Takeshi Morishima

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[GOTNW]

Morishima was a good worker in his time, possibly even great around 2006-2007, but he's been way too shitty the last few years to even warrant consideration.

[JRGoldman]

I think it depends how highly you value peak performance. I think overall he is a problematic performer that was hurt by being too giving to junior contemporaries. His ROH run holds up as well as anyone. His work really fell off a cliff as his body betrayed him when he probably should have been reaching his peak, which probably colors our perception of him. I think his US Indy run during the height of that style probably merits a low spot on my ballot.

[Quentin Skinner]

Morishima was very good during his peak in '06-'07, but very uninspired and often mediocre for the majority of his career. Didn't come anywhere close to the expectations fans and NOAH higher ups had for him to become a bonafide star.

[W2BTD]

Another guy that instantly came to mind when I read the head scratching Roman Reigns thread. To me, Morishima's peak blows away Roman to the point it isn't even comparable, but the drop off was so sharp and steep that there is no way he can seriously be considered for something like this. I think it would probably be wise to think about guys like Morishima before getting too excited about a four month stretch of (very arguable) great work from Roman.

[Jaivl]

Another guy that instantly came to mind when I read the head scratching Roman Reigns thread. To me, Morishima's peak blows away Roman to the point it isn't even comparable, but the drop off was so sharp and steep that there is no way he can seriously be considered for something like this. I think it would probably be wise to think about guys like Morishima before getting too excited about a four month stretch of (very arguable) great work from Roman.

 

You mean two years (Nov12-Jun14 & Feb15-now), not four months.

[W2BTD]

 

Another guy that instantly came to mind when I read the head scratching Roman Reigns thread. To me, Morishima's peak blows away Roman to the point it isn't even comparable, but the drop off was so sharp and steep that there is no way he can seriously be considered for something like this. I think it would probably be wise to think about guys like Morishima before getting too excited about a four month stretch of (very arguable) great work from Roman.

 

You mean two years (Nov12-Jun14 & Feb15-now), not four months.

 

 

Roman's singles work was widely panned until the WrestleMania match, with serious concerns from both within the company and among fans that the main event could be a complete disaster if Brock couldn't carry him. Most people were hoping it could just be decent at best. Obviously the match ended up delivering, and Roman gave a career performance. The narrative now, which I find puzzling and don't agree with, is that he's been great since. I don't personally see it, but let's conceded that's true for the sake of argument. Hold that thought.

 

I went back recently and rewatched nearly every Shield trios match available on The Network. What I came away thinking, was that in a vacuum, Roman added virtually nothing to the act. Rollins took the great bumps and did all of the crazy dives, Ambrose brought the charisma to the table, and Roman... well, Roman hung out on the apron, didn't do much of anything, screamed a lot, and was given all of the shine at the end of nearly every match. He literally could have been any big guy with a modicum of charisma who could do a spear. I'm shocked Rollins & Ambrose didn't break their backs carrying the guy for 18 months. And yes, I understand that this was the idea, for those guys to carry the team and get Roman over as a superstar while he developed as a worker, and I have no issue with that, but his work is what it is regardless, which was mediocre at the very very best. He was almost never better than the 4th or 5th best worker in any Shield match.

 

So two years? No way. More like 2 or 3 months. He's been (very arguably) "great" since Mania. Anything else is revisionist history. He shouldn't even have a thread yet. I can name hundreds of wrestlers who had great two month runs.

[Manatee]

He only got 8 votes. I guess not enough people saw this https://youtu.be/-P_W6jf3PZU

[ChuckScumm]

Remember when he was a scrawny AJPW rookie?

[TheU_2001]

Takeshi Morishima is someone I completely forgot about when compiling my list. He's one of my favorites, I probably would have placed him somewhere between 85-100, on my list as I've only seen some of his NOAH stuff, but loved all of his ROH stuff.

[Jingus]

Even during his "peak" years, I never saw his greatness. He never carved out his own niche in NOAH, he always looked like a kid who was cosplaying the acts of his elders. In ROH he seemed dull, with offense that was apparently stiffer than it looked; it seemed like he was a one-man injury factory for a while.

 

Terrible selling, too; I remember a match with Danielson where the finish was AmDrag snapping and stomping Morishima in the balls over and over again, literally at least a couple dozen times in a row. Takeshi's response to getting his balls stomped dozens of times in a row was... wait til Bryan is out of the ring, calmly stand up, and walk to the back with no expression on his face while selling nothing whatsoever. Fuck a BUNCH of that.

[Cap]

Yeah, his selling is what stood out to me on rewatch. It was terrible. I still really like a couple of those matches with Dragon, but there are parts where he just clearly doesn't know how to sell what Dragon is doing to him. I think it was the first one where Dragon is going after the leg and Mori does nothing, but it isn't the undersell sell like Misawa. It is a strait up no sell.

 

Still, I liked his ROH run pretty well. If nothing else he was a really unique wrestler (at least in that context), who brought good work out of a lot of guys. I kind found his look to play into his mannerisms too. To see a strait up scary dude act like a crazy monster is one thing but to see a giant female baby look mother fucker do it is sort of unsettling. His offense was the kind of simple I generally like, but he never really put it together and learned to maximize it. Still looked brutal to me most of the time. I haven't gotten a chance to revisit his matches with Nigel, but I still generally like his series with Dragon. I thought it was all good to great, except one. Only 1/5 of their singles matches in ROH fell flat to me (12/29/07).

 

All that said, he wouldn't have sniffed my top 100.

[Clayton Jones]

Morishima will sniff my top 100, and he will sniff it vigorously. It looks like Soup and I coincidentally started watching his work last night which is some real GWE synchronicity. He recommended a 2001 match VS Akiyama which I will certainly check out, I strongly recommend his 2004 WLW title match VS Ikeda. I also watched a 2011 title shot he and Yoshie got VS Bernard/Anderson to get into some later stuff. It was an okayish match, I'm not motivated enough to make its own post, but it's worth noting Morishima brings the vast majority of the positives to the match as the resident top NOAH wrestler trying to win back the titles. I haven't generally had problems with his selling (the entire Danielson feud is a favorite of mine), my main criticisms of his work are of his tendencies to show what he can do instead of what he should do. He's definitely a peak argument but I think there's more connective tissue there than people might expect. In large part because he was a great tag wrestler. I wish the end of his career went differently for his sake especially and I'm not looking forward to getting into the last few years, but I'll make sure I at least hit on some.

[DylanZero]

He was special for the first 6 years of his career, but his, and the companies around him's flaws pretty much derailed him completely. I will always have a soft spot for Wild II & his ROH run.

 

He SHOULD be here as a legend in this business and an all time great worker but...I just can't see it with the reality of what we got.

[Clayton Jones]

That's fair. If I feel revisiting and discovering more of the Wild II stuff it's flashes of greatness but moreso unrealized potential he'll probably get cut. If I think that combined with the ROH run make for a compelling peak argument I could see him making his way on the tail end of my ballot. I'm pretty darn high on the ROH work but I'll go back through some of that as well to be sure.

[Cap]

I want to take back everything I said in that 2016 post. No idea what I was on about. I love those matches. I'm not saying he didn't have flaws, but I don't believe my take from 5 years ago anymore.

[Clayton Jones]

I remember poking holes in Hashimoto's case for god knows what reason. There was a lot of negativity going around, it was contagious.

[Ma Stump Puller]

I feel like people are more on board with the concept of Morishima than the execution: the idea of a big Terry Gordy/Jumbo hybrid going around beating the shit out of whoever is in front of them while being a complete monster in the process sounds awesome, and for what it's worth, Morishima for most of his RoH run and his mid 2000's NOAH work is mostly very well done. He's a fun tag worker with Rikio and gets incredibly over with the NOAH crowd: people forget how loud they were for the guy when he's just running all over people: but gets incredibly cooled down by a shitty Misawa match where the poor man almost dies after a bad concussion and Morishima, the rampaging monster, is quietly put down by Misawa with a elbow to the face, sent to ROH for his historic title reign, and by the time he DOES eventually beat Misawa, the allure is long gone and he's just not the same anymore. Morishima has a pretty bad Achilles Heel: he can't really do long-form matches well, by that I mean anything beyond 20 minutes tends to lose steam unless it's something really special. He's just not that kind of worker in my opinion and it cripples him when he needs to do big GHC main event epics. 

He does get some solid enough matches later on but these are marred with a lot of half-assed performances, "health issues" (most likely underlining alcoholism) and Cho Kibou-Gun garbage where he's a near EVIL tier heel of consistent interference, ref knockouts, and other just general weak ways to get around actually having to wrestle. Even Nagata couldn't get much out of the lad at that point. His potential was huge, but there's way too many times where I've seen Morishima in action and he's just...bleh, doing all of his signature moves and nothing else, putting all of the baggage onto his opponent. Morishima bouts in the 2010's are dictated by how generous his opponent is basically. When he's on, he's fantastic, health issues be damned, but there's just way too much mediocrity to put him on a top 100.