Great Sasuke

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[Timbo Slice]

I soured on Sasuke over the years, but he was still enjoyable to watch. Won't be making my list, though.

[BillThompson]

Very enjoyable to watch, but I don't see him as a guy on my list. No real reason either, as shallow of an answer as that is, but he's just not a guy I watch and say, "Yep, top 100 right there."

[PeteF3]

Sasuke was not highly regarded at the time of the '06 list--I don't know if it was Tiger Mask backlash hitting him or just general apathy toward the '90s juniors, or the belief that he was really just a spot monkey. So far in the '90s he's been a pretty consistent hitter of his big spots but is also underrated on the mat and has worked as a tremendous babyface, especially an underdog babyface. There's a lot of substance there that I don't think Sasuke always gets credit for.

[Graham Crackers]

One of my favorite cult wrestling heroes. Sasuke as psychopath bumper with crazy ideas is the embodiment of pro wrestling to me. I need to rewatch some of his New Japan matches but the MPro tags from the 90s still hold up as incredible. I'm not sure if he's the best worker in that style but he is someone O really enjoy in those matches.

 

I do think that some of his 2000s performances are a real feather in his cap. Some of the 2000s mpro tags are disastrous clusterfucks (more of a booking problem than anything else) but Sasuke is generally great in singles matches.

 

vs Ultimo Dragon Mpro 8/30/2007 - Sasuke carries a past his prime Dragon by turning the match into a surly brawl.

vs Fujita Jr. Hayato Mpro 6/19/2009 - Juniors MOTDC

vs Kenou Mpro 11/7/2010 - A little long in the tooth but avoids overkill. Sasuke sells that every movement he makes causes him immense agony. Or he's not selling and every movement actually hurts that bad.

w/Shinzaki vs Kenou & Hayato Mpro 11/4/2013 - Awesome epic tag match.

 

I'm not calling him a lock but he's someone I enjoy who I think I'd like to have on my list.

[W2BTD]

I love Sasuke, and was hyped to watch this:

 

w/Shinzaki vs Kenou & Hayato Mpro 11/4/2013 - Awesome epic tag match.

 

...but I ended up hating it. Found it extremely boring, which probably means some of you guys should definitely check it out based on the fact i'm so wildly far apart in taste as most of you. I remember Dylan really loving it.

[North South]

At this point Sasuke might or might not make my final list. I get the feeling he won't make it, but we'll see overall. Just depends on how well others do on my ballot within the next two years.

 

I watched a good amount of his matches from MPro, New Japan, WAR and WWF this week on YouTube.

 

Super Delfin: MPro - 7/24/93

Liger: NJPW - 4/16/94 & 7/8/94

Benoit: NJPW - 4/16/94

Ultimo: WAR - 7/17/94 & NJPW - 8/5/96

Taka: WWF - 7/7/97 & MPro - 10/10/97

Togo: MPro - 6/5/11

 

I enjoyed these matches. The best of the bunch being the Liger J Cup match. The Togo bout was the weakest but for 2011 it was rock solid.

 

The thing about Sasuke is that while those were all truly quality matches, it was the guys he was in there with who were the man of the match. But with that said he did look good in all of them, just not 100 greatest all time good. I'm going to check out his tag and multi-man work to see what he can bring to the table in them.

 

So, he's got a real good list of matches to his name, but performances in them which were not world class. I think i'll drop him at the end but who knows.

[Loss]

I was looking for some guys who have gotten lots of play that I think are roughly perceived on the same tier as Sasuke, but I couldn't find a good comparison guy. My goal was to see how he stacked up against various other great wrestlers. I love Otani, but I can see an argument for Sasuke over Otani, even just peak-to-peak. I can't think of any reason to put someone like Curt Hennig or Brian Pillman ahead of him. I'll be surprised if Ultimo gets any votes at all, but Sasuke is way ahead of him. He would probably be neck and neck with someone like Kikuchi, but it's hard to make good comparisons. I don't know, Owen Hart, maybe?

[Grimmas]

I was going to pop into this thread to see what people thought of Sasuke. At his prime, he was so great. What a hot streak from 94-97. It's a short streak though.

 

I may consider voting him based on the M-Pro tags, the Liger and Dos Caras matches, but we will see.

 

A good comparison would be maybe someone like Juventud Guerrera?

[Gregor]

I'll be surprised if Ultimo gets any votes at all, but Sasuke is way ahead of him.

I'd actually like to hear your thoughts on Ultimo, if only because when going through the '90s you didn't seem to have the dislike for him that seems to be the dominant feeling for him here.

[Loss]

I'm mostly indifferent to him.

[Jetlag]

Great Sasuke is awesome. And someone whose variety is undersold, I feel. He brings that Sabu-like car crash feel to junior matches that desperately need it. You never know he might crack his own skull or unexpectedly lay in an ultra stiff spin kick. Underrated matworker. Looks good in a number of different roles, working as top face in his own company, as indy sensation going at it with the big stars in the big league, as established star against lesser guys, and as a hardened, possibly insane veteran politician wrestler. One of the few juniors to look really good throughout the 90s and 2000s. Plenty of strong singles bouts under his belt including matches against guys like Magnum Tokyo, Kenou or Samurai, and then a bunch of multiman tags including spotfests, brawls and stiff wars like the Shinzaki tag mentioned above. Are you sure there's 5 japanese juniors clearly better than him?

[dawho5]

I love Sasuke. One thing I always enjoyed is that you never really knew what to expect even after watching a bunch of his matches. The guy would just do crazy shit that you had never seen before even if he was in a gym in front of a few hundred fans. He is underrated as a babyface and on the mat. And I think besides Santo there's nobody I would rather watch performing a dive. His tope con hilo had one of the most explosive take-offs in my mind. The sheer acceleration he got when he jumped always impressed me. On the downside, his moonsault off the second rope to a standing opponent always looked awful. The timing was always such that the other guy had to stop and wait for it. Drove me nuts.

[concrete1992]

Okay just got done watching him and Fujiwara vs. Taka Michinoku & El Samuari which is a match that makes me watch more "low-key" Great Sasuke matches.

 

The probablem that people have pointed to is that he never comes off as the better guy in a lot of his great matches and sadly that is probably also true in the match I just mentioned. Sucks to have Fujiwara in there who will rule the world in this instance. The things I loved that Sasuke did though was him doing wild things at sometimes wild times. When he threw out stuff he came off committed to seeing it through. El Samurai is getting up but I, Great Sasuke, wants to throwing a flipping kick? Yeah, we are going to worry about that and just do it.

 

The older the get the more clinically insane he becomes. That probably doesn't mean much for most but there is something far too endearing about that for me to ignore even if that doesn't lock him onto my list.

[Dylan Waco]

This is a weird observation, but I think I like Sasuke best during his athletic peak when he was working spotfests. To me he was the best of that era of juniors guys at just turning it up to ten and going. I'm not saying he couldn't build a match, I'm saying that I think I preferred him when he would just go ballistic with dives and other insane shit for fifteenish minutes. I tend to think his best Ultimo match is like this to take one example.

 

It's an odd observation because I don't think the J-Cup classics are like that really, and I don't think old man Sasuke is like that all the time either, even though some of the old man stuff that really stands out is him taking insane bumps in crazy matches.

 

I always sort of shrug my shoulders at the thought of including him on a list like this, but I'm not sure I can leave him off in good conscience the more I think about it.

[elliott]

What does 2000s Great Sasuke look like? Candidate for best 90s Junior other than Liger. I watched a few of his best 90s matches over the last 5 years and sometimes he's really great and other times he's doing really dull mat work for long stretches. 

[soup23]

2000-2001 Sasuke is inconsistent without the high end classics of the 90s. Instead of boring matwork he replaces that with aimless brawling a lot of the time. 

[elliott]

Oh, that's disappointing. I feel like there could have been some real potential in Great Sasuke the Garbage Brawler because he's such a nut. 

[Jetlag]

There are quite a few quite great Sasukes 2000s performances. Singles matches against Hayato Fujita, Kenou, and even Ultimo Dragon come to mind. He's probably not as good in the 2000s as, say, Kikuchi, bit still damn good. And much of his matches are buried in random Michinoku Pro TV that could never be widely uploaded.