is so bad that the commentary is just a low Canadian buzz. My limited Stampede experience suggests that this may be an improvement. This is the mirror image of the Awesome match. They wrestle so much! Hip tosses, armbars, flips to get out of out of armdrags, the whole megillah. Owen was so fast back then. He's really impressive. Smith keeps up with him, but he's more of a brawler than I thought he was. I was expecting his work to be more Zack Sabre-ish, but he doesn't betray his heritage with joint holds as often as I figured he would. So they wrestle and wrestle and wrestle until Smith goes for a piledriver but is reversed. Owen then hits an awesome moonsault, but Smith's evil manager hops up. Hart throws manager into managee and then stacks them and goes to the top, only to be knocked off by Larry Cameron for a DQ win. This was a lot fun and definitely action-packed, but it was like what Bret Hart thinks a Ric Flair match is. They just did stuff without building to anything or telling a story. I could make out through the buzz that this was a grudge match, but there was too much hip-tossing and dancing for that to come across.

Mike Awesome vs. Johnny Smith (ECW Heavyweight Title Match 09/26/1999) Smith earned a title match by losing to Sabu three days before this, losing to Jerry Lynn one day before this, and defeating Tom Marquez a minute before this. This is a ringside fan cam video, so we get to hear some scintillating conversation ("I'm gonna kick your ass!"), some E-C-Dub chants, and even a solitary "Kill the Brit!" The wounds of 1812 are still fresh in Michigan. Smith isn't exactly in his element here, as they do no wrestling. I don't believe that a single arm is held throughout. It's all moves, including a Michael Elgin-esque number of powerbombs (i.e., too many). They do some stuff and then Awesome sets up a table on the outside only for Smith to slip out of a powerbomb and dropkick him through it. There is no point to this other than a dopamine rush for the 856 in attendance, as the only effect it has on Awesome is that he looks kind of uncomfortable. He gets right up under his own power and then wins. Garbage!

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.