G1 A Block Gibberish Day 2

Lance Archer vs Bad Luck Fale

This was more fun than I thought it would be, mostly because I think Archer is secretly very good. Everything he hits looks explosive and real, which is a hard thing to find with bigger dudes unless they are facing tiny dudes. When up against another hoss, it can often look clumsy and halting, but Archer looked as good against Fale as he did against Ospreay, and that’s all him I think.

Archer also has this weird energy that I think is almost amusing to the Japanese fans rather than frightening, and while this may seem like a not so good thing for a huge monster, it lends itself to the crowd being willing to get behind him when given the chance. He’s just this crazy, loud, weird dude who will beat people up and scream EVERYBODY DIES and maybe spray water over them and, hey, listen, Japanese people are weird and the more a giant American menaces them the more they laugh and clap and get all excited, and I’m not trying to sound racist here but it’s definitely a thing.

Fale’s mass actually worked well here because it made Archer seem all the more impressive for being able to handle him. I have no complaints here, which is good because on paper this was probably shaping up to be the shittiest of all the G1 matches, but it wasn’t which means we are in for a Real Good Time this summer.

Will Ospreay vs Sanada

This was obviously excellent, as my shitty memories of Ospreay fade more and more with each match. He still seems like a dumb wanker, but he has toned down a lot of the hysterical pig bleating that he used to do, and I can handle his cornier edges, like his dumb anime posing, as long as he continues to do shit like this, because, yeah, this shit is obviously on another level.

It wasn’t just Ospreay, though, because Sanada is right there with him in his ability to do crazy shit and move in a way that very few dudes can do and move. Watching them wrestle is like watching a crazy anime fight come to life. They are just on another level than virtually anybody else right now, and so of course they are going to have a balls-out match that gets everybody going and there’s not much more you can say about than that.

I will say that Sanada remains very handsome, and even his beard has started to take on a more natural fit with his overall aesthetic and he looks very much like a dude ready to blossom as his own thing rather than as the sort of mercurial mystery dude of LIJ owing way too much to Muta that he has always come across as. I think he’s ready to go up a notch in terms of where he stands on the card, which is great because watching these two dudes you can see how well New Japan is able to build from within and replenish their shit even when a bunch of dudes leave. It’s fucking awesome to watch, and it just makes me excited to see where it all goes which is about all you can ask from your professional wrestling.

Kazuchika Okada vs Zack Sabre Jr.

Okay, I will admit that I nodded off during this match, which shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of it but more a condemnation of my own degenerate ways, which are well documented and you still love and respect me, so fuck it.

I didn’t miss the whole thing. I was in and out throughout and what I saw seemed like a very typical Okada vs ZSJ match which suggests that it was at the very least pretty good. I do think it’s interesting that ZSJ is kinda being booked a lot less strongly than he was in the past, especially because last year they seemed ready to blast him up the card. I’m not sure why that has kind of been downplayed, as he’s actually gotten better and even his often meaningless submission pantomime isn’t as eye rolling as it used to be. He’s still an insufferable prat who you want to see get beat up, but I mean I guess you can’t push everyone as hard as you want all the time.

Okada is Okada, which is to say that he’s at the very least one of the best dudes going today, and if you’re ZSJ I guess you just go back to Minoru Suzuki and plot ways to ruin the tournament for everyone else. A spurned ZSJ is only going to be more petulant and insufferable, especially as his own countrymen Will Ospreay seems to have stolen his spot which I am sure will lead to a bunch of whiny posturing and douchey jackassedness from both, but that is just the way of things, I guess. Still, it is funny to watch these dudes just go at each other and you feel a little bad for a chump like Seth Rollins wasting away in the soulless death spiral of WWE because he is hopelessly lost when compared to these other young dudes of his generation who have gone to another level while he’s busy trying to keep a senile old pervert happy.

Kota Ibushi vs Evil

I loved this, and I think I am starting to love Evil as one of my main dudes, and it’s just another reason to love New Japan because they can just take dudes like this and shove them up the card and it all works because they are all just so damn good. I love Evil, both the dude and the concept, and I’m excited to see where they go with him, especially because with Sanada they have two dudes who are getting too big just to be sidemen to Naito and that should lead to a ton of interesting shit in the months to come.

And, of course, watching Ibushi is always kind of pornographic in that you are almost certainly watching a sadomasochistic autistic dude ruin himself for his own ghoulish needs. You go from watching him concuss himself to having various limbs ruined and pretty soon you start imagining him being shackled in a basement with electrodes attached to his nipples and . . . oh shit, I’ve gone too far, haven’t I?

The point is that there is something obviously alluring in all that, something vaguely erotic and sinister and I suppose that should lead to a lot of self-reflection on my part, but I am a 39 year old dude watching Japanese men in tiny shorts kill themselves for art and my love and so the moment for self-reflection has already come and gone, you know?

Anyway, I can’t get enough of this shit, and I’m especially happy that they’re pushing Evil a bit while also telling the story of Ibushi ruining himself for art and it’s all good, baby, this is my perverted professional wrestling.

Hiroshi Tanahashi vs KENTA

This was obviously great. I mean, the backstory here is easily understood and felt as two standard bearers maybe a little past their sell by date going out there and trying to ruin each other both for the sake of their own art but also for their pride and their reputations and for what they represent both artistically and professionally.

It’s especially gratifying to watch a dude like KENTA, virtually ruined by WWE, reclaim some of what he used to be even while the promotion where he earned all that he is languishes as a sort of ruined thing, abandoned by him when it maybe needed him the most. And it’s gratifying to watch him do it against Tanahashi, the dude who stayed and pulled New Japan out of oblivion, a dude who is so frustrated at getting older and now he has this ghost from his past, this idea that runs counter his own vision of pro wrestling, this man who represented the company fighting against his own for the precious remains of a shattered national pro wrestling scene, of an art nearly ruined by the rise of MMA and the assorted Inoki related fever dream projects which harmed an entire generation of wrestlers.

And now you have an aged ace, struggling to hang on to everything he’s built, both against the rising tide of a new generation ready to cast him to the midcard and comedy matches for life, and now against this dude KENTA coming back and trying to prove that his way was the right way all along, and of course you have Shibata lingering in the shadows, supporting KENTA and once again threatening to take away the artistic soul of pro wrestling in Japan from Tanahashi, the dude who stayed and fought for it while everyone else fucked off.

This is KENTA’s back against the wall moment, and he is standing and fighting and he is winning, and you can feel his animosity and his resentment at having been dismissed as a failure or as a quitter, even as you can feel Tanahashi’s resentment and bitter anger at being forced to stand up and fight for something he has already won, and you can feel for KENTA winning just as you can feel for Tanahashi losing and it’s all just so beautiful, a statement for everything that pro wrestling can and should be.

Anyway, this show was beautiful, even if it did come right on the back of having watched a million hours of wrestling, including an AEW show that sort of died in the heat of a Florida summer night and left me not really wanting to watch wrestling for a couple of days, not because it was bad or anything but simply because it all just felt spent because of an exhausted heat-stroked crowd and also maybe because of the tortured passion play of the Bucks and Cody indulging their own power in order to tell a story that maybe felt bigger and more important to them than it really deserved. But that is a whole other thing, and I only mention in it in context of this New Japan show, which came at a time when my wrestle-love was maybe on fumes a bit and yet it reignited those fumes into excitement just through the sheer awesomeness of it all and the realness of the art and the real techniques combined with the real feelings that is strong style and that is the pro wrestling of my heart.