The Best And Worst Of NJPW: Destruction In Kobe and Fighting Spirit Unleashed

Previously on NJPW: Miho Abe won her first singles championship, Suzuki failed his months-long quest to rip off both Naito’s legs at the knees, and the last NJPW show in America left Bullet Club the EXACT OPPOSITE of East High School at the end of High School Musical.

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And now, the best and worst of Destruction in Kobe from September 23, 2018, and Fighting Spirit Unleashed on September 30, which I saw live at the Walter Pyramid in Long Beach.

Housekeeping: The English Commentary Team Def. Emily Pratt By Submission

In honor of the final Destruction show taking place in the hometown of Kobe beef, I decided to treat myself to the gourmet version of watching televised wrestling, the version where you barely understand anything the commentary team is saying and just absorb their enthusiasm! When I started this column, I said that I would listen to English commentary for it in order to review the version of NJPW programming intended for English speakers. But author Chris Carlton’s constant barrage of historical facts and fan remarks during the G1 and American comedy writer Marc Warzecha’s voice made it difficult to concentrate on the actual cool and good in-ring stuff at times really beat me down after a while, so I took a break. Commentary isn’t really needed to understand wrestling shows anyway, especially ones like NJPW’s that are still primarily performed to the live audience.

Best: Baby Blood Feud

Destruction in Kobe opens with another Yota Tsuji vs. Yuya Uemura match, and would you believe these crazy kids go to another ten-minute time limit draw??? This one starts without the inexplicable emotional intensity of their first several and is just a normal, fine, trainee match, but they get super fired up when they start dropkicking, and the crowd gets into it. This time the time limit draw happens right after Tsuji locks on the Boston Crab on Uemura, and the ref has to force the larger wrestler to break it off. Uemura stays in the ring longer to bow to the audience while Tsuji just leaves up the ramp too, which seems to fit their gradually developing, still-fetus personas.

Best: Is The Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Division Secretly The Most Fun Thing In This Company Right Now?

This show also sees some significant progress and fun matches in the post-Hiromu-injury rebuilding of the Junior Heavyweight division. A lot of the buzz about Super Junior Tag League has involved teasing mysterious future reveals (Bushi’s and Ishimori’s partners) so far, but here we see the state of its already-established tag teams.

https://twitter.com/MrLARIATO/status/1043763446075011074

Last year’s tournament winners and the most recent Young Lions to return from excursion, Roppongi 3K, get a dominant win against the boys almost definitely set to depart next, Shota Umino and Ren Narita. Narita starts confidently against Sho and both cubs fight like they have something to prove, but R3K is way better at this tag team wrestling thing at this point, and they have an attitude about it.

And it makes sense for the rare, kind of mean variant of this tag team, including Rocky Romero yelling for his boys to be meaner to Narita and Yoh doing an Extremely Deep Boston Crab Of Spite on an undergrad, to show up now. These guys have been either sidelined or dealing with Jay White nonsense or losing for months, but it looks like they’ve refocused now that the tag titles aren’t so out of reach. Even Rocky gets more serious in his backstage promo, hyping up Sho and Yoh as “the gold and silver standard of professional wrestling” and saying “I will accept nothing less than a win.”

This tag division’s been pretty much just Suzukigun vs. Roppongi 3K for a while now, but then this Jushin Thunder Liger and Tiger Mask vs. El Desperado and Kanemaru tag match popped up on the card for Kobe. Would this just serve to reestablish our champs before their next real title feud, or would it establish what I immediately realized would be my most desired title feud? Turns out, the second thing!

Suzuki’s goons jump the masked living legends during their entrance. Despy starts beating Liger with a chair and trying to choke him out with a mic cable while Kanemaru immediately goes for Tiger Mask’s tiger mask. Like in this year’s BOSJ and other recent tag matches, Tiger Mask’s wrestling is solid but understandably slower than that of his younger opponents. But does that affect the extreme hotness of his tag to Liger after fending off both tag champs? NOPE. Liger and/or Tiger kick butt using their veteran anime character expertise and the match ends with TIGER MASK PINNING ONE HALF OF THE TAG TEAM CHAMPIONS, despite said half having just kicked him in the nards.

Backstage, Desperado, of course, claims this was a lucky win and threatens to unmask Tiger. Tiger Mask brings back some of his talking points from earlier this year, including that THE ESTABLISHMENT is the only thing keeping he and Liger from the tag championship picture and that their previous attempts at title shots have been IGNORED because NJPW knows if they won the belts they would KEEP THEM FOREVER and they want to push younger talent. Will Tiger Liger defeat ageism at King of Pro Wrestling??? I kind of hope so, but if not, I’ll still be psyched to probably see this team in the upcoming Super Junior Tag League.

Worst: But The Heavyweight Tag Division Is Still Stalling

With the Young Bucks vs. G.o.D. tag match still upcoming, our two other currently active NJPW heavyweight tag teams are just out here trying their best!

After a dominant win in Beppu, Killer Elite Squad, who continue to make my eyes angry and heart happy by going full meth dealer with their entrance gear, is again the initial crowd favorite in a match with the Best Friends, because although people know Beretta as part of other teams, these two aren’t really established together in New Japan yet. They finally get some good applause after simultaneous dropkicks to Lance Archer and a flex pose, but K.E.S., kind of hilariously, still gets louder cheers for suplexing both their opponents and for Archer yelling at the audience to shut up.

Like the last K.E.S. vs. Best Friends match, this is on the slow side and not all that consistently exciting, especially when the former champs are dominating. The simultaneous plancha spot feels awkward, but there are some nice moments too, like Dustin and Greg suplexing Archer together and Beretta being surrounded by giants after Archer’s “EVERYBODY DIES” taunt.

The ending of the match, with Beretta countering the Killer Bomb into a rollup, is very suprising and exciting. Neither of these teams have looked super great since returning to NJPW, but both are now established as potential contenders, rather than a team of monsters and a team of jobbers.

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We also have an eight man tag of Ayato Yoshida, Taguchi, Honma, and Makabe vs. Nakanishi, Nagata, Kojima, and Tenzan. I initially thought it was really weird that this was the fourth match on the card rather than the second, but the crowd was super into it, so what do I know about booking, and booking for Kobe specifically! Here are my takeaways from this okay nostalgia/trainee match:

1. Taguchi only being able to convince Honma to wear the Taguchi Japan rubgy jersey is Peak Honma
2. Nagata continues his mission to shoot kill the entire next generation, not just Shota Umino
3. Yoshida does PKs and is from the K-Dojo, so I’m convinced/hopeful that he will join Suzukigun and maybe even become Suzuki’s next Handsome Son Tag Partner and he and the Boss will at some point PK people at the same time

Best: Pumpkin Spice Goths

The ol’ Plot Furthering Six Man Tags are pretty fun this show too. Sanada, Evil, and Naito vs. Taka Michinoku, Zack Sabre Jr., and Suzuki has a very obvious case of One Of These Wrestlers Is Not Like The Others, and yep, Michinoku, the match’s only junior, eats the pin to make Evil look strong.

Suzuki and Naito, the two halves of the only recurring NJPW feud in which I wouldn’t be surprised to see somebody intentionally spit into somebody else’s mouth, get the biggest entrance pops and appropriately pair off to brawl outside the ring. When Naito loses the hoodie, we can clearly see that he is wearing a NEW HALLOWEEN-THEMED L.I.J. SHIRT. He was not even the target of the Halloween-based insults, but he is both a good friend and a massive troll, so he’s supporting his boy Evil with the new merch. I’m so pleased one of my favorite holidays has become such a crucial element of this feud.

Besides Suzuki trying to make Naito cry with chairs and knee torture, this match also has a lot of Evil vs. ZSJ, including Evil chopping Taka while making eye contact with Zack and a nice octopus hold to fireman’s carry to triangle choke to struggle to transition out sequence.

Backstage, ZSJ calls Evil a “smashed pumpkin,” which is pretty great, and Evil says that if he gets a singles match with Zack he will show us all a SPECIAL DARKNESS WORLD, which I’m pretty sure is a sex thing.

In stark contrast to the found family functionality of Los Ingobernables de Japon and Suzukigun, we see Chaos in their namesake state when Will Ospreay, Yoshi-Hashi, and Jay White defeat Toa Henare, C-Block champion David Finlay, and Juice Robinson, who is not pretending to abide by the “swearing ban” anymore.

Yoshi-Hashi asserts himself in the workplace like I’m assuming the self-help podcast he listened to on the way to the arena told him to and pushes White out of the ring to start the match against Finlay. Ospreay does insane flippy things with his body and the crowd loves it, Juice and Jay White have an aggressive reunion, and we get a lot of good three way tag teamwork from Taguchi Japan. But alas, this normal, quality trios match cannot last. Yoshi Hashi holds back Henare for White to hit him and AGAIN the person Yoshi-Hashi’s holding dodges and AGAIN the Hash gets hit.

Because this is Jay White and he is THE WORST, instead of blaming the hitter, he blames the person who isn’t him, yelling “YOU SHOULD HAVE HELD HIM” at his tag partner. White almost eats a rollup, but kicks out and hits a quick, angry Blade Runner on Henare for the win. Yoshi-Hashi actually steps up to White after the match, but Switchblade tries to play it off because they won.

Backstage, we get some minor storyline developments:

1. Henare does not feel good about the slow pace of his progress, and says that if he goes home on a loss “ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT IS WINNING”
2. Juice adds a class element to the U.S. Championship feud. He’s “the son of a machine operator” while Cody is wrestling royalty, and while his opponent is the American Nightmare, he’s the American Dream. It would be cool if Cody was around to respond to his opponent giving himself his dad’s nickname! That would sure escalate this feud in a cool and intense way, much like the Robinson-White feud on Kizuna Road! But it’s another fired-up promo to the void for our beloved champion.
3. Will Ospreay does not support Jay White at all and kind of calls him out on his nonsense. He also says he’ll win the Junior Heavyweight title and hold it until Hiromu can challenge for it when he returns from injury. With this stuff, the cool moves, and being the tryhard third wheel to the Best Friends, this is the most likable I’ve found Ospreay in a while!

Best: Mist Opportunity

Speaking of that Junior Heavyweight title, we finally get the first match in the four-person tournament to fill its vacancy. Bushi is the fan favorite to win the whole thing, according to an NJPW fan poll, I think partly because of the emotional/faction connection to Hiromu. But also he’s cool and popular and hasn’t been champion in a while. He definitely enters looking ready to be the masked face of the division in the ring and on the runway, if that’s ever called for.

This is their fourteenth singles match, their promos on each other haven’t exactly been respectful, and they have very different personas (see: Kushida warming up like an athlete before the bell while Bushi plays it cool in his corner), so the opening forearm exchange is pretty heated.

After a really nice handspring kick from Kushida knocks Bushi out of the ring, the Back to the Future Part II enthusiast starts working his opponent’s arms. The first portion of the match is based in solid submission wrestling, with Kushida focusing on that arm with his impressive grappling skills, but Bushi escaping to lock on a headscissors and a crossface that both necessitate rope breaks.

Bushi hits the first bigger spot of the match with a missile dropkick to a Busharooni, but Kushida soon gains ground with forearms and his cartwheel dropkick. They both sell every one of each other’s moves, and the match has a “less is more” feel. Eventually, both men are down and Kushida, frustrated, yells at Bushi to bring it, and the strong-style forearms begin in earnest.

Kushida gets REAL MAD, BRO, after being slapped in the face, and follows a tope suicida from Bushi with a submission outside of the ring that prompts a scolding from Red Shoes. The combination of top student attitude and naked ambition that makes Kushida both unappealing to some people and a versatile face or heel is very much on display.

Bushi, still selling his arm, which is great, sets up for the MX. Kushida counters it into a submission that Bushi grabs Red Shoes to escape because, guess what, it’s mist time now! He mists Kushida and gets a nearfall, but the Time Splitter blocks his double knees follow-up and hits Back to the Future for the win. Man, even though I really hoped Bushi would win the title for L.I.J. and especially Hiromu, I enjoy Kushida’s wrestling so much that I can never be all that annoyed about this character winning when I don’t want him to.

Kushida rolls around dealing with the mist as Bushis is helped out of the ring, but reveals backstage that he is SOMEWHAT IMPERVIOUS TO GREEN MIST because he was mentored by Tajiri! Does this mean Tajiri misted him over and over as part of his training until he developed an immunity? I think it probably does, and I also think now is a good time to revisit the 2010 Dominion clip of bleach-blonde Kushida attempting to save Tanahashi from an attack by Chaos and getting Iron Gloved, but then Taijiri saving them both with Mist so hair vs. hair match justice can be carried out on Toru Yano.

Best: The Hero We Kneed

Okada and Tanahashi close the show, and the crowd reaction for even the match announcement explains why NJPW keeps revisiting this rivalry on and off, year after year: A LOT OF PEOPLE LOVE IT.

Both of these guys are all business before the match starts, playing to the crowd minimally, and Tanahashi looking kind of apprehensive. Each person’s ultimate career/life goal is currently blocked by the other, and with their history, this means it’s blocked by the worst possible person.

The tension is there from the opening sequence, the strong lockup, the mat wrestling wrought with struggle, and Okada starting in early on Tanahashi’s leg. It’s a clash of the titans not just because the company told us that and/or people are doing dramatic fight faces; it’s because they are titans and they are clashing.

The forearms at the beginning are EXTREMELY FIRED UP. Tanahashi starts working one of Okada’s legs on the apron and it looks painful. Tanahashi knocks Okada to the floor with a dropkick and hits him with a plancha, but it looks like he hits his bad knee on the barricade. He holds his knee, concerningly early in the match for those hoping for an Ace win, and Red Shoes has to check if he can continue.

Okada smells blood. He hits Tanahashi with a dropkick RIGHT TO THE KNEE as soon as Tanahashi stands. He elbows it, grinds it with is food, kicks it, and works it in the ropes. After dodging a move off the second rope, he puts Tanahashi in an Indian death lock and doesn’t let go until after Red Shoes tells him to back off when Tanahashi makes it to the ropes, and even then yanks the submission harder at first and then pretends like he did nothing wrong. It’s brat Okada at his brattiest, tinged with that no title, no contract crisis state of mind.

When Tanahashi finally manages to get some offense, he cleverly uses the fallout of a Dragon Screw leg whip to buy recovery time. He continues to dominate for a while, but Okada soon evens things out. When Tanahashi manages to hang on to the top rope by his knees rather than falling outside of the ring after a dropkick from Okada, the Rainmaker snaps even further and just starts elbowing the eff out of Tanahashi’s knee to the point that Red Shoes has to call him off. His ruthlessness got mixed reception earlier in the match, but now it’s audible boos.

https://twitter.com/MrLARIATO/status/1043800080703197185

The figure four was used a few times against Tanahashi during the G1, and Okada goes for one here. It’s a really good, exciting figure four spot that maximizes the drama the submission can create. When Tanahashi finally escapes, he takes the match outside the ring, and, calling back to a big theme of their Dontaku match and its surrounding feud, hits his younger opponent with a tombstone piledriver.

https://twitter.com/MrLARIATO/status/1043801206903189505

It seems like he’s really on a roll after this with an exciting High Fly Flow to Okada on the outside and a Twist and Shout to a Slingblade for a nearfall. The high drama continues when Okada counters an HFF with double knees and both men struggle to their feet. They counter each other’s tombstone attempts and Tanahashi avoids a Rainmaker to hit a High Fly Flow, but has to stop before pinning to clutch his knee in pain. But he does for the pin, and Okada kicks out SO CLOSE TO THREE. The next attempt at the move is countered with a dropkick, and then Okada is finally able to hit that tombstone, baby!

Okada FIRED UP RAINMAKER-POSES NOW like he actually feels alive and like he can win this thing. Both men dodge Rainmakers, but Okada hits one without a pin follow-up, and Tanahashi lands a suplex for a nearfall that I didn’t buy for a second, but the crowd was VERY INTO.

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They struggle on the top turnbuckle, but Tanahashi stops whatever Okada’s going for with a slap to the face, and gets the better of the encounter with an extremely cool and dramatic HFF to Okada while they’re both falling! He goes up top again for another, and collapses for just a second while going for a second, but it makes it in time to win the match. Tanahashi beats Okada for the first time since 2015, and it feels so satisfyingly earned after a hard-fought, high-quality match with an easy to follow, very engaging story. These guys are so dang good at what they do. Wrestling is the best.

Best: Curse Your Inevitable Betrayal And Your Sudden Betrayal

After just enough time for this match and its result to set in, we get THE BETRAYAL OF THE CENTURY. As Tanahashi poses with the briefcase, Jay White, the Ace’s only defeat in the G1, runs into the ring to hit him with the Blade Runner to huge boos. He then starts to attack Okada, takes a chair from his critic Rocky Romero on commentary, and is delayed by Yoshi-Hashi, who in the most Yoshi-Hashi moment ever, shoot trips while running into the ring for his big heroic moment and busts his face open (and then is revealed to have either a pretty serious shoot injury from this or possibly very strategically, kayfabe-ly exaggerated one.) He valiantly tries to save his stablemate while bleeding profusely from the head, but is taken out (very carefully, to the watchful eye) with a chair by White.

And then the ACTUAL SHOCKING BETRAYAL HAPPENS because GEDO takes the chair from White… only to ATTACK OKADA WITH IT and declare he’s Switchblade’s EVIL MANAGER now and a NEW ERA is upon us!

It’s such a good, truly shocking pro wrestling swerve, because Gedo’s been unwavering in his devotion to the Rainmaker for SIX YEARS, but has also always felt kind of skeevy, at least to me, and more invested in Okada as the Golden Boy, the man who makes it rain money, than as a person. This is a huge betrayal, but not a betrayal of this established character.

Also, as White reminds us, it’s the most devastating version of the payoff (at least, in a world with a title-less Okada) of Jay White openly proclaiming that he would come for Okada since LIKE A DAY AFTER JOINING CHAOS back in JANUARY. Okada, at the peak of his powers and confidence, didn’t take that threat from a recently-returned Young Lion who just lost to Tanahshi at Wrestle Kingdom seriously. Now the man who had seemed to hit rock bottom after Dominion, and just bounced off it and landed again after losing this match in Kobe, really has lost everything.

As for Tanahashi, the Okada-Gedo thing means nothing to him! He’s even more pissed at Jay White than ever before, because “Do you know how many years it took me to finally beat Okada?” (Yeah, like three! That’s a lot!) “Punk!”

Worst: Who Cares? A Sincere Question About The Fighting Spirit Unleashed Matches Advertised More Than A Week In Advance

So, with the stakes raised super effectively for what turns out to be the semi-main of King of Pro Wrestling at Sumo Hall, let’s look at how weird the set up ends up for the big matches in Long Beach on September 30. The Fighting Spirit Unleashed card was announced the Monday before the show except for three matches: Juice Robinson defending the U.S. Championship against Cody, the Young Bucks defending their Heavyweight Tag Team Championships against the Guerrillas of Destiny, and Will Ospreay vs. Marty Scurll as part of the tournament to crown a new Junior Heavyweight Champion.

An entire month of New Japan programming passed after these matches were announced. We saw Juice, the BCOGs, and Ospreay during this time, with Juice and the G.O.D. wrapped up in a trios championship feud while Ospreay played a supporting role in Chaos tag matches/increasing internal drama while desperately trying to get Ibushi to notice him. In addition to playing roles in these storylines, these wrestlers also cut promos throughout the Destruction tour on their FSU opponents. This gives us a full understanding of these characters’ states of mind going into the Long Beach show, and these people also did additional pre-match comments for NJPW World.

Ospreay gets real serious about the upcoming match and brings up his longtime rivalry with the Villian…

Tanga Loa and Tama Tonga cut an impassioned promo addressing their many and longstanding beefs with the Jackson brothers…

And Juice addresses his perpetual underdog status, and the previously established themes of this feud that would be used to even greater effect in the pre-match VTR.

Cody, Scurll, and the Young Bucks tweeted about these matches a few times before the show, but otherwise were on vacation from All In to ROH’s Death Before Dishonor on the 28th. Sure, Cody and the Bucks cut promos about the beginning of their matches at the G1 Finals when they were first set up. But overall, the impression going into FSU is that only one half of each Match With Title Consequences actually cares about the outcome on a level beyond scoring a W and furthering their personal brand.

This definitely informs who I want to win, but that’s a worrying amount of matches with a New Japan guy vs. part-timer element. I think I would have been more hyped for these matches as a fan if I felt something about them beyond “these should all be pretty fun to watch, but oh my gosh I hope they don’t result in a picture of a huge pile of IWGP titles on the Jericho Cruise boat while New Japan wrestlers are wrestling on the Road to Power Struggle.”

I Am Confused: A Consumer Report

I’m not at all a pro wrestling business expert, but here’s my point of view on Fighting Spirit Unleashed as a person who lives in Southern California and likes to go to wrestling shows in the area.

The cheapest tickets for this show were $50 minimum, up from the last NJPW Walter Pyramid show, Strong Style Evolved, back in March. SSE also had only three matches for a while and sold out well in advance, but that was the company’s second U.S. show and one of those was the bonafide dream-come-true of Bucks vs. Lovers and one was, until the last minute, Mysterio vs. Liger. FSU had the matches I just talked about and was promoted a lot less.

Other wrestling shows with advance tickets in this price range in this area are Survivor Series (cheapest tickets also around $50 after fees) and PWG (usually $80 or $90 minimum.) Even if you buy tickets to these before you know any of the card, you know the type of thing you’re getting. The brand of these experiences is very strong!

And while Fighting Spirit Unleashed was a New Japan Pro Wrestling-branded show…

Worst: Battles With Way Too Much Honor

… it was basically an NJPW-ROH crossover show. The intro video recapping SSE even starts with Christopher Daniels, who is not a New Japan employee at all!

Like the previous NJPW United States shows this year, the opening tag matches were there to fill time. But in San Francisco and in March, these at least also served the purpose of showing off New Japan talent, people we rarely have to opportunity to see live, to the American audience.

This card was full of guys from ROH, most of whom also do PWG and/or Bar Wrestling and/or PCW – basically, the bigger indies – in the area. This was so not a New Japan card that it honestly felt like kind of a bait-and-switch, especially when the next talent announcement after the first three matches was a list of Japanese wrestlers who would be on the show. Unsurprisingly, the big Japanese stars, Naito, Okada, Tanahashi, Liger, Ibushi, and Ishii, along with Kenny Omega, got the biggest entrance cheers and sustained hype throughout matches. Also unsurprisingly, they got them in an arena with a lot of empty seats, one that their company had previously sold out.

The Venn diagram of fans of ROH and Being The Elite and fans of New Japan is not a circle. Especially ROH and NJPW fans, because these promotions have nothing in common in terms of aesthetic, booking, style of wrestling, types of characters beyond like half the Bullet Club, and types of stories they tell, so there’s little reason to assume that people who buy a ticket for an NJPW event or start watching an NJPW show are cool with it being like half ROH. There’s also little reason to think that people who enjoy Japanese pro wrestling would necessarily be big fans of All In, which was basically sports entertainment with more creative freedom for the performers and also targeted solely to white males in their 20s and 30s.

Anyway, Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian defeat Hangman Page and Chase Owens, and this one’s for all you BTE and/or ROH fans out there! It’s fine! Both these teams will probably be in World Tag League this year.

We also see Chris Sabin, Flip Gordon, and Jeff Cobb vs. Hirooki Goto and the Best Friends tag match.Goto, a wrestler often used to represent the traditional style of the company hosting this show, is the odd man out. This is a fine indie-style match.

A cool thing about this match is that, like I hoped would happen post-NEVER championship loss, we see a much freer version of Goto, a warrior with something to prove, but without a title pressuring him to be literally the most respectable guy in the world about. An uncool thing about this is that it turns out to be in service of an ROH TV TITLE FEUD.

This will probably go down at Global Wars or something, and if it means we get more Jeff Cobb in New Japan, cool! But for now, I reserve the right to be extremely annoyed that I got tricked into watching the set up for an ROH storyline. With the last-minute addition of the ROH title to All In (available to watch on Honor Club!) I think that promotion’s main growth strategy right now might be glomming onto more likable brands and then using those connections to trick people into watching their title matches.

Best: Some Of This Filler Was Fun Though

Liger, Taguchi, and ACH defeat Roppongi 3K in a really fun show opener with comedy, good wrestling, and ALSO primarily New Japan talent, wow! We primarily see Rocky Romero lead a heel-ish charge against Liger on his own, then with his boys, then all three against Taguchi, whose Funky Weapon is in exceptional form.

Zack Sabre Jr. and K.E.S. defeat Naito, Sanada, and Evil, in a match with very good vibes to watch live. L.I.J. is a group that it feels good to root for with a group, especially against such obvious villains, and everyone was so psyched to see Naito in person.

This match is another preview for the soon-to-be-confirmed ZSJ vs. Evil singles bout. Like in Beppu, we see Sabre counter Everything Is Evil into a bridging clutch to win the tag match, this time while flipping double birds, and Evil smolder with rage. Their in-ring dynamic is now well-established: ZSJ works to counter power moves into technically complex submissions, and Evil works to transition and/or power out of those, when he can, into his high-impact moves. Everything Is Evil is basically a One-Hit Kill, but Sabre has so far been able to counter it. So for KOPW, we have the question of if Evil will be able to hit his finisher, be able to find another way to beat ZSJ (who’s kicked out of Darkness Falls a few times now), or just lose?

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Also, this might be an annoying thing to add, but I need you guys to know how much funnier Lance Archer’s promo was in person because Davey Boy Smith Jr. was just doing bicep curls next to him the entire time. You can’t see much of this the way NJPW filmed this segment, but it was wonderful.

Best: The New Dojo Kids Are Alright

Also, us live audience types saw two Young Lions contracted at the LA Dojo have a dark match about half an hour before the show. Shibata came out to ring the bell and then loudly hit the apron with a kendo stick. People went nuts.

Alex Coughlin and Clark Connors, two almost identical-looking from a distance young American wrestlers, have a standard Young Lion match, exactly the type of type of thing you’d see open an NJPW show in Japan. Most people in the audience recognized what this was and reacted accordingly, except for one guy who apparently had never watched New Japan before coming to this show and decided to react to something he didn’t get (but the people around him appreciated!) by yelling “Wrestling!” sarcastically several times.

Besides the heckling, which there would be a lot of throughout the show, (More than I could hear on the version of the show from which I got screencaps and watched matches I missed while at the post-match interviews, which I guess is… good? The mix of the crowd sounded odd to me) this was a cool thing to see.

Best: Fredo Gedo

The part of the show with consequences starts with Jay White and Gedo defeating Tanahashi and Kushida. The heel heat for our villains isn’t as palpable as it was for White in San Francisco, but it’s very respectable.

Tanahashi is ready to fight White as soon as he sees him, and slides out of the ring to immediately bring it to the kid. He gets in some strikes, including a very heroic-looking uppercut that I really loved, but soon finds himself troubled by pretty dastardly heel tactics. We get a fun moment of Kushida absolutely wrecking Gedo after he gets tagged in, but White puts him in peril enough that his eventual tag to Tanahashi is a hot one. The bad guys win in just terrible fashion, with White distracting the ref while Gedo hits Tanahashi (and then Kushida) with brass knuckles. This gives White a whole lot of time to hit the Blade Runner while Gedo does the gesture for the move because he’s an extremely good manager/hype man.

This is effective preview tag for KOPW, and establishes Switchblade and Gedo (Switchbledo?) as a really good, detestable, manager-heel team. And even though in the smark part of my brain I think there’s no way they take Tanahashi out of the main event of Wrestle Kingdom for Jay White, I can tell I’m going to be real tense during White-Tanahashi because they’ve raised the stakes so effectively and established the villains as such a credible threat.

White also does a good job stoking the boos and “F*ck you, Switchblade” chants when he starts his promo, which includes the points that 1) “New Japan can’t face the thought of having their beloved Tanahashi in the main event of Wrestle Kingdom” (inaccurate, but a good heel twisting of the truth to serve his worldview), and 2) New Japan “certainly don’t like the thought of two foreigners in the main event of Wrestle Kingdom.”

This second part gets a mixed response! It’s a weird point to make in America, but also it’s wild to me that some people gave White “He speaks the truth!”-type cheers for this, because… yeah, New Japan Pro Wrestling has had a certain nationalistic element historically and also it’s a Japanese-style wrestling company, even though it’s booked very similarly to Western ones, and their primary target audience is Japanese people in Japan. That’s the audience at the vast majority of their live shows! Imagine being so entitled that, after wrestling has been marketed primarily to you for your whole life, you start watching a new, different type of wrestling with its own history and tradition you think it should immediately be changed to be marketed primarily to you as well!

This type of reaction of a minority of New Japan fans makes the situation with Kenny being basically a heel or tweener at best currently in Japan and face in the States very interesting. It’s also complicated by the perceived lure for NJPW of money from a new market, anxiety over new company management, partnership with ROH, BTE dudes having basically their own brand/promotion now with All In, and this whole “alternative wrestling movement” gimmick (which absolutely is a gimmick; it’s on exactly the same level of reality as WWE’s Women’s Revolution.)

How does New Japan balance this? Is there actual pressure to change to please, like, American gamers and/or dudes mad at WWE, or will NJPW maintain its distinct identity through this period of expansion? Since that is basically the Tanahashi-Omega storyline, is there a way they try to have it all, try to keep real New Japan for the Japanese audience but increasingly Westernize the shows in other countries and the big shows where they try to snag the new audience with foreign part-timers? These are just a few of the expansion period New Japan questions!

Best: Birdish Invasion

After much ado about all that, let’s talk about this BritWres match I really liked! The crowd was extremely hyped for Will Opsreay vs. Marty Scurll and I’m really glad I was able to be in the audience for its entirety. These guys counter each other very well both in kayfabe and in terms of their artistic styles. Scurll gets in some good underhanded heel moment and catch wrestling and Ospreay gets in some unreal acrobatics and none of it feels too indulgent.

Backstage, Scurll does the “death, taxes, and Marty Scurll beats Will Ospreay” thing, which… does not make any sense anymore since Ospreay pinned him at Wrestle Kingdom and beat him clean earlier this year. That’s not part of this rivalry anymore, guy! But the promo on Kushida is solid.

And going back to that fan poll, Scrull and Kushida are the two least popular wrestlers in the junior title tournament. Scurll, the poll’s only heel, is appropriately dead last, but Bushi’s about a mile ahead of Ospreay and Kushida too. To me, this points to the likelihood of Ospreay moving up to heavyweight or making another big change in his career and also Bushi’s tag partner, to be revealed at the Sumo Hall show, being too big of a deal for him to play double duty in that reveal and a title match.

Best: FTE

Presciently, the pre-match video for Young Bucks vs. Guerrillas of Destiny basically presents both sides of the Bullet Club Civil War conflict as equally valid. In it, the Bucks are about proving they’re the best and getting extremely rich, reflecting the way a lot of current BTE fandom involves merch, and the G.o.D. are basically ideological extremists, way more reminiscent of Year One Bullet Club when it felt like a lot more like a gang. Who’s right? Neither of these positions have a real moral high ground, so pick your poison!

The IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championship match sees mixed support for the opposing parties, but while Scurll vs. Ospreay had it in a “Both these guys!” way, the Young Bucks vs. the Guerrillas of Destiny had it in a “ONLY THESE TWO GUYS AND VERY INTENTIONALLY AND AGGRESSIVELY NOT THOSE TWO OTHER GUYS” way. There’s a defined, traditional heel/face in-ring dynamic going on, but people really don’t care beyond cheering for the Bucks doing their cool moves and signature hot tags and some light boos for the G.o.D. at one point.

This crowd is hot in a way that created kind of a tense atmosphere to be a part of. Back in San Francisco, it sounded and felt like a very intentional pledge of support when some people cheered for L.I.J. rather than the Bucks, but here, with an actual storyline full of conflict, that vibe is amped up by about a million. There’s a downright bloodthirsty vein that peaks when a “F*ck the Elite” chant breaks out while Tama’s elbowing Nick in the neck, and another vein of shootier disrespect exemplified by some guy yelling “Hey Camacho!” repeatedly. After the superkicks to Tanga Loa for a nearfall, fans are united in being largely actually mad, because they know the finish must be close and the match really feels like it could go either way. They can’t sustain a big group chant, and where earlier in the match the chants were largely started by groups and then other groups started intentional counter-chants to try and drown them out, this stretch has individuals doing cheers and then other individuals doing counter-cheers, which really amounts to fans yelling at each other across the arena.

As for the match in itself, it’s good! It’s an entertaining, pretty well-executed tag match that I would definitely recommend to people who haven’t seen it. I enjoy watching both of these tag teams, so it was exciting to see them wrestle each other, both doing their signature things in a previously unseen combination.

The live reception to this match and how it didn’t seem to come as a surprise to the wrestlers and production was way more interesting to me though, especially as a member of the audience. I don’t know if this is a point everyone involved in the BC angle over the past year or so thought it would reach, but it’s what they got. I’m not sure if the All In crew realized how having Cody side with Kenny via chair attack in San Francisco would generate a lot of internet jokes about white people sticking together, for example, and that the way Omega and the Bucks and Scurll and everyone continued not to take these guys seriously after they pulled off a year-long revenge plot and basically just wrote it off as these dudes being crazy and aggressive for no reason would rub some people the wrong way.

Anyway, skipping ahead, the BC dynamic changes yet again at King of Pro Wrestling, so hopefully I don’t get sucked into writing about this stuff at length anymore for a while! The real main takeaway of this match is that I’m glad we’ll have the tag team champions around to participate in World Tag League. I don’t think anybody thought the Bucks would hang out in Japan for that and it would be a bummer for the tag champs not to be in that tournament.

Worst: United States Championship Nightmare

The United States Championship match starts strong with the video package and, in my opinion, Brandi’s best valet outfit ever (she looks amazing but also appropriately uncool, a real trophy wife at a horse race or society wedding type) and goes downhill from there.

I think a part of that is actually the use of the Brandi character, an element of Cody matches I usually don’t take much issue with. There’s a spot early on where Brandi touches Juice and he elbows her and she falls over dramatically and then Cody nails Juice and the couple to their little dance thing. Later in the match, she grabs Juice’s foot and he goes after her outside the ring for a moment. People boo this because it’s a man advancing aggressively on a woman (bonus points of a fair amount of people liking Brandi for her intentionally likable work in other promotions and media) and it’s a bad look for our hero. Makes sense!

But last time NJPW was at this very venue Rhodes challenged Jay White to an intergender wrestling match and she’s wrestled in ROH and Stardom and she later starts clawing at Juice’s eyes, so these type of “oh, but our chivalrous hero can’t hit a woman” spots feel disingenuous to me. Brandi’s claimed she’ll throw down with a guy who beat Kenny Omega and Tanahashi! It would look terrible for a male babyface to treat her like Goto treated Kanemaru and Desperado during the most recent NEVER title match, but in the kayfabe world of wrestling, they probably should! It’s kind of sexist that they don’t! This is the trickiness of the old-fashioned valet role in a world with intergender wrestling.

On the old-fashioned note, a lot of this match feels like a performance of pro wrestling from a previous era. Cody is very slow and theatrical in a way that feels like an Abercrombie model doing an impression of an NWA heel, especially that figure four spot. I’m all for letting matches breathe, but there isn’t much actual content here to air out. It doesn’t allow his opponent much chance to shine as a wrestler or a character and it reminds me a lot of his second match with Ibushi. Even what looks like Cody selling the heck out of Pulp Friction by taking forever to get back in the ring after Brandi drags him out turns out to be playing possum.

The match ends when Robinson hits a superplex, but Cody rolls him up for the win. The result gets a very mixed response at first, and Juice stays in the ring longer and gets a sincerely sympathetic, comforting ovation. This didn’t feel like “Oh no, the bad guy won and that sucks!” It felt like it shouldn’t have happened at all. Robinson had such a great babyface win in San Francisco and such a thoroughly built up storyline of struggling through injury during the G1 and potential defenses piling higher and higher… and then this guy, wrestling his sixteenth match on a solely New Japan branded show this year, a match he didn’t really seem invested in at all, cut to the front of the line and beat him and the whole storyline for Robinson that we got invested in got thrown in the garbage.

Honestly, the “not the same Juice Robinson” premise of this rivalry doesn’t even make sense. We just got that match for Robinson when he beat Goto in the G1, which showed he’d improved from just a few months before, against the guy who was presented as a gatekeeper to being a “real Japanese pro wrestler.” But then it was like, oh, but has he really improved if he can’t beat this other white guy with a famous dad who beat him way longer ago? How was that match more important to him?

Backstage, Cody reveals that he did actually have something personal against Juice because he was one of “Dusty’s kids” at the Performance Center, and he’s Dusty’s actual kid. This makes sense as the Cody character’s motivation! It sure would have been cool to hear about this before this match actually happened so it actually seemed like both people involved cared about it! It’s aggressively lame to after a match tack on “actually, this was secretly all about stuff that happened in a completely different company years ago.” Cody couldn’t have dramatically yelled that at Juice during one of the match’s long pauses or something?

Best: Playing The Hits

The Golden Lovers vs. Okada and Ishii main event rules. It rules in terms of cool wrestling stuff happening and feeling like it’s happening for a reason due to the callbacks to Okada-Omega, Ibushi-Ishii, Omega-Ishii, and a brief glimpse at oh my gosh there hasn’t been an Okada-Ibushi singles match since 2014 and can we please, please have another one, please? It also actually feels like an NJPW match and is an actual exhibition of NJPW talent for the live American audience that bought a ticket to an NJPW show.

The Omega-Okada stuff is really good too, with Okada doing a taunting finger gun while wrestling Ibushi that almost gets Kenny to just jump the ropes and throw down.We get a strike exchange, a quick counter of a Rainmaker, counter of a One Winged Angel – definitely playing the hits in the most fun possible way. And Broke-ada/Bro-kada has been going on for a while now, but it feels like we really see an Okada with absolutely nothing to lose here, a guy who’s taken a level in being dead inside, especially with those I FEEL NOTHING facials after doing cool moves as the crowd cheers.

After Ibushi breaks up the pin THAT WOULD HAVE CHANGED EVERYTHING by Okada to the champ, the golden boy is appropriately fired up and plays to the crowd with a deranged Rainmaker pose. There’s more Ishii vs. Ibushi with Omega and Okada preventing each other’s interference, and the Lovers double-pin Ishii after a Golden Trigger for the win. It feels like the appropriate ending for the show, with the bonus epilogue for the match of a shot of Okada lying on the ground outside of the ring after another loss and probably the only chance at a title shot he’ll have until after the all-important Tokyo Dome show. He leaves the Walter Pyramid the EXACT OPPOSITE of Zac Efron at the end of the second act of High School Musical 2.

WORST: It’s Okay If It’s In A Three Way

After this very fun, very New Japan main event, the IWGP Heavyweight Champion gets on the mic and the rest of the BTE guys get in the ring with him. Omega says he’s so happy to see so many “satisfied faces,” but wait, that’s “faces that were happy that they made the time to come check out the Elite, the the Elite.” It does make sense for his terrible character to credit only his faction, but it really sucks to hear the shoot face of the Western expansion not even mention the company by name at all in his closing speech, especially when this is still only the fourth fully NJPW show in America and was advertised as that, not Bullet Club Elite Souled Out or whatever.

Omega then tries to use crowd reactions to pressure Ibushi again into a one-on-one title match. Cody comes out just as it looks like Ibushi might actually agree to it and inserts himself into the title match, making it a triple threat. Omega’s into this, but then he immediately diffuses any gravitas behind this historic-ish nature of the match by making a crack about what happens when he tries to stick to a script

“This is about showing the beauty, the originality of professional wrestling,” but in a way where the audience should be fully aware at all times that this is not real and really nothing about it matters besides, I guess, Kenny and Cody doing another WWE or Impact-typical main event for a New Japan show. “The business will be sure to change, step by step” into NJPW just doing fully Western wrestling things all the time, I guess, which sucks a lot and is why I can’t wait for Tanahashi to hopefully murk this dude at the Tokyo Dome. Like three out of four weekly WWE shows are pretty good right now and most people watch New Japan Pro Wrestling because they want to watch Japanese wrestling!

To conclude:

1. Cody was not even in the G1 and just ended Juice’s story that people got really invested in, and he’s getting yet another top championship shot for a company he never works for, so that sucks
2. Remember how part of the Cody-Ibushi-Kenny storyline earlier this year included Cody forcibly kissing Ibushi and commentary going out of their way to call this behavior “a form of assault” and compared it to if Kenny “terrorized” Brandi Rhodes? And then Cody-Ibushi II happened and Cody won? The sexual violence aspect of this feud was at first handled in a remarkably responsible way… but now Cody and Omega are friends again and Cody never got his comeuppance at Ibushi’s hands. To me, this really hurts the Golden Lovers relationship, which had such an idealized purity about it when they first reunited, and my ability to sympathize with the Kenny Omega character at all. I hope that’s what’s supposed to be happening and Ibushi-Cody III will happen and have a happy ending.
3. This and the whole rest of the set up for this title match makes it feel so much less important than anything in Okada’s entire reign. That made this title feel incredibly important, absolutely the most prestigious pro wrestling championship in the world, with Okada at the top because he had the title and the title at the top because Okada had it and cared so much about retaining it and had so many killer matches after entering with it around his waist. In Omega’s title reign so far, he’s said more memorable things about star rankings than the championship. The title seems more like a way, along with star ratings, to silence people who don’t think he’s the best, not like something he’s fighting for in itself.
4. This is a really good contrast against Tanahashi, who is all about representing the company and what it stands for because he cares about the company and the ideal it stands for. Pro wrestling as presented by NJPW, in its ideal form, as we hear about every time an injured vet returns and hops on the mic, is something that inspires people to keep fighting through their own hard times. (Obviously, this is the fictional version of NJPW; the shoot version of the promotion exists to make money because it’s a real company in the real world.)

So that’s how we leave Kobe and Long Beach! I’ll see you back here soon for the Best and Worst of King of Pro Wrestling, where a lot of this pays off and even more things pop off.