It Begins

The G1 tournament is my favorite wrestle-time of the year. It is a month or so of just balls out strong style mania, at the end of which is a white hot star ready to conquer the world while Japanese announcers cry out in wild ecstasy and concussion doctors start opening triage centers. It is glorious spectacle, epic and true, the pure heart of warrior madness which drives New Japan Pro Wrestling.

So, I figured, hey, let’s write about the fucker.

Chances are exceedingly good that you already know what to expect out of me in the weeks ahead, but if you don’t, prepare to have your soul stolen as I write my way into your heart and your fever dreams. Every time you close your eyes, I’ll be there, and I’ll be there with my friends in the G1 Tournament, all of whom have been chosen from among the elite in pro wrestling to come together and show the world just why New Japan Pro Wrestling is the best wrestling on earth, at least in mainstream terms. Somewhere, there is a wild lucha match being fought in international waters between a trio of masked men and the Midnight Express, but we can’t watch that on the TV, and so, what we’re left with is this sublime spectacle.

I figured I’d start out by previewing each block. As you probably know, the G1 is divided into an A Block and a B Block, and in each block, ten wrestlers will get it on round robin style until there is an A Block Winner and a B Block Winner. Those two champions will then meet to decide just who the master is of the G1 in 2019. So, without further ado, or whatever ridiculous horseshit is threatening to spring forward from my mind and my heart and my fingers at any moment, let’s meet the bois from Block A!

Lance Archer

I once opined that Lance Archer was like a cross between Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds and my boy TOM from the internet and various alleged other dealings. Now, I figure that if you’re reading this, you know who TOM is and I don’t need to explain. But, in the slight chance that you are just stumbling upon this from some random encounter gone wild, I guess you could describe TOM as more an elemental force than anything else. He is 1,000% his own dude, living free, his way, the only way, in a society too ridiculous to even be acknowledged by him most days, or only when he has to take young T3 to Chucky Cheese.

The point is, is that Lance Archer embodies some of that feral one of a kind spirit warrior ethos and then merges that with a pitiless disdain for nerds and anyone who doesn’t appreciate his wild water fetish. He is best known perhaps for spraying water everywhere from a never ending supply of water bottles, and then leering over shocked/bemused tiny Japanese people like some wild animal not human enough to even try to bother to tame. In short, he is the perfect wild-haired American barbarian in the mold of, say, a Bruiser Brody or Stan Hansen who back in the day basically just beat the shit out of the Japanese fans who took it as an honor.

Of course, you can’t do things like that now, not even in Japan, which leaves Lance Archer looking more like a hollowed out silhouette of the real thing, prone to outburst of corny noise in the faces of children who aren’t sure what the fuck is going on, but that is life in the future, baby. We’re all just shells of the real thing trying to get by.

The only reason Lance Archer is even in the G1 this year is because the first show takes place in Dallas, which is his home town, and I guess the muckity-mucks in the New Japan offices thought he could boost sales there, which honestly is kind of misplaced because anyone going to a New Japan show in the United States just wants to see the top New Japan stars, not the B-show players who just happen to be from the area. It’s 2019, no one cares about the hometown boys anymore.

Expect Lance Archer to be in the opening match of most of the G1 tournament matches, and maybe he can snag an upset or a double DQ with Bad Luck Fale, but that is about it. He’s just here to be the token white dude on a show where the fans really don’t even want a token white dude. That is just life in the big time, though.

Evil

Evil, now, well… Evil is my boy. He’s evil, obviously, but he’s also got that young lion warrior heart just waiting to break out. He’s been the number 2 or 3 man in LIJ for a while now, partnering with Sanada while Naito gets all the good bitches, but young Evil seems to be ready to break away… at least for the duration of this tournament.

It’s huge that he was given the spot to walk away from LIJ in the runup to the G1. It shows that the company wants to give him a little push all on his own. They could have chosen Sanada, who is probably the most likely candidate from the standpoint of being a dude who’s already found himself sliding into the main event scene as of late, but they chose Evil instead, or Evil chose to walk away on his own, I don’t want to start working myself into shoots or shooting myself into works here. The point is, is that Evil seems primed to make a real run this year.

He isn’t going to win it. I mean, I doubt it, but he is going to be Evil and he is going to throw some dudes around. I’m really looking forward to his match with Sanada, both because of the LIJ intrigue, but also because it will be a good chance for Evil to become his own man. I see him being a real factor in the block, someone who will be in the mix until the end, but it will be whether he decides to play nice with Sanada and go back to the way things were before or whether he decides to just beat the shit out of his boy and that is a road you can’t go back down once you’ve started on. But it may be the only road Evil has to take if he ever wants to be anything more than Naito’s side-guy.

Bad Luck Fale

Fale is in there to be the pain in the ass obstacle for the heroes to overcome. I’m guessing he’s gonna be played as Jay White’s bear, looking to hurt dudes more than win on his own, softening them all up in case Jay meets them in the finals. But is that all there is to Bad Luck Fale? Is he just destined to be the heavy for a never-ending parade of mouthy white dudes, palling around with his fellow Island boys in the background and pawing Pieter’s fat ass while the Jay Whites of the world get all the Bullet Club glory?

I don’t know, but here’s the deal: Fale is fat and he will always be fat no matter how much they gibber on about him losing weight. He moves like a fat dude, slow and lumbering, limited in the way that fat dudes are by their ponderous girths, and he doesn’t really have another gear that he can kick it into. He’s just a big old bear and his matches are usually pretty shitty. Maybe he does something interesting like break Kota Ibushi’s ribs or hurl Zack Sabre Jr. face first into a ring post, but probably not. Most likely, he’s just there to play spoiler with Lance Archer or menace the ring announcer while Japanese folks gawk at him with racist eyes.

Also, I can’t believe this dude is fucking Pieter in real life, the Tokyo Latina Yujiro rolls with. I mean, what a life. This dude basically has a job for life as foreign heavy while he trains his students and fucks girls way out of his league, lol leverage that Japanese Bob Sapp racism baby, leverage it all the way to a spent dick and your own private army of young bois to meet your every need.

Kota Ibushi

Ah yes, the Golden Star, which is apropos for a dude who’s one of the favorites to win the A block. All of this is contingent of course on whether or not this yung idiot dies in the ring. He seems to have a head made of nothing but concussions and hazy memories of fucking Kenny Omega, and I guess that works for him. I mean, by now he’s obviously got to be legally retarded, but that just plays into his own whimsical and prodigal persona. He is more apt to chase a butterfly into oncoming traffic than he is to hold his shit together and exist in a more or less mortal realm.

He will get dumped on his head in grotesque ways that make you question your complicity with this madness, but he’ll also do things nobody else can do and he’ll be the Golden Star of the tournament because that is what he is poised to be now that his eternal lover Kenny Omega is off doing the AEW thing, and he is finally signed by New Japan to be one of their foundation pieces moving forward.

He’s gonna be in it to the end, and my guess is it will come down to him and Okada in the A Block, the only real intrigue is whether he’ll still be all there or whether he will just be led to the ring in a diaper and a vacant smile on his face. But that is part of the allure of this wicked style of pro wrestling and anyone who denies it is just denying it out of guilt of their own complicity in it all. But deep down, you need Kota Ibushi’s neck being broken on that wall. I just hope no one asks him to count to 20 or to not vomit on screaming teenage girls while he tries to remember his own name.

KENTA

I’m excited to see KENTA in the G1 because, I mean, well, he’s KENTA, the dude who most of your favorite wrestlers stole their move sets from in the last decade. But I’m also a little leery here because those NOAH days are long gone and who knows what kind of spirit sucking ruination has taken over his life in the last few years stuck in WWE hell trying to turn himself into something Vince McMahon can pretend to like in between bouts of senility and motorboating his face in his own daughter’s grotesque plastic titties.

It is from that sort of spiritual morass that KENTA finds himself crawling from. He has Shibata at his side, which is a hell of a spiritual boost, but I don’t know if even Shibata can cure KENTA of that WWE sickness. It might end up being a really sad tournament, both for KENTA and for us, as he wrestles clearly diminished from what he used to be, serving as only a reminder of what once was and what could have been had he swerved away from that WWE fork in the road a few years back.

I’m sure it will be exciting initially to see him, and there are a lot of dream matches to be had, but I think it’s important to keep expectations in check. He’ll probably be competitive, but in the end, he’s still damaged goods and he’s still an outsider, and it’s hard to see him winning too much in the end. But oh well, at least he’ll always have the experience of “learning” under the watchful aegis of Bill DeMott and whatever corporate team of branding experts assigned him by Stephanie McMahon’s soul-stripping factory.

Kazuchika Okada

O-KA-DA O-KA-DA O-KA-DA

Sorry. It’s just that, well, the man is the man once again and it’s hard to see anyone getting in his way. The dude does so many little things so well that make all the difference in a match. His sense of timing, of the moment, is so great that it takes a good match into the realm of the epic and every time he’s in there, you have the chance that you’re about to watch something special happen.

But, of course, it’s a different role being the champion in the G1, focused as much on beating off challengers (yeah, like THAT) as winning the tournament. There is also the expectation of greatness that hangs over his every match. He’s not gonna get a chance to half-ass it because all of his matches by default are considered big matches. That’s great for us, but fuck, man, I don’t know how a dude can pull it off night after night in the hot Japanese summer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him eat a couple of surprise upsets because at the end of the day, he’s still the champ and no matter what happens in the tournament, he’ll be there at Wrestle Kingdom in the main event. There’s no use in breaking yourself for something you already have.

But that would be the coward’s way, and Okada is no coward. He’s still gonna go all out, and I just hope he doesn’t get too fucked up or that Fale doesn’t sit on him too hard or whatever the fuck. Pray for Okada, or at least for good matches even though he doesn’t really have to go all out here. His match with Ibushi is one I’m particularly looking forward to, and of course there is the old warhorse Tanahashi, and their match is at the beginning of the tournament, so hopefully they’ll be able to go all out before Tana disintegrates into a cloud of butterflies or some shit.

Will Ospreay

Will Ospreay is a dude riding a huge tidal wave of momentum after winning the Best of Super Juniors and then recapturing the IWGP Junior Heavyweight title, and he has dudes like Meltzer dropping “best in the world” rapturous quotes about him, so… yeah, no pressure or anything.

I’ve actually come to accept Will Ospreay since he has bulked up some and stopped bleating like a goddamn goat every time he tries to emote in the ring. For the longest time, I always felt like he was more a dude playing the part of a professional wrestler than an actual professional wrestler, all pretense and deep sighs, hammy and ridiculous, but he has toned that shit down, and has even had me rooting him on as he clowns on Seth Rollins in that pitiful twitter war they had.

He’s clearly a dude coming into his own (his own what? His own hands? lol Neil pls) and it will be interesting whether he kicks it up yet another notch here or whether he breaks down under the strain of trying to go Big Epic Fantastico every fucking night only a month or so after he just got done doing it in the juniors tournament.

I wouldn’t expect him to win the block, but New Japan obviously has big things in store for him, and he’ll probably have a prominent place in the tournament, ultimately falling just short amid widespread admiration and applause and continued deep ownings of that cuck Seth Rollins on twitter and Instagram and whatever fucking surreal through the looking glass world bullshit we find ourselves living in here in the year of our Lord 2019, Amen.

Zack Sabre Jr.

ZSJ is a lot like Ospreay in the sense that they are both English and both very, very annoying twats. But while Ospreay seems to be growing out of his own pratishness, ZSJ seems to still be wallowing in his own spindly armed morass of strident jackassery and questionable aesthetics.

He’s still the same irritating gumby man that he was last year, and he’ll probably have a similar sort of tournament, at least as long as his bird chest doesn’t get caved in by an errant Fale fart or some shit. His pretend submissions don’t even look like they’re doing anything half the time other than serving as some sort of slight of hand’s magician’s trick to make you overlook the fact that he looks like his most trying bout has been a bout with AIDS.

I mean, seriously, I get that the whole lack of any muscle definition whatsoever is part of the gimmick, but it would be nice if that gimmick didn’t amount to a bunch of nonsense in the end while he spouts off tired leftisms and tries to get you to forget that he looks like he could be taken down by Neil (not that Neil, or this Neil) from The Inbetweeners.

He’ll have TAKA with him and they’ll do the whole spiel blah blah blah and he’ll finish with a respectable showing, but I won’t respect it, no sir. Fuck this dude.

Sanada

My boy Sanada may be the handsomest man in the world. Of course, he tempers that with an utterly disgusting beard, just like all the most handsome men do, like me for instance or Kendall (hi, Kendall!) but that just shows that he is a man of deep humility, again just like me and Kendall.

Unlike me, who is a drug addict who would probably fall into a million pieces at first contact, that is if I wasn’t immediately arrested at the airport by Japanese police who don’t appreciate “my kind”, or like Kendall, who although he is a gracious martial arts warrior, is also 40 years old and thus an old old man worthy of our laughter and cruel japes and maybe even of having his senility be taken advantage of by old friends, Sanada is a young spirit warrior in his prime who just needs one last push to take it over the top and become a perennial main event player in New Japan.

With that in mind, I’d look for him to have a strong tournament, and again, his match with his old boy Evil is particularly interesting, not least of which in seeing which of these dudes Tha Office is more inclined to get behind as they build new champions in the wars to come.

Either way, Sanada will remain deeply handsome and also his beard will remain deeply disgusting, but that is the yin and the yang of dudes like him or me or Kendall, who again I will remind you is an old man and probably smells bad now too.

Hiroshi Tanahashi

Finally, we come to old man Tanahashi, who is so old that even Kendall looks at him and says wow that dude is old, which means he is 42, and which also means that in wrestling years, where he has been the Ace of New Japan for well over a decade now, he is roughly 169 years old and will soon disintegrate into dust and air guitar solos.

He’s also the defending G1 champ, but even that run last year was a surprise, one last gasp at being The Man before it all starts to slide away, slowly at first but then quicker with each month, with each match, with each ache, and before you know it you are in opening matches with the Young Lions and everyone is happy just to see you getting out and about in your dotage.

But it’s too hard to think of Tanahashi like that yet, right? I mean, he’s still got enough in the tank to be a compelling hero, the one true ace of the universe. But its also apparent, watching him lately, that he can barely do anything in the ring right now. I don’t think he’s near healthy enough to have a truly good tournament, but that just adds to the intrigue of it all.

I wouldn’t expect him to make a run like last year, but he’s still Tana and that means that he’ll always be in a place of pride on the card and get a chance to hang with the kids, at least for another year or two. It’s just gonna be weird to see him shuffling around like fucking Tenzan in a few years, but that is coming quicker than you are ready for. But in the end, that is just the way of things, and as one old dude disintegrates into dust, a young dude steps his game up and becomes the next ace. Tana won’t win it this year, but he’ll at least have something to say about it.

Anyway, shit, that is the A Block. I’ll try to get the B Block preview up here in the next few days, but for now, let us reflect in the promise of yet another sublime G1, and also hopefully Kota Ibushi doesn’t get turned into a literal baby, swaddled in diapers and his own vomit, but also maybe hopefully he will because we are all monsters preying on this young boy’s stupid ass dreams. G1! LOUD NOISES! YES!