[1994-01-04-NJPW-Battlefield] Antonio Inoki vs Genichiro Tenryu

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

The last few minutes of this looked pretty good. Tenryu gets a win, which mildly surprises me, and of course Inoki lunges after him within seconds of the loss to make it seem like he got lucky despite it being a clean win.

[Kevin Ridge]

This has to be the first time I've seen Inoki lose a match. Granted I haven't seen a ton of matches so this was a pleasant surprise to see.

[Childs]

I've never seen the whole match, but the clip made me want to track it down. They really stiffed the shit out of each other down the stretch.

[jdw]

It's worth watching the whole thing. A little surprised it was edited, since it was Tenryu's "Big One" in the NJPW-WAR feud, with Hash's win ending the feud the next month.

 

John

[Loss]

Didn't even get *** in the WON, and I have never heard a single person talk it up as a good match. The finish was here because it was an important match, and we understood the value of it. If we could do it all over again, I'd put this on in full and completely toss the Doc/Eagle vs Misawa/Akiyama tag everyone pushed for in its place.

[jdw]

Didn't even get *** in the WON, and I have never heard a single person talk it up as a good match. The finish was here because it was an important match, and we understood the value of it. If we could do it all over again, I'd put this on in full and completely toss the Doc/Eagle vs Misawa/Akiyama tag everyone pushed for in its place.

I'm not sure if folks could have been any clearer:

 

http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?show...12685&st=68

 

You followed up on me & Childs pointing to it, and I was even more explicit. Don't know what more we could have done.

 

As far as dropping stuff, the one that could have been dropped is the WAR tag the following night. That's pretty much a like-for-like: NJPW vs WAR, neither is a MOTYC, one is in the end pretty much a throw away (both your comments and Childs get that across), while the other is the main event of the biggest show in the world in 1994 and Tenryu's climax of his feud with NJPW.

 

There are times when even a ** or *1/2 match deserves to be on the sets. The Sting-Hogan from Starcade 1997 MUST be on that one: it's the climax of the NWO vs WCW feud, and Sting's long storyline. Set aside that it got screwed seven ways to Sunday early in the next year. In 1997... it's pretty much everything WCW built towards. I know a lot of people think it's a crappy match, and I'm one of the few who were morbidly entertained by it. From a historical standpoint, it's the highpoint of the entire history of WCW. It has to be on.

 

Tenryu-Inoki is one of those.

 

In the long term, we're covered because it will be a match on Will's Tenryu set along with some other NJPW vs WAR matches that didn't make the Yearbooks.

 

Short term... maybe it's worthwhile to toss out late in the thread a question along the lines:

 

"We only have space for one of these two: 1/4 Tenryu-Inoki or 1/5 NJPW-WAR Tag. Is one of these more of a must than the other?"

 

And that puts it on our heads to jump in with one last chance to say something.

 

John

[Loss]

I have already said I wish it could have gone on and that it should have gone on. But when the only argument for something is that it's historically significant, I take that as including a clip to show that it happened, not including the entire thing. Yes, there are absolutely ** or **1/2 matches that should go on in full regardless of how good they were because they were so important, and we've included quite a few of those on previous yearbooks. I don't know that I truly got that this was something on par with Hogan/Sting at Starrcade '97 in terms of significance.

[Exposer]

This was pretty damn good of what was shown. It was cool to see Tenryu get the win over someone as huge as Inoki. The post-match was great with the NJ guys wearing jackets or outfits of some kind with their names on the back channeling my high school soccer team. Hase slapping Inoki was tremendous too. Those WAR outfits looked awesome.

[soup23]

Finishing stretch was intriguing and well paced. After watching Tenryu throughout the 1980's All Japan set, it was nice to see him get such a big win in this setting. Inoki jumping on him right after the bell is a big F U moment. What was shown made me want to seek out the full version and if the remaining is as strong as the stretch run, this may be something worth considering putting on in full for the errata set.

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

Can somone explain why Hase slapped Inoki after the match?

[FLIK]

This is such a uniquely Japanese match. There's a JIP version of this on youtube, shows about 11 of 16 mins. Shortly into it Inoki locks on an illegal sleeper and chokes Tenryu into unconciousness. The next 4 minutes consist of Tenryu laying on the mat knocked out & after that an additional minute of him slowly regaining conciousness. You'd never see anything like this in the US or Mexico or Europe or anywhear else but it's Japan & you can get away with it thear, or atleast a small handfull of masters can. Pissed off Inoki makes this work, the ref makes this work, the crowd makes this work, Tenryu's team mates and the NJPW crew alike going nuts encouraging him to get up & fight makes this work. After that Tenryu comes back to life and we get another 6 or 7 mins of bomb throwing action. An amazing spectacle for sure.

[Zenjo]

Were there any big names from 80's or 90's Puro that didn't job to Tenryu? Whilst not a good match it was certainly intriguing seeing who was going to win.

[PeteF3]

Interesting match when viewed full. Inoki stuns me by working this basically as the heel, being the first to throw closed fists and then the big moment when he won't break the choke sleeper with Tenryu on the ropes. Tiger Hattori gives him what-for and Inoki responds by slugging him. Inoki could give Hogan lessons in being an entitled little shit. Meanwhile Tenryu is out cold. This is almost comically overdone, as Tenryu is unmoving for close to 3 minutes from being sleepered for about 10 seconds, and the guy should have had permanent brain damage even in a pro wrestling context. Hattori grants him enough time to wake up, because of the illegal nature of the hold, which he eventually does. Inoki again refuses to break when he applies a cross armbreaker in the ropes, and the Dome crowd BOOS him. Holy shit, I've never seen a reaction to Inoki like that before. Boo-tista, indeed. Tenryu comes back again and while this doesn't really look like a shoot in the UWFI sense, the stiff lock-ups and rough strikes carry the air of something on the verge of breaking down totally. Tenryu catches Inoki with a power bomb for the win and there's almost no audible reaction from the Dome crowd--despite their distaste for Inoki's tactics this seemed like an Ivan-beats-Bruno stunner to them. Tenryu is now one of the only wrestlers--and the only Japanese--to get pinfalls over both Baba and Inoki. Historically significant and well worth watching just to see Inoki work heel if nothing else. I wouldn't really call it a good match, though.

[...TG]

This was really entertaining for what it was. I did have to rewind to make sure Inoki took the pinfall, which was why he kicked out right after three and covered Tenryu, I'm sure. : )

 

WAR never really had its shit together business-wise, but man, their warm-up jacket game was on point. Those things were sweet.

[garretta]

Now that I know the NJPW-WAR feud would continue, this lost a lot of significance to me. I thought going in that this was it, that Tenryu had now officially beaten NJPW, and that the postmatch was about the two sides making peace. That was my reason for Hase (I thought it was Sasaki, actually) slapping Inoki; he'd extended an olive branch to Tenryu as the elder statesman of the promotion, and the young bucks didn't like it. As I've come to find out, this was just a way to keep Tenryu hot for the real ​blowoff a month later. I'd have rather seen old man Inoki beat Tenryu than Hash, but that's just me, I suppose.

 

I enjoyed Pete's story about how Inoki was the one to work heel. That, to me, is a bigger surprise than the result. I never thought I'd read about a pro-NJPW crowd actually booing Inoki, either. The things you learn from reading this board!