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Minoru Suzuki


Grimmas

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It hasn't shown immediate, game changer results, but the Suzuki-gun invasion has shown promising signs of life for NOAH and put out stuff I've liked in-ring. That 9/19 I would even go as far to say it was great. Suzuki's matches for the most part have just been okay to me, but that Sugiura match and the Takayama one were spectacles I really enjoyed.

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I hear you. Do you feel like the Suzuki invasion has worked? Based on the handful of shows I've seen and stuff I've heard from modern puro mavens like Alan, my impression is that it's been kind of meh. But it's not like I want that to be the case. I hoped this would be a great run that would add to Suzuki's stature.

 

There's a chart of this year's Korakuen attendance floating around Twitter that would seem to indicate it has had a negative effect on business.

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I've only seen Suzuki's defense against Takayama, but based on it I think the reason attendance is down is that even though Suzuki is clearly a hard worker and it's unfair to fault him for letting his opponent wrestle their usual style, the whole invasion context just isn't something the fans want to see from the promotion. A big part of Baba's vision for King's Road was to move away from all the bullshit and create a style that highlights wrestling as a brutal sport. Hence, a world title match where Takayama tried to turn back the clock to 2002 yet couldn't conquer the heel champ with a shitload of interference shenanigans struck me as the promotion telling the stragglers from the days of Misawa and Kobashi that the promotion had moved on. I thought it was a technically really good match but it was also the moment I stopped considering myself a NOAH fan.

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Hence, a world title match where Takayama tried to turn back the clock to 2002 yet couldn't conquer the heel champ with a shitload of interference shenanigans struck me as the promotion telling the stragglers from the days of Misawa and Kobashi that the promotion had moved on. I thought it was a technically really good match but it was also the moment I stopped considering myself a NOAH fan.

They were doing the same thing last year with Chokibogun, though it wasn't nearly as bad.

 

 

 

I wanted to like Sugiura-Suzuki but it completely bored me. I love strike exchanges but in order for them to work you have to sell eventually and they.........didn't. Nor did they bring any variety to them. They just traded elbows in the middle of the ring for twenty minuts. They hit each other really hard but I couldn't give two shits about it. I started liking the action as soon as they moved away from that but that was only the last few minutes.

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  • 2 years later...
  • 3 years later...

I'm torn on Suzuki. On one hand just being a Pancrase founder that had good work in UWF2 and PWFG should be alone for him to make my list. In his later career it's clear he has developed a unique mind for crafting matches that can result in true epicness: when watching something like the two matches he had vs. Katsuhiko Nakajima in 2016 or the infamous Tanahashi match you get a feel for what he is capable of.

On the other hand, he spent such a big part of his late career playing a clown I almost want to disqualify him so my list doesn't have "uwu murder grandpa" on it.

The environment he worked in surely doesn't help: I remember one time watching some match he had vs. Okada that wasn't even that revered, where it looked clear to me that if he was facing just someone competent in pro wrestling basics, literally just take an old school New Japan name: Osamu Kido, Kengo Kimura, whomever; the match would've been a classic. Instead Suzuki would do great work for a couple of minutes and Okada would do something dumb and I'd just wonder I even bothered watching the match in the first place.

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MiSu's last year G1 run was fucking badass (he even had something pretty good with 2021 Will "Omega 2.0" Ospreay), he looked like he returned to his peak. He also had the Moxley match, the Shingo matches, and the last singles match of Liger's career, all of them rocked. That's just late 2019-20. He's aging ridiculously well, and that combined with his best stuff from the early 90s and his peak years in the 10s could be enough to make my list in the Q4. His indies and comedy stuff is also worth watching (I 100% recommend two Rocku Kawamura matches in 2017 or so, tremendous). The NOAH runs will decide if he finally makes it for me or not, and how high he ends if he does make it.

 

I love the old bastard. His character is one of the coolest ever in profesional wrestling and that alone carries most of his regular matches, but his top matches (Sano, Kobashi, Tanahashi, Styles, Sugiura, Kawamura, Goto, Barnett etc) are huge, very different from each other, and as good as anyone's.

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  • 10 months later...

Insanely inconsistent, maybe too much quality-wise to accurately put on a top 100. His NOAH work is bleh with a few bright spots but he mostly stunk the joint with whatever he was trying over there: booking can be blamed for most of that but I felt like he's always been a poor match for overtly long matches in general, his title reign massively Suzuki working longer than 25 minutes drags the pacing down to a utter crawl, it's just something he can't do. This is fine by itself (there's plenty of great workers who can't do the same on here) but it's the fact that he isn't always conscious of this fact is what annoys at times. Overtly long matches are a issue of Puro companies in general but he's one of those who tends to lean into them more often than not with a lot of padding work that doesn't achieve anything but make the match longer.

Shoot Suzuki is a really fun period for him but it's WAY too short to really account for much outside of some solid bouts (he has a match series with Shamrock that's pretty underrated) and it's mostly him against unremarkable mid-card acts. He fails to have a good match with Fujiwara on account of the same weakness mentioned above: it goes to a 30 minute draw, way too long for him, which does play badly against him in that regard.

He is best used as he's been presented the last 5 years or so: he shows up now and then for big matches with people better than him and manages to get his usual stuff over with his sheer charisma, especially given his workrate has drastically reduced in recent years. Not the biggest fan of his match-style that he tends to lean into for every match (strike exchanges, dumb facial expressions, no selling, etc etc) as it becomes very overplayed and frankly, lazy, especially when he's in a match with no stakes doing the exact same thing as he'd do in a title bout.

For me, I think Nagata would have more of a chance of getting on than Suzuki. Suzuki has FAR better high-ends but Nagata's been a consistent good to great act throughout the last 15 years: even his GHC title run I felt was better than Suzuki's overall. Nagata is also a lot more varied than Suzuki has been and has gotten a lot more out of his opponents than Suzuki, who tends to takeover the pacing of the match regardless of who's in with him. Suzuki is someone whom you tend to have high expectations for watching his best work but those reduce as you realise that a LOT of his material beyond that is varied and downright poor for a top 100 quality. He's very good at his best but that best is something that's incredibly hard to keep around. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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