Kiyoshi Tamura

[RyanClingman]

Are there any comps out there similar to Tabe's Volk Han comp which contains the majority of Tamura's matches?

[KB8]

Tabe actually made a Tamura comp as well (which I bought). I'm on a phone right now and my internet is shitty, but if you plug "best of Kiyoshi Tamura" into google it shouldn't be too hard to find.

[Childs]

The Tamura comp is fantastic.

[KB8]

It really, really is.

[elliott]

Oh shit! I actually just got that Volk Han comp (complete and accurate coming soon) and I was thinking I wanted to have one made for Tamura. Fantastic! I ranked Tamura 12th overall, but regret not getting him into the top 10. He was the best at the hardest style to master.

[KB8]

Yeah, he was my #13, and I said in the countdown thread that if I'd watched some more of the early UWFi stuff you'd written about in your C&A thread I could see myself bumping him into the top 10. I sort of wish I did now, because really good RINGS might be my all-time favourite kind of wrestling and Tamura was better at that than anyone else ever was.

[RyanClingman]

Thanks everyone! I will probably order it some time within the next few months. As a quick note, the Tabe comp is one of my favourite comps in my collection, although it should be said that a few matches are missing. Thankfully, most are available on the internet somewhere and it is only a handful.

[Tabe]

Thanks everyone! I will probably order it some time within the next few months. As a quick note, the Tabe comp is one of my favourite comps in my collection, although it should be said that a few matches are missing. Thankfully, most are available on the internet somewhere and it is only a handful.

Which matches did you think were missing?

[Microstatistics]

A #1 contender. Maybe the best specialist ever and a strong contender for best wrestler of the 1990s (the best wrestling decade, IMO). Also possesses one of the best great matches/total matches ratios of anyone ever (even if the style he worked assisted in that). He probably wasn't as stylishly breathtaking as Volk Han or as charismatically expressive as Yoshiaki Fujiwara but was technically perfect and brought tons of fire and spunk to his matches.

[DylanZero]

One of the absolute gold standards of shoot style and I suspect it will come down to him or Yuki Ishikawa as my number 1 of the style, and of Tamura's ilk I think clearly number one. From literally the beginning he understood how to incorporate fiery selling and emotion into his matches and within his first 10 matches I think there's a case you could argue he was one of the best in-ring performers in the world. Then you get to fully grown peak Tamura in RINGS and he adapts more to the Volk Han ilk of being a more pure technician while also bringing his own spin on it and became wildly successful in multiple ways, and ended up closing the decade as Jumbo started it: Dominating the MOTYC scene and having great matches over and over. He took a break until 2003 and even then he was having MOTY-level matches in his own promotion and this time it isn't against the likes of Han, TK, & Yammamoto but against guys who were younger and inexperienced and some who basically never did anything else except have great matches with Tamura.

 

Micro makes a great point with his great match average being stupidly high, and there's more meat he brings to the table in his career than his other awesome RINGS contemporary Han, just based on quantity and variety. I have top put Tamura as a strong top 10 contender and if someone put him number one I wouldn't be opposed at all.

[elliott]

I voted Kiyoshi Tamura 12th in 2016. Its too low. He's one of the 30 people I want in my top 10. I think he was the best wrestler on Earth from 95-99 and again in the early 00s when he came back. On the short list for greatest athlete in the history of wrestling. His career story arch is more interesting than Volk Han and his peak might be better. Those two are so interconnected and I'll have them next to each other. Hopefully in the top 10. 

[KB8]

I had Tamura at in 2016, but he'll most likely be be top in 2026. Since the last poll I've gone back and watched most of the UWF/UWFi stuff, so that along with the RINGS stuff and there's no way he finishes outside my top 10. His peak is truly phenomenal and he'll naturally get the bonus points with me personally because your high end RINGS might be my favourite type of wrestling ever. I know some people are iffy on the idea of tag matches in shoot style, but UWFi is what it is and it gives us a chance to see him work tags, and of course he was good in them. We have his full career arc on tape. He was fun as a scrappy underdog getting his ass beat in his second or third match ever. He was great punching above his weight a year into his career, clearly working with a chip on his shoulder. He was great as this ridiculous athlete who was starting to come into his own and gain momentum by picking up wins. He was great as a man at the absolute peak of his powers against his peers. He was great as promotional ace running the gauntlet against all comers. He was a great mat worker and a great striker. His explosiveness was often stunning. He was a wonderful pro wrestler. And I still haven't seen the bout with Yamamoto from 6/99 (but I'll add it to the list anyway because everyone and their granny has said it's awesome).

 

KIYOSHI TAMURA YOU SHOULD WATCH:

v Yoji Anjoh (UWF, 9/30/89)

v Masahito Kakihara (UWFi, 5/10/91)

v Yoji Anjoh (UWFi, 7/3/91)

w/Yuko Miyato v Yoji Anjoh & Mark Fleming (UWFi, 3/17/92)

v Yoji Anjoh (UWFi, 8/28/92)

v Kazuo Yamazaki (UWFi, 10/23/92)

v Nobuhiko Takada (UWFi, 2/14/93)

v Naoki Sano (UWFi, 5/6/93)

v Vader (UWFi, 6/10/94)

v Kazushi Sakuraba (UWFi, 5/27/96)

v Volk Han (RINGS, 9/25/96)

v Volk Han (RINGS, 1/22/97)

v Nikolai Zouev (RINGS, 6/21/97)

v Bitsadze Tariel (RINGS, 7/22/97)

v Volk Han (RINGS, 9/26/97)

v Mikhail Ilioukhine (RINGS, 1/21/98)

v Tsuyoshi Kohsaka (RINGS, 6/27/98)

v Yoshihisa Yamamoto (RINGS, 9/21/98)

v Tsuyoshi Kohsaka (RINGS, 1/23/99)

v Yoshihisa Yamamoto (RINGS, 6/24/99)

v Wataru Sakata (U-STYLE, 2/15/03)

v Dokonjonosuke Mishima (U-STYLE, 4/6/03)

v Tsuyoshi Kohsaka (U-STYLE, 2/4/04)

v Hiroyuki Ito (U-STYLE, 8/18/04)

Josh Barnett (U-STYLE, 11/23/05)

[highflyflow]

Save Fujiwara, Tamura will be my highest ranked shoot-stylist. Unbelievable combination of athleticism and skill, and brings a certain character that's so easy for me to connect with in these shoot style matches, whether it be the cocky underdog in Takada's UWFi, the prodigy in the first year in RINGS, or the established ace against underdogs like Yamamoto in those peak 97-99 years. Unreal how good he looks early in his career, too; I think the 1992 Yoji Anjo match is a legitimate classic, and I wouldn't be mad if someone said that wasn't even his best work in UWFi. Top 20 contender

[Control21]

Kiyoshi Tamura is going to end up #5 on my ballot. He was absolutely one of the best wrestlers I've ever seen. We talk about Volk Han's batting average (rightfully so), but Tamura's is right up there as well.

I've struggled to find a good way to describe the differences between Volk Han and Tamura. While Volk had the explosiveness and the ability to manipulate "space," I think Tamura differentiated himself by being one of the best athletic specimens we've ever seen in the ring. It's not that Tamura couldn't manipulate space as well, but I think he relied on it less than Volk did, and instead combined his natural talents with a raw intensity that very few have. I remember seeing someone describe Tamura as the shoot-style version of Kenta Kobashi (could have been in this thread). In other words, he could convey emotion, urgency, and will through his actions and movements in the ring. The differences here are probably one of the major reasons why the Volk/Tamura trilogy was so damn good; they played off each other's differences and abilities extraordinarily well. 

I think people sometimes forget how good he was during his U-Style run. His matches with Ito, Mishima, Barnett, etc., all come to mind initially. He was probably one of the best in the world during that period. He was doing all of this while facing people like Yoshida and Bob Sapp in PRIDE as well. He really never let up once in his career. Maybe that's why he decided to step away from the ring after his PRIDE run. Perhaps he understood he couldn't deliver the same level of quality after the beating his body took in PRIDE. That's a very admirable quality to have, I believe, despite us not having more matches to enjoy. 

Tamura is also one of those wrestlers who made the shoot/work spectrum nebulous at times. He had a whole host of pro wrestling matches in his career that looked like shoots. He also had a handful of shoots where I wouldn't blame someone if they thought they were worked. I've written to some degree in some of the other threads here about how it is hard to ignore how certain workers spent a lot of time in places like Pancrase, or had matches in RINGS, PRIDE, or other JMMA groups that were straddling the line between shoot and work very delicately. Tamura falls under this category. His match against Frank Shamrock in RINGS stands out as one of the best displays of scientific wrestling I've ever seen, and it was basically conducted under RINGS' pro wrestling rules. He also had a match against Renzo Gracie under RINGS' KOK rules, which were more explicitly MMA. I would argue, though, that Tamura was a pro wrestler that night, and getting a win over Renzo while carrying the UWF banner is one of the greatest "pro wrestling" moments I've ever seen.