Masakatsu Funaki

[Control21]

1 hour ago, club said:

I'm considering Funaki based on the strength of his pre-Pancrase stuff. His 89-91 run is superb. The Nakano match posted above is probably his best, but he has also has great matches with Maeda, Sano, Fujiwara, Anjo, Yamazaki etc. Plus a weird match with Terry Rudge in Reslo! He has such charisma and dynamism. Perhaps this is coloured by what was to come for him, but from his timing and reactions he comes off as the real deal more so than anyone bar Maeda.

Since he's been back I've seen bits here and there but wasn't particularly into it. Apart from the Suwama and Akiyama matches in AJPW what should I seek out?

Yeah, his pre-Pancrase stuff is really underrated and one of the main reasons why he is so high on my list. His 2000s work in AJPW isn't bad either. I'd check out the cage match he had with Suzuki.

It's probably too late to do this for 2026 without rocking the boat too much, but for 2036 (yes, a long way from now), I might make the argument that Pancrase should be included in how we evaluate wrestlers who did both pro-wrestling and Pancrase. From 1993-1997, Pancrase is so interlinked with the roots of pro-wrestling that it is hard to ignore it. It was shootfighting, yes, but it was also shootfighting with a pro-wrestling ruleset that called back to the days of wrestling before the Gold Dust Trio took things in a different direction. I think for guys like Ken Shamrock, Masakatsu Funaki, Minoru Suzuki, Frank Shamrock (albeit he only did pro-wrestling once), and Bas Rutten, there's some practicality in considering their Pancrase work but that's a debate we will have another day.

[club]

Thanks for the rec. Haven't seen this since it happened, will rewatch. The Pancrase thing is interesting. The line between some Japanese MMA and pro wrestling was certainly a lot more blurry in the 90s: early PRIDE, late RINGS etc. Not sure I buy it as the aims are different, but it's an interesting conversation to have for sure.

[fxnj]

I made the argument in favor of counting Pancrase during the 2016 vote as well as earlier in this thread, and I don't think I got any real pushback. My impression is 90's Pancrase, alongside Ali/Inoki, Sakuraba PRIDE fights, and possibly Lesnar UFC fights are a grey area where some people aren't going to count shoots at all out of principle but no one's gonna get flack for doing so due to how closely tied those shoots are to the pro wrestling careers of the workers involved. I'd argue even if you do follow that work only philosophy that you'd still have to consider those things indirectly due to how those shoots influenced the pro wrestling characters of the workers involved. In contrast to those examples, something like CM Punk's MMA career seems a different beast from all that, where everyone currently doing business with him tries their best to forget the whole thing and docking points on him for crashing and burning like he did would be absurd.

[Control21]

53 minutes ago, fxnj said:

I made the argument in favor of counting Pancrase during the 2016 vote as well as earlier in this thread, and I don't think I got any real pushback. My impression is 90's Pancrase, alongside Ali/Inoki, Sakuraba PRIDE fights, and possibly Lesnar UFC fights are a grey area where some people aren't going to count shoots at all out of principle but no one's gonna get flack for doing so due to how closely tied those shoots are to the pro wrestling careers of the workers involved. I'd argue even if you do follow that work only philosophy that you'd still have to consider those things indirectly due to how those shoots influenced the pro wrestling characters of the workers involved. In contrast to those examples, something like CM Punk's MMA career seems a different beast from all that, where everyone currently doing business with him tries their best to forget the whole thing and docking points on him for crashing and burning like he did would be absurd.

Well said. I would be in favor of counting Sakuraba's PRIDE career as well considering he considered himself a pro-wrestler in his MMA career and it all links together in terms of the evolution of pro-wrestling and Kakutogi ("the long UWF") in Japan. Honestly, that probably played a role in my high Sakuraba ranking. There are a lot of guys who had MMA careers like CM Punk where it should be treated as a separate thing, but it's hard to ignore it for a good amount of folks who came through during the 90s/00s.

[club]

I wouldn’t count Saku’s PRIDE run for his case. I'd argue that his understanding of how to entertain as a pro-wrestler contributed to his success as a fighter though.

I would of course consider how his fight career played into his pro-wrestling career when he went back. For instance I loved his Laughter 7 NJPW run with Shibata where he was the unstoppable submission machine, culminating in one of the great modern NJPW matches with Nakamura at the Dome. This works because he’s Kazushi Sakuraba, PRIDE star and all-round MMA legend, and he’s booked like a killer.

 

To bring it back to Funaki, I remember being intrigued to see him back wrestling, but to me it hurt his aura that it had come off the back of some high-profile losses to Saku and Tamura (and one very iffy win against Minowaman).

[ohtani's jacket]

What I wanna know is if anyone is hardcore enough to watch those insufferably long Funaki/Shamrock matches from PWFG. Even I tapped out watching those.

The most fun I ever had watching Funaki was the run he went on in 1990 when he returned from injury. If the UWF had continued into 1991, I have no doubt that Funaki would have been vying for the number one spot. 

And I still think Funaki vs. Rutten is one of the best pro-wrestling matches of the 90s. 

[Ma Stump Puller]

2 hours ago, ohtani's jacket said:

What I wanna know is if anyone is hardcore enough to watch those insufferably long Funaki/Shamrock matches from PWFG. Even I tapped out watching those.

The most fun I ever had watching Funaki was the run he went on in 1990 when he returned from injury. If the UWF had continued into 1991, I have no doubt that Funaki would have been vying for the number one spot. 

And I still think Funaki vs. Rutten is one of the best pro-wrestling matches of the 90s. 

I did actually watch their trilogy of PWFG matches (which ended with a 40 MINUTE stint btw rough stuff) while going through Funaki PWFG stuff. 

My conclusion was that the first match was the best; it only goes on for about 20 minutes, good enough action and has a underlining intensity to it that is solely missing from their later two matches. From a pure technical side the two are mechanically brilliant, but they just do not click together in terms of making what they do look interesting for anyone else; there's just too much bloat to take with the good stuff. Pancrase would've died a sad death if every main event was like those matches. 

It's the same issue UWF Original had with every major match going at least 10 minutes too long.

 

 

  

[Ma Stump Puller]

I had Masakatsu Funaki at #48 on my ballot. My main positives about Funaki and why he's so low on the top 100 is that watching him in shoot-style feels like he's a decade beyond his peers; from a technical standpoint he feels like a completely different beast, stringing together strikes, slams and submissions in little distinctive ways to feel wholly unique from the pack while also experimenting with radical time lengths from 40-minute affairs to less than 10, working between legendarily brutal sprints or long-form grappling affairs. Make no mistake, very few at that point and time were making such a concerted effort to coordinate what they were doing in these sort of matches bar organising who went over. it really felt like he was the impending Next Big Thing, but that moment never really reckons. In UWF he's surpassed popularity-wise by Maeda and in PWFG he is a very big star in a small pond that never gets to actually face off against the other potential star in Minoru Suzuki so they kinda awkwardly orbit each other until they and others leave to greener pastures to Pancrase.

With that said though, his quality of work both there and as a rookie in NJPW is astonishingly good at the high-end. What really makes his placement for me is his comeback work in AJPW; after the first 6 months where he figures out what he wants to do he really hones in on this brutal hard-hitting persona that can realistically win off any single strike or hold which makes him wholly unique in that company; Pro-Wres Love era is defined by gimmicks, stories, WWE-isms Muto borrows, so having someone who needs none of that is again a concerted attempt to stand out from the crowd. Who could envision having a Triple Crown match only 4 minutes long AND also have it be brilliant? Turns out it's Funaki. I think all in all the word to define his ring work as a whole is "pioneering" especially in his efforts to work with guys like Minoru Suzuki or Suwama where in one it's a huge 80's style blood feud and the other is a more classical Kings Road/90s NJPW hybrid. One could struggle to put those pieces together (hell Tanahashi infamously stunk the room out trying to do that with Murakami) but with Funaki it never felt like he was out of place or drowning. There's a certain level of genius required to make that work and I think he had it in spades. 

My only real drawback is that as his career continued it was clear he became a lot more content with just showing up; he could still have good to great matches (KAI in 2015, Fujinami in 2016, HARASHIMA tag in 2017, Aoki the same year, Abe tag in 2021, Fujita in 2022) but for the most part he was just there unfortunately. With that said I think most of that was boring at worst and never got truly unwatchable so it isn't a huge knock. All in all though I think #48 is a good enough slot.

 

[Control21]

Well said. Funaki ended up #19 on my ballot. I did consider Pancrase in my analysis of his career (along with Suzuki, Rutten, and Frank Shamrock). It's just too big a gap to ignore. Fundamentally, my philosophy remains that Pancrase was, at its very core, practically pro wrestling, despite being mostly a shoot. This will be a topic I'll explore more in-depth eventually on here. 

[Ma Stump Puller]

8 hours ago, Control21 said:

Well said. Funaki ended up #19 on my ballot. I did consider Pancrase in my analysis of his career (along with Suzuki, Rutten, and Frank Shamrock). It's just too big a gap to ignore. Fundamentally, my philosophy remains that Pancrase was, at its very core, practically pro wrestling, despite being mostly a shoot. This will be a topic I'll explore more in-depth eventually on here. 

The Pancrase work/shoot stuff (we know there was AT LEAST a couple of matches that were worked to a point or were legit shoots with a determined winner) is certainly interesting to investigate, I just figured it was too all over the place for now for anyone to really reliably use it to judge the rest of his career.