Kenta Kobashi

[BillThompson]

Just watched the big 05-26-1990 tag, and of the three young workers in that match I found Kobashi easily in third place behind Misawa and Taue. Maybe this will change going forward, and by no means does it mean Kobashi was bad. He was still great, just glaring flaws compared to the relatively polished Misawa and Taue.

[Childs]

 

 

Early Kobashi is easily my favorite Kobashi. Up until 95 he's absolutely incredible in everything for me. Kawada takes a while longer to put it all together, but once 92-93 hits I'm more into him than Kobashi usually. That being said, 1993 Kenta Kobashi is probably a top 5 pick easy for me.

I dunno, Kawada was a really a good tag worker in 1988/89. He was still a step behind Fuyuki but was still a big part of why those matches were great.

 

 

'89 Kawada reminds me a little of WWE Daniel Bryan or Horsemen-era Benoit, an undersized heavyweight who takes a lot of beatings but has enough offense and works with enough pace and intensity to make himself look credible against significantly larger men.

 

 

He wasn't undersized.

[Lee Casebolt]

 

 

 

Early Kobashi is easily my favorite Kobashi. Up until 95 he's absolutely incredible in everything for me. Kawada takes a while longer to put it all together, but once 92-93 hits I'm more into him than Kobashi usually. That being said, 1993 Kenta Kobashi is probably a top 5 pick easy for me.

I dunno, Kawada was a really a good tag worker in 1988/89. He was still a step behind Fuyuki but was still a big part of why those matches were great.

 

 

'89 Kawada reminds me a little of WWE Daniel Bryan or Horsemen-era Benoit, an undersized heavyweight who takes a lot of beatings but has enough offense and works with enough pace and intensity to make himself look credible against significantly larger men.

 

 

He wasn't undersized.

 

 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjmwI2b7oh4[/embed]

 

Looks undersized to me.

[ohtani's jacket]

Just watched the big 05-26-1990 tag, and of the three young workers in that match I found Kobashi easily in third place behind Misawa and Taue. Maybe this will change going forward, and by no means does it mean Kobashi was bad. He was still great, just glaring flaws compared to the relatively polished Misawa and Taue.

 

Taue was polished in 1990? Misawa wasn't polished in 1990.

[Childs]

 

 

 

 

Early Kobashi is easily my favorite Kobashi. Up until 95 he's absolutely incredible in everything for me. Kawada takes a while longer to put it all together, but once 92-93 hits I'm more into him than Kobashi usually. That being said, 1993 Kenta Kobashi is probably a top 5 pick easy for me.

I dunno, Kawada was a really a good tag worker in 1988/89. He was still a step behind Fuyuki but was still a big part of why those matches were great.

 

 

'89 Kawada reminds me a little of WWE Daniel Bryan or Horsemen-era Benoit, an undersized heavyweight who takes a lot of beatings but has enough offense and works with enough pace and intensity to make himself look credible against significantly larger men.

 

 

He wasn't undersized.

 

 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjmwI2b7oh4[/embed]

 

Looks undersized to me.

 

 

Dude, sorry, I misread your post. Thought you were talking about Kobashi. You're right about young Kawada.

[dawho5]

Kawada had it in him to put on good to great matches at the time, but a lot of the traits that really define him hadn't come out in his wrestling yet. I don't think any of them are polished in 1990, but Kobashi's energy and spunk in that time period made him a great sympathetic babyface. Kawada just didn't have the same charisma Kobashi did, his was more that aura of violence that came later on. Young Kawada was pretty much a juniors style wrestler where Kobashi was more of an all-around guy with a weakness in his striking.

[BillThompson]

 

Just watched the big 05-26-1990 tag, and of the three young workers in that match I found Kobashi easily in third place behind Misawa and Taue. Maybe this will change going forward, and by no means does it mean Kobashi was bad. He was still great, just glaring flaws compared to the relatively polished Misawa and Taue.

 

Taue was polished in 1990? Misawa wasn't polished in 1990.

 

 

In that one match, yeah, Misawa and Taue look far more polished than Kobashi. I'll see if that changes moving forward.

[Loss]

Kobashi's role wasn't as critical to that as Misawa's, and Taue was higher ranked on the totem pole. The KO stuff was really being done to establish Misawa as Jumbo's new rival, so Kobashi being outshined by his teammates was by design.

[BillThompson]

Kobashi's role wasn't as critical to that as Misawa's, and Taue was higher ranked on the totem pole. The KO stuff was really being done to establish Misawa as Jumbo's new rival, so Kobashi being outshined by his teammates was by design.

 

I really hope Kobashi's horrendous selling wasn't by design. That was really my only issue with the match, and the area where I felt like Kobashi looked considerably less polished than his peers. Otherwise he was fine, but he shrugs off a lot of leg work and immediately starts hitting a lot of leg based offense. I'm hoping as I move forward with Kobashi that his selling will improve, and I'm pretty sure it will, but in this match his lack of sustained selling brings the match down.

[shoe]

I'm a fan of Kobashi. I seem him in my top 10. I just don't know where. One of my knocks on him was sometimes he would do something in a match that we didn't need. His Moonsault was an example of this for me.

[Childs]

Are you saying he never needed to do it or that he forced it into matches where it wasn't essential? Because I'd argue that Kobashi either hitting or missing his moonsault created some of the best moments of the promotion's mid-'90s classics.

[shoe]

I didn't think he needed to do it.

[MJH]

But you can say just about every wrestler didn't need to do most of their spots, really, if you go by some "you only need x, y, and z to have an solid/good/effective match"; the point should always be whether a move was used effectively, not whether it was "necessary". For better ("artistically" or however you want to phrase it) or worse (long-term physical health, obviously) the AJ guys in particular were not about doing as little as possible, but were about pushing/expanding/developing both in terms of moves/spots, structure, "story", etc. Certainly there's something to be said for "keeping it simple" - although "less is more" is as hollow as it is overused - but having greater ambition (and, more importantly, pulling it off) is what separates the great from the good in anything.

[shoe]

Not arguing what you're saying. Their was many times the Moonsault was important to the story . I'm not a fan of the Moonsault for him. I'm all for him trying difficult things. I just wish he would have chose something different than a Moonsault. It has more to do with the move than the wrestler.

[Exposer]

I've watched a lot of Kobashi in the last few days. I've seen his 90, 91 and a few big matches from 92. I've seen later stuff from him, but I'm trying to get a retrospective of him. I've noticed that he's better trading bombs in singles matches, working matches around his sleeper hold, and playing the role of the hot tag or guy who toes toe to toe with his opponent in the finishing stretch of those six mans. His selling is great in matches with bomb trading, but he can be terrible at limb selling. When Fuchi spends ten minutes torturing his leg and he waits on the apron for a few minutes only to come back and hit moonsaults and running, flying shoulder tackles it gets a little ridiculous. Limb selling is much better served for Misawa who's much better at it in those tags. He may get better at this as I go through his career, but right now it drives me off the wall. It's not a good thing when WWE robot Sheamus is better at limb selling than Kenta Kobashi.

[Exposer]

So I've completed Kobashi through 93. He's an elite worker by the middle of that year. He's finally learned to sell limbs and has some of the more epic exchanges with Kawada in those tags. I'm interested to see if he gets any better through 94. On a side note, I'm hoping to wipe out 90s AJ mostly from the Big Three as my first assignment for this project.

[NintendoLogic]

It's increasingly likely that I'll have Kobashi above Kawada on my ballot. I had always taken it as an article of faith that Kawada was the smart one and Kobashi was the dumb one when it came to stuff like structure and selling. But I'm starting to think that the opposite is closer to the truth. For all the talk about how Kobashi/Sasaki is a dumb match, it's differential calculus compared to Kawada/Sasaki.

[MJH]

It's not (though the line made me laugh), but I agree that someone saying "Kobashi/Sasaki isn't a carefully/smartly laid out match" watched a different match than I did.

[El-P]

Do the later NOAH years, when he was immobile and doing a billion chops and a bunch of head drops, hurt him at this point ? I'm sure some would advocate he still had some great matches then, while others probably hate this same period.

[Parties]

Last great Kobashi match is what, Ogawa in '03 or Akiyama in '04, depending on how you felt about the latter's barrage of headdrops? Or '05 tag with Akiyama/Tenryu with Go?

[WingedEagle]

What about the '07 return match?

[GOTNW]

His retirement match was great.

[Jingus]

I've seen him have lots of fun matches in his old age that were perfectly decent, and only suffered by comparison to THE KOBASHI, SUPERWORKER back in his prime. But the last real masterpiece I saw him have was with Samoa Joe in 2005. That match was fucking awesome, to the point where I think it's been severely underrated by many people just because of how much the ROHbots loved it.

[MJH]

I'm not so keen on the Joe match, I never connected with any real focus, it felt like a chance to see Kobashi do his spots live (ie an exhibition, which I should point out is absolutely fine given the setting). The Sasaki match is far better laid out (better than the Misawa/Kawada match too, I thought, last time I watched them), and that's what sets the AJ guys apart for me.

 

I'm sure I've said this before, but Kobashi benefits so much from watching handhelds and the smaller comms. He had a formula (and it's a more logical one, to me, than Misawa's, though the latter had better matches given the when and who), but he'd go far harder than Misawa/Kawada on those shows and actually try and make something of matches vs. Jun Izumida et al.

[fxnj]

Not sure what someone who wasn't as invested in the promotion might think, but after following NOAH through its depressing years of financial turmoil and Kobashi through his sad 2011-2012 comeback, watching him pull out one last performance in front of a sold out Budokan for his retirement tag was a ***** MOTY to me. For one night, all was well in a decaying promotion.