[1997-07-16-WDF] Tarzan Goto & Ryo Miyake vs Shinichi Nakano & Masayoshi Motegi

[Jetlag]

This also delivers the promise of an IWA Japan vs. Yume Factory match. Picture 4 sleazy heavyweights potatoeing the shit out of eachother, add a ton of blood and you have this match. You know it's an awesome match! Tarzan Goto is one of the most mean wreckingball wrestler dudes ever, and this match really showcases him both doing some cool actual wrestling, and fucking dudes up in really graphic ways. Motegi is very lovable as this legendary sad sack who tries really hard, and he takes a monster beating from the IWA guys, getting waffled with chairs, punched and bloodied and he fires right back with full force hits. Miyake is perfectly fine as a disdainful shitbag kneedropping and stomping dudes in their bloody face. Nakano fits perfectly in this kind of savage potatoefest as a hot tag with his eardrum shattering slaps and enzuigiris and awesome powerslam, also he comes in with a bandage over his eye resulting in some gross spots where he gets hit in the eye with chairs and headbutts that would make Terry Funk cringe. Finish was not as epic as the body of the match but kind of worked as a payoff. This pretty much ruled.

[Microstatistics]

Gritty brawling with lots of blood, a nice heel-face dynamic, stiff strikes and good-looking punches, fire and hate. Well paced with an interesting structure as they start off slowly with some chain wrestling before tensions quickly boil over and it just disintegrates into an absolute fight. A great tag match. ****

[Phil Schneider]

What a sleaze soaked pleasure this match was, the wrestling equivalent of eating a giant roadhouse bacon cheeseburger. Goto is a treasure in this, I can't believe I ever used to diss this dude. He basically works this as a fat grotesque Tenryu as he beats the bricks off of Motegi with chair edges, meaty punches right to the nose and thick headbuts. Motegi bleeds a ton and was pretty great as a fired up babyface, by far the best I have seen him look. Nakano and Miyake were really fun as the secondary dudes too, they would tag in and slap the shit out of who ever was in the ring. I really miss this kind of dirtbag Puro indy, now all Japanese indies seem to be about telling jokes, there was nothing funny about this match at all.

[G. Badger]

Ditto to everything said above. The promotion has a wacky name but, man alive this was a stiff intense match! Always dug Tarzan Goto and before I knew anything about the big world of puro including AJ and NJ, I knew Goto...carving a hole in some guy's arm during a glass pane death match. This man is sick!!

 

He has that aura of danger and toughness about him that pushes this match to something great. He can wrestle, he's got moves but, man once he's throwing chairs and bleeding its on!

 

He and his partner Ryo do so well in building heat that when Nakano comes it to kick ass, I was right there cheering him on. Skip ahead to the finish, Motegi put on his Michigan Wolverines head gear, started barking and threw Ryo for a beauty of German.

 

Great match!

[KB8]

This was even seedier, even nastier, even better. I mean think about that statement. The last match had someone getting attacked with scissors and lynched to a ring post. This didn't have anything quite as brazen, but it was far more primitive. All things considered you can work being stabbed in the head with a sharp object or being strangled pretty safely. It's smoke and mirrors. It's harder to work being drilled in the forehead or orbital bone with the edge of a chair and make it look good without hurting like a bastard. This had lots of edge-of-the-chair hits to the forehead and orbital bone that looked like they hurt like a bastard. It started out with an indie parity stand-off between Goto and Nakano and it might've been the best indie parity stand-off ever just because it's fucking Tarzan Goto doing indie parity stand-offs. Then the hellish beatdown started. They didn't go straight to the chairshots, Goto and Miyake wrestled mostly clean initially, but it was potatoey clean and Motegi was the recipient. He fired back and hit a couple dives to the floor, but he never should've let it go out there because you put Tarzan Goto anywhere near a chair he's hitting you with it. He hit Motegi with several, often with the edge of it, often dead in the forehead, sometimes in the throat. One shot took the padded seat off at the hinges so Goto just smashed him over the spine with the frame. This genuinely had some of the best working the cut stuff I've ever seen. Motegi bleeds a ton and Goto is covered in blood up to the elbow as he throws disgusting little rabbit punches to the cut, bites the forehead, etc. Miyake's decision to wear white pants on the night pays dividends as he drops knees across the forehead leaving blood stains on the material. Nakano comes in off the hot tag, but he has a bandage over his eye so before long Goto and Miyake are punching him in the eyebrow and jabbing him in the face with chair legs. At one point it looked like they were winding up for a double clothesline on Motegi but then they just double punched him in the forehead. If I had one complaint it'd be that there wasn't really much of a babyface comeback, but the match was clipped by a few minutes so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. What a night of indie sleaze perfection. Imagine this was the kind of thing Meltzer went gaga over? We'd have six hundred Tarzan Goto ripoffs running around with rabies rather than six hundred Tetsuya Naitos.