Before going into the reviews, I’d like to remind readers that I recently introduced a Ko-Fi link! I’ll continue to be focusing my writing primarily on the year project, but if you’d like to see me write about any match of your choosing, I currently charge $3 a review, or $5 for any match that goes longer than an hour. You can find the link right here at https://ko-fi.com/fujiwarasmirk. I appreciate the continued support, and I hope you continue reading!
Steve Austin vs. Chris Adams (USWA Dallas Sportatorium, 8/3/90)
This is a Come As You Are match. In other words, both wrestlers are allowed to wear anything they choose to the ring. In Steve Austin’s case, that’s a being decked head to torso in football gear, complete with a helmet to protect his face; in Chris Adam’s case, it’s a judo gi with a kendo stick.
How could you not love this shit?
I’ve seen some talk this feud up as sneakily some of the best wrestling to come out of 1990, and I’ve been mostly underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all solid enough, but nothing has really grabbed me between these two up to this match, and if it wasn’t for the novelty of A. this particular stipulation, and B. the novelty of seeing a rookie Austin at work, I might not have chose to watch this.
God, am I glad that I did.
Austin’s smugness when Adams tries unsuccessfully to hit him in the football gear with the kendo stick, only to quickly eat shit when Adams goes below the belt and targets his exposed legs in wrestling tights is a perfect start to this, one for the “half-measures are for cowards” crowd. Even this early into his career, and with all the extraneous equipment on his body, Austin is a total bump freak during this blink and you miss it shine segment from Adams, flying all over the place to the approval of the fans in the Dallas Sportatorium.
While Austin did fail to address the obvious-in-hindsight weakness of his legs, he does commit to the football gimmick when on offense, shoulder tackling Adams right out of the ring when he gets the space to and adopting a three-point stance to charge at him. He takes the helmet off only to jaw-jack at fans, but doesn’t dare keep it off when in Adam’s vicinity out of fear.
Chris Adams is pretty good here, too. He’s mostly just asked to sell around and inside the ring, and he’s good at it when asked. His brief hope spots are well done, and it feels well earned when he gets his revenge by cracking Austin with the helmet after he ran so hard into the post on the outside that it fell right off his head.
The only thing that would have made this match better is if Austin got busted open, but it’s a minor quibble, the difference between good and great. Even if this isn’t great, though, it is absolutely awesome, one of the most fun matches I’ve seen all year and the major highlight of USWA for me. Bonus points for the future Paul Bearer getting cracked with the kendo stick.
Rating: ***1/2
Atlantis, El Rayo de Jalisco Jr. & Ringo Mendoza vs. Cien Caras, Mascara Ano 2000 & MS-1 (EMLL Super Viernes, 8/3/90)
Another hit from the most watchable promotion of the year.
The thing with these EMLL/CMLL trios matches, and this is true both then and now, is that they’re relatively easy to predict. Especially in a match like this, you can tell the match’s structure pretty early; the rudos dominate the first fall, then the tecnicos make the comeback in the second fall, leading to the third fall providing the bulk of the drama. This certainly isn’t true of every match (many have the tecnicos dominate the first fall only for the rudos to cheat and take the second), nor is it necessarily a negative to be so tied to formula like this, but it can feel like there’s a ceiling to how great a match like this is and how warranted the praise you give it really would be.
That’s not to say this isn’t really damn good, though.
The rudos team is great here, especially in the first fall as they swarm whatever tecnico happens to try to jump in the ring and play tough guy. The tecnicos aren’t slouches, either; Atlantis is as rock solid as he always is, Ringo Mendoza doesn’t offer much by way of bumping but really brings the fire when trading strikes, and Jalisco Jr. is the standout here for his interactions with Caras in the second and third falls, complete with mask ripping and brawling to the outside. It’s their heated fighting in and out of the ring that really sets this apart from your standard good EMLL trios match into something with a little more staying power in the mind, capped off by a wonderfully entertaining chain of headlocks between all six men leading up to the finish.
Not the most imaginative wrestling in the world, but when the machine isn’t broken, why try to fix it?
Rating: ***1/2
Devil Masami & Itsuki Yamazaki vs. Miss A & Harley Saito (JWP 8/12/90)
I love doing projects like this and getting blown away by gems that I wasn’t aware of beforehand.
JWP has been a consistent, if mostly unspectacular, promotion so far. Outside of a handful of quality matches, nothing’s really stood out to me from them and their relatively young roster of talent, but this stands head and shoulders above all of them as the most impressive JWP match of 1990 to date.
This match is slightly clipped, and it ends in a draw so we’re missing about 3-4 minutes out of a 30 minute match. It doesn’t matter all that much. As it stands, it’s still one of the most exciting and interesting tags I’ve seen all year off the back of excellent performances from all four women.
Firstly, Itsuki Yamazaki. Considering all she accomplished as one half of the Jumping Bomb Angels over the last decade, it can be easy to forget that Yamazaki is only 24 in 1990, but she looks every bit like a wrestler in or entering the prime of her career here, and she’s fantastic in this match. Her and Devil adopt a more antagonistic edge to pair against the younger, less experienced babyfaces and she fits like a glove in that role, unsympathetic and really mean and vicious when in control. Her aggression is really fine tuned in this from the start when she wails on Harley Saito in the corner with forearms, or when she jams her elbow into Saito’s neck, or especially when she’s zeroing in on Saito’s hurt leg in the back half. She does all kinds of creative and mean work on the limb, just wrenching it on the mat or headbutting it, and it adds a lot to the heated structure of the time limit draw. She’s a great instigator and disruptor too, getting in a great little cheapshot on Saito while Masami is stretching her and breaking up a would-be hot tag to Miss A who toils on the apron.
Speaking of Miss A, or Dynamite Kansai as some of you are more familiar with, she shines very brightly in this as the powerhouse babyface that stands up to her veteran opponents. She’s not in this as much as her partner, but she makes a great impression whenever she’s going toe to toe with Devil, or raining bombs down onto Yamazaki, or even honing in on the latter’s right leg and applying leg locks. She knows exactly when to step in and interject when Saito is getting stretched on the mat, a real big sister-like presence that the crowd already buys into. She looks shockingly similar to the worker she would become in those interpromotional matches a few years on from this, even if she hasn’t changed her name to reflect that yet.
Harley Saito, surprisingly, stands out even more than her partner.
As you might have guessed, Saito’s the one getting worked over for so much of this match’s runtime, and she really excels in this fiery underdog role. She gets her left leg worked over, and she sells the damage well both in the moment and after it, hobbling around to try and get her partner in. Her hope spots are timed excellently, like the German suplex she rattles off on Itsuki Yamazaki, or the string of spinning wheel kicks she hits on Devil Masami. There’s an incredibly unfortunate moment where she tries to hit Masami with a tombstone piledriver, but her opponent’s weight just crushes her on the mat, and it’s a testament to Harley Saito how bad it feels watching something like that happen, like watching a likable young basketball player go through a non-contact injury on the court.
And Devil Masami, Jesus Christ. She exudes such a massive aura that makes her feel like the most important wrestler in the ring at all times, and she wrestles appropriate to that. Powerbombing Saito through the damn mat, constantly going for surfboard stretches to really torture both her younger opponents, slamming Kansai face-first on the mat, she’s just consistently unreal in this from the very start. She’s also a delight to watch from a character standpoint, like when she pulls a suffering Saito towards Kansai and yanks her back just before she can make the tag and applies a sleeperhold as Kansai’s forced to watch, or the multiple times she smiles and flexes at the crowd like she knows she’s the best. It’s easily her strongest performance of the year, and makes her look like she’s still one of the best wrestlers on the planet even as she’s bulked up and abandoned the high-energy style of her AJW years.
It’s not perfect, the finishing stretch gets a little too spot-heavy as they approach the draw, but when a match shocks me the way this one did, I feel compelled to gush about it to you all.
Rating: ****
Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs. Dick Leon Vrij (UWF 8/13/90)
Low-level recommendation, but a real good match for sure. It’s not close to their first encounter a year prior, a Different Style fight that was a real battle, but it’s very good regardless. Really strong, slick matwork, great striking as to be expected by both of them, and a fun little story of the two trying to little bro the other with these dismissive pats on the head, and it’s delightful to see Vrij get progressively angrier as Fujiwara returns the disrespect. What’s more, Fujiwara gives a strong performance as a guy clearly hurt but trying to put on a Poker face as Vrij targets his midsection, eventually just blitzing Vrij and applying his signature armbar to get the win. Not the best Yoshiaki Fujiwara match of the year, but well worth a watch anyway.
Rating: ***1/2
Animal Hamaguchi vs. Masanobu Kurisu (NJPW Chiba Park Stadium, 8/16/90)
Hell yes.
This is a 7 minute brawl in an around the arena where these two kick the shit out of each other in and around the ring, and it’s a BLAST.
Animal Hamaguchi storms into the ring, and these two get right to it. In the opening minute, Masanobu Kurisu grabs a chair starts wailing on Hamaguchi with it, and then piledrives him onto it, which is all you really need to know to understand what these two are going for. Kurisu remains the violent dickhead he’s been all year, stomping full force onto Hamaguchi’s face from the top rope and kicking at his kneecap to get out of his grasp. For his part, Hamaguchi is great here too as a sympathetic asskicker, throwing Kurisu around and busting him open before flexing to the fans inside the ring. There’s a snap and energy to every movement he makes, and he just steamrolls Kurisu in the back half of this.
I’m not going to tell you this is one of the best matches of the year. It’s not. But it is one of the most purely fun matches I’ve seen for this project so far, and something I’ll think of fondly when looking back at this year as a whole.
El Dandy, El Rayo de Jalisco Jr. & El Satanico vs. Cien Caras, Mascara Ano 2000 & MS-1 (EMLL Super Viernes, 8/17/90)
A little spite goes a long way.
What separates this from the last match I wrote about with this rudo trio, and most other trios matches in this promotion so far, is how heated this one gets. You come into this expecting the amazing execution on everything, and you get it with these beautiful armdrags and rope running sequences from the likes of El Dandy especially in the first fall and a half. You might even see former Los Infernales teammates El Satanico and MS-1 on opposite sides and expect to see them duke it out, and that’s all here too and it’s awesome.
What really catches your eye, though, is how mean and vicious the rudos are to Rayo de Jalisco Jr. here, ripping at his mask to the point that you can see his hair sticking out and bloodying him up really well. Cien Caras in particular takes great pleasure in working the cut during the rudo heat in the second fall, really kicking the dude around and even hitting a jumping knee on Jalisco Jr. that looks awesome. It’s what really got me invested into this trios match in a way that I didn’t expect to be on the surface beyond the trios formula in the promotion being consistently good and entertaining throughout the whole year.
To that point, Rayo de Jalisco Jr. is surprisingly the guy that shines brightest in this.
Of course, the bleeding and all the stuff mentioned is great, and he sells that stuff well, but even before he gets targeted by the rudo team in the second and third falls he’s incredibly captivating. His exchanges with Mascara Ano 2000 are some of the best in the entire match, like when he sends a flexing Ano 2000 flying across the ring as he just runs into him, or when he does that hilarious fakeout spot that sends the rudo crashing to the outside. On a team with two of the best wrestlers in the world, let alone the promotion, Rayo de Jalisco Jr. was the highlight of the show for me which I really didn’t expect coming into this.
Come for the slick and impeccable execution on the moves, holds, and dives with this one, but stay for the bleeding and mask ripping that puts it a level above most matches like it in the promotion this year.
Rating: ***3/4
Akira Hokuto vs. Manami Toyota (AJW Survival Shout In Korakuen, 8/19/90)
Much like the other Joshi match I wrote about in this catch-up, this match went to a 30 minute time limit draw.
This match is not as good as that one.
Even for veteran presences like Masami and Yamazaki, a 30 minute draw against less experienced workers was ambitious, and when you take that factor out of the equation here, you can see the ambition get stretched a little too thin by the end. A minor but notable flaw is the weird no-selling Hokuto does of a tombstone piledriver in the outside, immediately getting up and hitting Toyota with a piledriver of her own in a moment that threatened to completely take me out of the whole thing. On a more macro level, Hokuto and Toyota in the back half of this work a more generic and less interesting match than the work that preceded it, abandoning the sharper focus of that first half in favor of more nearfalls and bigger pieces of offense.
It’s a shame, because the first half of this is some of the most compelling work I’ve seen all year, and it’s why I overall think this is still great.
Manami Toyota is someone you think of in the vein of go-go-go workers and high flyers, and for good reason, but she surprisingly is a lot more grounded in this than you might imagine. Hokuto’s bad leg is apparently hurt going into this, and Toyota goes after it the first chance she gets with a level of doggedness that sort of blew me away. All her work on the leg is really good and impactful, especially the sick looking ankle lock she applies or the Indian deathlock/cattle mutilation hybrid she seemingly invents here. She’s so ferocious here on the mat that, even as physically dazzling as she is already when she takes to the air and hits those gorgeous missile dropkicks or suicide dives to the outside, you wish she spent the whole match just torturing Hokuto’s hurt limb, and especially that she worked like this more throughout the rest of her career.
Akira Hokuto, to her credit, is incredible here as well. You can tell she’s already a borderline great worker by this point in how well she does selling that leg, screaming and wincing in pain as Toyota stretches the limb out. There’s an especially great little limp she has when she gets up after hitting a piledriver in the middle of the ring, and that attention to detail makes her stand out compared to so many of her peers at this point. It’s not perfect, she does kind of neglect it in the climax of the match when they’re trading bomb and nearfalls and the like, but she mostly gets it right when she needs to, and it’s not like Toyota necessitated the need to keep selling it when she abandoned the leg attack in the first place. Additionally, while neither woman has the cruelty or meanness of Devil Masami and Itsuki Yamazaki in that tag, they do make this more heated when they’re slapping each other at the start, or kicking at the other on the mat to break control, and it adds a lot to the competitive nature of the draw.
These two will go on to become much better in their own lanes, both against each other and in general, but for the most part I think they get the most out of an untypical match structure and deliver one of the most compelling matches in AJW all year.
Rating: ***3/4
Big Van Vader vs. Riki Choshu (NJPW Summer Night Fever II, 8/19/90)
This match was for Big Van Vader’s IWGP Heavyweight Title.
I just think this match is really neat.
It’s not for everyone, of course. This is not a masterful story or narratively complex or anything like that. This is Choshu and Vader slugging it out for almost 12 full minutes, with little in regards to selling or moves thrown out there.
It’s fucking awesome.
Vader spends most of this match in control, and he’s great as he always is there. Great punches, great use of his size against a similar heavyweight, sick looking lariats, all the works. At one point he takes his mask off and appears to have trouble with the bad eye Hansen gifted him months prior, but this still doesn’t stop him from unleashing vicious headbutts that bust Choshu open and add a great visual on top of everything.
Choshu, too, fits right into this shorter, more action-packed fight. He takes the stiff shots Vader famously dishes out and responds in kind with some of his own, especially those meaty lariats he’s fond of throwing out there. What really stands out with Choshu is the incredible comeback he makes at the end, though, utilizing those aforementioned lariats to knock the champion to his knees, and then off his feet entirely. Him being insanely over pushes this one over the top, as the New Japan faithful are molten hot for everything these two do and especially when Choshu chops down the tree and wins the IWGP title for the second time.
It’s only borderline great, there’s not a whole lot to this beyond the basics that these two legends both mastered, but I’ll never scoff at a short and sweet confrontation like this when these two are so great in it.
Rating: ***3/4
Mitsuharu Misawa & Toshiaki Kawada vs. Jumbo Tsuruta & Masanobu Fuchi (AJPW Summer Action Series II 1990 – Day 2, 8/19/90)
This match only exists in handheld form, which is a shame for two reasons. The first reason is that we’re missing like a minute or so of this from when our hero’s camera seems to go out near the middle of the match. The second is that, understandably so given the action in front of them, the camera stops focusing on the action for like 30 seconds near the climax of the match. Ultimately it’s a minor quibble, but it’s unfortunate to not be able to see everything that there is here, because the work that we do see is all tremendous.
Specifically, Jumbo Tsuruta is outstanding in this match.
It’s hard not to get romantic when discussing ol’ grumpy Jumbo in these reviews. This period of Tsuruta’s career is the perfect mix of all-time greatness on both a performance and narrative level, portraying the wrathful and villainous king who refuses to cede control to his younger would-be usurpers. The level of intensity and fury he wrestles with is palpable from the moment he steps in the ring, firing off these nasty elbows to Misawa’s midsection at the very first opportunity, and he never lets up. He makes light work of Toshiaki Kawada, absorbing some early body kicks before catching an errant one and throwing him down with a force that seems designed to leave him below the Earth’s crust. Even when he isn’t the legal man, though, his impact can be felt when he just slaps Misawa in the face to break up a submission hold or when he immediately throws Kawada into the guardrails the moment he catches him outside the ring.
What really separates this performance from the rest of the pack, though, is how hyperfocused he is on going after Misawa. He’s a raging bull in there, but it’s the green that sets him off, and he takes every opportunity to beat down on Misawa; you can see this in the moment where he bounces off a great rolling kick from Kawada in the ring to cheapshot his rival on the ring apron. He punches at Misawa’s head repeatedly from a mounted position, wallops him with a lariat, knocks his block off with an elbow that knocks him from the top rope, and. just to prove a point, picks him up on a pin attempt to show just how much greater he is than the punk. His one-track mind is such that even his partner is begging and pleading with him to let it go, and in his mindless rage he even attacks Fuchi and throws him out of the ring so he can punish Misawa some more. It’s one of the most impressive performances of the entire year, a complete and total commitment to a character losing his grip on his sanity as things have gotten so personal for him in this feud already.
Everyone else is really great as well, of course.
The Misawa/Jumbo exchanges are, as you might have guessed, tremendous again. Misawa once again makes up for a seeming lack of outward fire with immaculate execution on everything he does, which only serves to drive Tsuruta crazier and crazier as it goes on. His selling when he’s the one getting worked on is tremendous, too, stumbling around on the mat and barely able to even get to his feet as Jumbo toys with him. Even afterwards, it takes seemingly everything out of him just to his an elbow on Masanobu Fuchi. It’s no wonder why Jumbo’s so insecure about him when, already, he does everything so tremendously well and is only continuing to get better day after day.
Kawada and Fuchi are the ones who spend the most time in the ring, and they mesh well together in this feud. Much like the match the previous night, Kawada looks more and more like himself by the day, taking the fight to both members of Tsuruta-gun but also playing a more sympathetic underdog to counteract the loss of Kikuchi to the equation. What really stood out to me was how great his selling was on the apron, leaning on the ropes to keep him up after the punishment he took. Fuchi remains the bastard that he is, stomping and punching and clawing at eyes like he’s wont to do, but he also shows himself to be a selfless soldier when he wordlessly takes Jumbo’s ire and continues to try to calm the big man down. It’s such an interesting dynamic between those two, akin to a Tywin Lannister/Aerys Targaryen relationship in a way, and that moment adds a lot of depth to Fuchi’s status as Jumbo’s second-in-command.
As a handheld, you can only wonder how many amazing matches like this will never see the light of day due to nobody having the wherewithal to capture it on video. As it stands, I’m glad we have this one as an excellent and immediate sequel to one of the best matches of the year the day prior.
Rating: ****
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