We try like bewildered beasts to catch up in the G1, chasing the fresh waters and grasslands to what proves to be an endless paradise where little to no white men trod except for those willing to learn the ways of the wilderness and even then they live just to be kicked in the face and offered up as sacrifices to the old gods. Maybe we’ll find an end to it all by Christmas or maybe it will all just bleed into a Wrestle Kingdom and pandemics will be over and the G1 will be back again and time moves in circles and we never stop chasing the fresh waters and grasslands of it all. But today, let’s just write and read about some wrestling that we watched or maybe you didn’t and just like to read about it I don’t know I just chase and write. Fuck it, let’s goooooooooooo!!!!!!!
Hirooki Goto vs Sanada
Hey, I like both these dudes! Hey, they had a match!
Not a ton to say about this one, which is to say it was maybe slightly disappointing? Maybe that is not fair, but this is the G1, baby, you either make the masses weep with transcendent pro wrestling or you disappoint. Or you are Toru Yano and these things don’t matter, or maybe that is what makes Toru Yano transcendent? Who are we to say? Maybe some more about that later during his match where it would be appropriate, Neil? Oh, okay.
Anyway . . . yeah, slightly disappointing, I guess. Goto tries to catch up to the moment and seemingly fails until surprisingly getting the pin over Sanada who is suddenly listless and perhaps in seek of something more comfortable in the wake of his betrayal by Evil, who as his regular partner perhaps betrayed him more than even Naito and yet no one seems to care for poor Sanada’s feelings which is perhaps partially due to his aloofness which may be stoicism more than a man who doesn’t care about things which Sanada clearly must as he stumbles off in bewildered fashion after losing yet again, dropping to 0-2 in what seems to be a dark tournament taking shape for him, although maybe, just maybe, this sets up for a run of heroic redemption and healing for the quiet, almost forgotten, member of LIJ. Wow, that was one run-on sentence for sure.
Goto, on the other hand, despite winning, seems like a man clearly furiously treading water to keep from drowning, which has kind of been his role the last few years to be honest. He seems to be letting down Shibata and himself, already being humiliated by KENTA in his first match, the man who betrayed Shibata and by extension Goto last year. Again, this seems kind of weird given that he won the damn match here, but an ailing shoulder and his long history of never being able to quite capture being The Man loom as terrifying Omens for what should prove to be another struggle of a tournament, and yet Goto never quite drowns, does he? No, he usually ends up banging his way to contention, or at least near contention, and if he finds his Inner Shibata, perhaps he can shock everyone in what promises to be a Block B that is up for grabs save a Naito run of dominance. Still, he’ll have to do better than this.
Hiroshi Tanahashi vs Toru Yano
Tanahashi tries to play Yano’s game which is always a dangerous decision and Gets Got which is a shocker as he falls to 0-2 and Yano moves to 2-0 leading to autistic screeching of Herbian types although that is not fair to legit autistic people who deserve better than to be compared to Pro Wrestling Fans.
Okay, so now that I’ve offended everyone, let me say that I do not for the most part have a problem with Dave Meltzer who I believe to be the foremost historian of the Pro Wrestling and a man who is often insightful when it comes to certain business arcana and their implications for companies going forward and often when it comes to the Pro Wrestling itself and its artistry. And yet, no one can argue that he has His Vision of what makes for great Pro Wrestling and if one strays from said Vision, he just can not see a point or purpose to any of it and such is his take on Toru Yano and often unfortunately those who ape or slavishly follow the teachings of The Herb are often bewildered and even Angry by these same sorts of things. That, of course, is their right and sometimes maybe it even is Right, but not with Yano in my opinion - and again these are all just stupid opinions - who transcends the Normal Way by not giving a fuck about it and drawing a different picture, one that seems simple and perhaps crude and rudimentary but then he laughs at your picture and somehow gets people nodding and smiling at his picture and then you are left in an indignant rage because your picture is technically better and so you start to try to draw like him and of course you cannot and lol he just made you look like a fool and now you are 0-2 and he is 2-0 and you are tearing up all the pictures and screaming that Art is Dead and you just got sucked into the Bewildering Dimension of Toru Yano.
How do you judge such a thing? Well, you can’t, and that is what bewilders and often angers a Certain Segment of the Pro Wrestling Intelligentsia which is a ridiculous oxymoron when you think about it and yet we are all a part of its stupid existence. I don’t blame you if you don’t like or get Toru Yano because hey man, we are all in this together and all have Our Things, and yet I don’t NOT blame you because to not call a poem a poem is also ludicrous and lol Toru Yano is laughing and laughing and laughing as we talk about all this and that is the point.
Tanahashi, meanwhile, is left scrambling for Answers which do not come because he is older and 0-2 is a terrifying prospect for the Elderly, which is unfortunate because he got himself into shape for this and is feeling like a man ready to run The Company again and bang models with a Hard Dick which has eluded him for a while maybe and stay up late drinking with The Boys while also getting up early to make Big Business Decisions before the proletariat has even awoken but Youth is just an Illusion, a Game laughed at by Time and Tana is not drinking with the boys or fucking models but trying desperately to find Meaning in the Life That Comes For Us All. His young protégé, Kota Ibushi, is ready to maybe run the company, and Tana has lived vicariously through him for a moment but that moment is now passed and past too and he is left a man who got his Abs in order but has found a business and kingdom which is not really his anymore so what does he do? Well, he plays air guitar and remembers that he is Hiroshi Fucking Tanahashi and proclaims that he will win 8 in a row and be found in his Old Office calmly sipping a scotch and reading the day’s paper while the wolves at the door howl and tear each other’s flesh having failed to understand that they are all peasants and he is King. Or he wins some and loses some and plays golf on the weekends with his old friends. Who is to say? Nobody, but never ever fuck with the King until he is dead, and the King is not yet dead.
Juice Robinson vs KENTA
Juice’s new look is vaguely ridiculous, like a man who fell out of the late 70s and into 2020, maybe did some coke along the way, maybe got sucked off in an alley by a Trans Prostitute and then beaten up and robbed by the same Prostitute before laughing it all off and heading to the gym to get in some work before heading to the arena to wrestle in the G1. And it works for him because he’s Juice Robinson and you’re not.
That Juice is also a man who can work a crowd of Japanese fans into doing whatever he wants pretty much because he understands that they are an orchestra just looking for a good conductor and he knows how to conduct, getting them to play a little Queen with their hands and feet while he punches KENTA in the corner. But he also understands how to connect more deeply, viscerally, with fans, Japanese, American, whoever, who want to get behind a fired up kid who is a little ridiculous and a lot lovable because he obviously cares about all this and can also wrestle and fight in the style called for while blending in elements of traditional American pathos and pro wrestling, which is really what Good Japanese pro wrestling has always been about, white or Japanese or whatever, understanding and respecting the particular Japanese character and ethos while also understanding and respecting that underneath it all is a raging fire that longs to be spoken to and for and will explode volcanically if stoked and pressed in all the right ways. And really, that is just Pro Wrestling at its core, no matter where it is found and practiced. And Juice is a dude who is good at understanding all that and working it.
KENTA is a man who has been betrayed in a way and has responded to that betrayal with one of its own and the result is an ugly maelstrom of a man who just can’t live with any of it and so he continues on in a fit of self-loathing, trying to make you loath yourself and all of, of, IT along the way. But he is also a man who can still kick you really hard and flash all of the things that came before all the Loathing, and remind you that he can still be beautiful and stirring, and yet it is not enough as he is knocked silly by Juice and then pinned, left to scramble back to his pit of self-loathing, not even the top dude or the second dude in Bullet Club, but a hateful assassin staring at the bullet and wondering if it is for himself or everyone else.
That’s a hard place to be obviously, and plenty still wait in the block to smack him around some more for being in that place and all the assorted betrayals, both of others and the self, that come along with it. But he will still kick you in the face and he will also humiliate you if he can, like what he did to poor Goto in his first match of the tournament, yet another spit in the face of Shibata and his former self along with it. That mixture, of self-loathing and of beating the piss out of everyone who reminds him of it, will continue for KENTA as he stumbles his way through the G1 and through life, until emerging as a man who either repents of it all and perhaps finds some dignity, honor and peace, or until he just becomes a blackened wreck, a ghost of the man who used to be the terror of NOAH and who once dreamed of something even greater, of something grander, for himself, but failed, as most often do. It is brutal and unfair, and yet, such is the life of KENTA, as it is for so many others.
Yoshi-Hashi vs Evil
This was, shockingly, perhaps match of the night for me as Yoshi-Hashi tried yet again to shed the Yoshi-Hashi of it all and be what he has always dreamed to be, a Man who Belongs, both in the G1 and in New Japan proper, and of course, in all of our hearts. And matches like this go a long way towards wanting you to want that all for him.
Yoshi-Hashi brought it all against Evil, everything in his heart, everything in his abilities, and probably deserved to win. No, he definitely deserved to win, both in the contexts of the ambiguously “fictional” world of pro wrestling and in the metatextual sense, which sees us all root for our favorites based on their reputed skills and Places In The Back and whatnot. And yet he lost, which is all part of all of that gibberish when it comes to Yoshi-Hashi, and also part of the story when it comes to the man who beat him in dastardly fashion, the appropriately named Evil.
The win for Evil, and the manner in which he stole it, is as apropos as the loss was for Yoshi-Hashi when it comes to telling their respective stories. Evil is the asshole who turned on everyone and is taking every shortcut in the book towards its end, which he hopes is a picture of him once again holding the double belts of Intercontinental and IWGP success and glory. But mostly, it is a picture of a man struggling with a Poor Choice, both its implications when it comes to how others feel about him and about how he feels about himself. Like KENTA, this sort of self-loathing manifests in being a vile shithead even if it is not how he would like to be. He must wallow in the despair and ugliness of his own making, relying on the wretched Dick Togo and his own newly found proclivity for punching other men in the dick to bathe in the blood and guts of the fans, his opponent and himself.
Yoshi-Hashi, meanwhile, is left to once again scramble for his own sense of self, wrapped up in the Failure Demons which have plagued him for so long, always the man who fell and burst his own head open while trying to save his friend and have his moment at the same time. He will always be that dude, both in its hideous failure and the absolute lovableness of it all. He has to win at some point, has to be the man inside, the man who deserves to be loved and appreciated not just for being a lovable failure but a man capable of beating down evil and Evil whenever they or he present themselves. He almost did it. By god, he should have done it, but he did not, and that remains the ballad of Yoshi-Hashi, a song which becomes more compelling with each sad verse.
Tetsuya Naito vs Zack Sabre Jr.
I’ll admit it, I fell asleep towards the end of this match. It wasn’t a full-on sleep, but one of those where I could hear and understand everything even as my eyes closed and then opened and then closed again and then stayed closed for longer and longer intervals. It was enough that I did not feel compelled to go back and watch the match again. I got the gist of it all and was awake, eyes opened and all, to watch the end as Naito said Fuck Time and Destinoed the shit out of ZSJ, who remains a spindly nuisance.
I don’t hate ZSJ as much as, say, dear Kendall, but I also do not really like the man, either in or out of the ring, which is odd because in both respects he should be a dude I like very much. I was vegan for ten years, am very leftist in my views and enjoy a man who can torture others in the ring via technical wizardry. And yet, the whole package when it comes to ZSJ feels somewhat False, just that, a package, which is not so much Pure in its disparate parts, but adopted as a premanufactured Whole, which is something I disdain.
Perhaps that is not fair to ZSJ. It almost certainly isn’t as by all accounts he is a dude who works very hard at what he does, which includes maintaining that spindly nuisance body intentionally instead of just being a lazy prick who gets off on doing nonsensical flashy wizard moves which are the technical equivalent of Will Ospreay’s bleating dance wrestling nonsense. And yet, that Falseness feels more like the actual ZSJ bullshit than a True Man Of Faith so to speak and if I am not making sense, I apologize, as I try to work my head and typing fingers around the whole idea which maybe isn’t coming off or maybe it is, either way we proceed as befits the way of New Writing.
Anyway, part of me, a small part perhaps, is beginning to suspect that ZSJ deserves more credit and respect than I currently give him, more certainly than I have in the past, and yet I am not there yet with him. I still find his spindly nuisance body off-putting in an I Can’t Believe This Guy kind of way, and his so-called technical wizardry has been exposed as False by dudes like Kendall, who know way more about this shit than I do, but even I can see his slippery bullshit is just that, bullshit, a con-artist’s shell game which is not as smart as he thinks it is. “Yeah, but that doesn’t actually hurt” is something I should not be saying while watching pro wrestling and yet I find myself at least suspecting it while watching ZSJ, which some might say is a failing on my own part to just shut up and enjoy the show, but these things are weird and I get both arguments, I really do, but there is just something about ZSJ which doesn’t let me just Shut Up And Enjoy The Show.
Naito, on the other hand, has won me over pretty much completely, and falling asleep is not his fault but my own as I attempt to not just burn the candle at both ends but at all points in between, a stupid man chasing his own Poor Choices into the abyss. But Naito is enough to wake my dumb ass back up and applaud his Capturing of The Moment as it desperately dwindles into the Time Limit, capturing the fervor of a crowd who wants to see a Real Finish and not ZSJ escape with an eelish draw. And Naito brings them to that moment and captures the pin and it is all good, my reservations about ZSJ and my own Poor Choices aside. And so ends another night of G1 madness, and now it is on to catching up to the next show and the next show after that as I chase those fresh waters and green grasses into eternity with you all.
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