Welcome to the G1 2020, which promises to have heads dropped, faces slapped, arms locked and legs set upon like the gnawing of a syphilitic wolverine. Nobody will come out of this in good shape, Ishii will have his entire body transmogrified into shined ham, Ibushi won’t be able to do basic arithmetic, Minoru Suzuki will beat up a small child. All of this and so much more awaits us as we G1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Will Ospreay vs Yujiro Takahashi
lol what the fuck is Yujiro doing here? Loyal vet gets a little push, sure why not, but it means that he’ll have to actually, you know, do stuff. And I guess he does have a few “stuffs” for everyone as he worked hard here, well, hard for Yujiro, which is to say he at least made the effort and didn’t look like he’s gonna fuck up too many matches for us purehearts living an ocean away who DEMAND satisfactory workrate in our wrestling. Or something like that. All I demand is that everyone try their best and say their prayers and take their motherfucking vitamins.
Ospreay *deep sigh* is back and a little thicker, but not so much that he can’t do his dance wrestling when he needs to. He also seems to have a cocky new attitude which is probably smart to lean into the hate now that everyone deplores every English wrestler as a sex pervert or sex pervert enabler, which in my day just meant they were professional wrestlers, but I understand RAPE is not funny nor is it a good storyline unless it involves the boys in the back and unwritten rules and JBL slathering himself in oil and demanding young lions lick it off of him, you know as a prank? Anyway, Ospreay has been declared GUILTY by association, or at least that is my read on it from 10,000 miles away, and by the way, some of you out there are just fucking obsessed with rape and have to talk about it whenever wrestling is on and for fuck’s sake, yes it was all terrible, but you are just wallowing in that cesspit now. ANYWAY, Ospreay is still a fucking geek who thinks too highly of himself, and while I’m sure he’ll AMAZE and ASTOUND at various points in this G1 tournament, this was just a basic match and neither guy looked good or bad, well Yujiro looked good for Yujiro, but Will was just putting in a practice pretty much.
Jeff Cobb vs Taichi
I am as always ambivalent when it comes to Jeff Cobb, which is maybe a failing on my own end because the dude can do pretty much everything you want these dudes to do. He just doesn’t seem like a guy who fucks, what can I say? But he does throw people around pretty good and he did so here, doing all the Jeff Cobb things that made him the loveable Matanza on Lucha Underground, and tbh that’s probably what he should be doing, is working as a monster under a hood or some shit like that. I know, I know, he’s a real Olympian and a Natural Athlete but he repped Guam, which meant it was down to him or a sea turtle for the spot on the team, and his natural athleticism is best served winging around 190 pound would-be heroes or maybe I’m just being stupid because he can for sure hoss fight and that’s what he’s here for.
Taichi, on the other hand, is a wonton degenerate after my own heart. When we are not fucking Miho Abe, we are managing to just barely get our shit together and come out looking okay. Taichi is at his best when he is kicking people in the chest and face, channeling Godfather Kawada, but he can also suplex the shit out of you, it’s just that he doesn’t want to have to expend that kind of energy if he can just slap you in the balls when the ref isn’t looking or choke you out with his mic stand. I mean, who among us would not just do what needs to be done and then go back and play out that tentacle porn with Miho Abe?
But, Taichi seems determined finally to make an honestish wrestler of himself, and when he does go, he goes very well, and I think we’re past the point of having to acknowledge this, right? His strikes, the kicks especially, are pristine, and he can drop dudes on their heads like every other well-bred Japanese kill dog, which I bet is what they make you do on your last day as a young lion, just go out and kill a dog with your bare hands. Benoit was already doing it anyway on his free time. It’s a good lesson for the lads.
So Taichi is poised to make a run here I think, while Cobb is what he is, gaijin fodder taking over from Mike Elgin, trying to make the Japanese fans think they are Doc and Gordy if they squint at just the right hour of the sun. But they are not, and Cobb is just a big marshmallow who can do freaky shit but has the personality and charisma of a stump. All in all, these two brought the professional wrestling in a solidly satisfactory manner.
Tomohiro Ishii vs Minoru Suzuki
Oh sweet lord, I loved this match. Match of the night for me. Ishii, of course, is a man whose very essence is intertwined with the G1, giving it virility and honor and him a chance to destroy himself in glorious battle. And Suzuki is Suzuki, which is to say he is willing to destroy Ishii also in glorious battle and then fuck the corpse.
There were moments in the match where it felt like Suzuki was treating Ishii as a helpless young boy, and I don’t mean he held his hand and brought him back to Miss Lawson’s classroom. I mean he almost uncomfortably beat the living shit out of dear sweet Ishii, and then he fucked Miss Lawson. But it was raw and it was primal, and it was very very real, the slapping of skin on skin, bone on bone, crazy old idiots on crazy old idiots for the sheer love of the goddamn game.
Ishii got his comeback, but it was all for naught as Suzuki finished him with the Gotch piledriver, which is an old man paying homage to an even older man and the foundations of Japanese wrestling itself, which is something for Suzuki because he has been something of an enigma in his pro wrestling career, but he co-founded Pancrase which is wrestling stripped to its essence, and likely the very thing that Old Man Gotch taught his beautiful boys.
But enough history, what’s important to take away from this match is that neither man will likely win the tournament, and yet, they both already have. Ishii never fucking stops having these matches year after fucking year, to the point where he has to be considered one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, which sounds crazy given that he’s never sniffed a top spot really, but the proof is in the wrestling and the wrestling shows that perhaps no dude is more respected at this moment when it comes to putting on epic matches. His body and skull seem to give him some sort of superpower, impervious to injury, stone pitbull and all that, but it allows him to do this night after night in an orgy of sheer brutality. How long can he keep this up? At some point, don’t they almost have to give him a G1 because it’s his fucking tournament every year?
Suzuki, meanwhile, remains the cruel bastard who will laugh in your face after you hit him and then he’ll cave in your frontal lobe and as he tortured Ishii like he was a “guest” in an internment camp, Suzuki had come home. Ishii is his perfect opponent because they don’t have to pretend, they just get to legit beat the shit out of each other and everyone is taken to a masochistic high, the destruction of man by man, the will to be more than man, this is the pro wrestling that I fucking love with all my heart.
Shingo Takagi vs Jay White
My boy Jared told me he thought of Jay White as “Neil’s boy” and that’s fair, I went very hard for him last year, and you know what? I will again this year too! His heeling is unscrupulous yet never tedious, no one has a better crowd talking game, “It’s the J1” You’re goddamn right it is, baby. I was afraid that Jay had slipped through the Covid cracks with the big Evil push, but he seems to be very much in the company’s plans still, and to be honest, he has maybe leveled up a bit this year. He’s rocking the abs and has a hideous beard and what more can you ask from your villains?
But more than that, Jay White wrestles with such fluidity and has such gnarly throws and strikes, and he can cook up a crowd and a match better than anyone alive today in my opinion. It may not play as well with Western companies, but he has Japanese crowd control like no other.
And Jay was at his best, both in a heeling sense and a wrestling sense against Shingo, who remains a favorite of many even if I can’t get behind him because he’s so fucking ugly and built like a roasted pig. What can I say, I demand my men in underwear be handsome so that I can tell my friends and loved ones that I’m watching High Quality Gay Porn instead of something seedy and indefensible like pro wrestling when they walk in on me and we have to have a talk before I’m to be left alone with the grandchildren.
But I will concede that Shingo is very good at the pro wrestling, and so this was a very good pro wrestling match, featuring lengthy psychology with the back work even if that didn’t really come into play, but it adds to the structure of a match, and Jay White is very good at the structuring of matches, which is a major element when it comes to doing the pro wrestling, I think. I don’t mind the Bullet Club shenanigans that much, but there is a purity in the G1 which I think must be respected in that this is very much a fetish tournament for nerds who like Epic Matches and also the Japanese paying public who understand their pro wrestling better than we do a million miles away, playing with our homemade Kawada dolls and studying short phrases in Japanese in case we ever need to seduce Miho Abe. But we’re the REAL fans, right? RIGHT???
Anyway, I am still all in on Jay White as a dynamic and important figure in the New Japan world, and will be very, very interested to see how the inner turmoil of Bullet Club plays itself out with too many chiefs. And Shingo goes back to being Naito’s War Pig, which is not a bad thing for sure, and I imagine he will do a respectable number in this tournament. Poor Jeff Cobb and Yujiro, they will be eating pins until Antonio Inoki steals the Olympic Torch and helicopters it to FUCK AND FIGHT ISLAND where he will be chased by specially handpicked Russian women with horse legs grafted onto their bodies. FUCK *INOKI SPINS TO LOOK WIDE EYED INTO THE CAMERA* OR FIGHT, only on NHK!!!
Kazuchika Okada vs Kota Ibushi
The good news is that idiot Ibushi didn’t get his head cracked open like an egg just waiting to be scrambled. The bad news is that I kinda wish he did. I know that is ghoulish, but there was another gear here which these two just didn’t get into, and I know it’s a long tournament blah blah blah, but they could have gone wild but didn’t. I mean, that’s okay, it was still a great match, as it always will be between these two. No houses were set on fire is all I’m saying.
Okada remains the best at what he does, which is wrestle professionally, his timing and athleticism combining to make him magic, a dude who could probably wrestle the proverbial mop to a Meltzerian orgasm. I, uh, *cough*, just came. Settle down, Dave! I’ve heard Okada compared to both Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels, which seems wildly disparate in a way, but what if you could combine the two into one fucking ridiculous wrestler? Well, you’d get Okada. Even without the belt, he is still The Man, calm, steady, explodes when exploding needs exploding. He lost to Ibushi, but that’s okay, Ibushi is still on his Vision Quest towards the apex of pro wrestling and he needs to win these matches from time to time. Okada will probably reel off an unbeaten streak after this as the time has probably come to bring it all back around again and put him on top of the company.
Ibushi will almost certainly die a little in every match, his brain shriveling up into a Benoit sized peanut, unable to count to ten or have a conversation without his mouth flopping open like a deadbeat dog, drooling on himself as he jacks his dick in front of mother, who weeps at the life choices her son has made. Dad will cover him in shame and then commit Seppuku in the garden while Kota eats a peanut butter sandwich and watches from his bedroom window, still jacking off, unable to control his own basic functions at this point. Kenny said he’d come back to play, but shit he doesn’t even remember who Kenny is anymore and he just keeps jacking it, dull cow eyes staring off into an oblivion of flips and head drops. Pro Wrestling was just a hobby, really, something he did for fun with his friends, whose faces and names he can no longer recognize. But tomorrow, he will enter the ring yet again and kick people in their faces very hard because that is what Lenny did to that rabbit and then he’ll flip off the apron and land on his face on the floor and he’ll pop right back up and stick his tongue out, a mongoloid baby in a man’s handsome body, and he’ll revert to muscle memory and he’ll continue to win match after match and someone with a leash will chase after him in the locker room but Kota will strip naked and run into the streets, tongue lolling and a helicopter will descend with Antonio Inoki offering an outstretched hand and screaming FUCK OR FIGHT FUCK OR FIGHT FUCK OR FIGHT and the G1 goes on.
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