Fucking hell is this an amazing bit of pro wrestling. The last time I watched it was over a decade ago, back on the DVDVR All Japan set. I had it as the 7th best All Japan match of the 80s then and honestly, that feels about 5 spots too low. Long story short, they worked one of my favourite match types in all of wrestling. That match type being the one that has you going from "these guys have no shot at actually winning this thing, do they?" at the beginning to "wait a second here, do they ACTUALLY have a shot at winning this thing?!" An awesome riff on that match type is one featuring a broken down semi- or fully-retired wrestler. Lawler/Miz from 2011 and Flair/Edge from 2006 are obvious WWE examples, where by the end of the match the audience is drawn in completely and they have you believing the old fella might just pull it out the bag. And this is the best version of that match ever, with two guys at their absolute peaks as wrecking ball bastards against two guys who look like they struggle to even exist, where general movements inside a wrestling ring look taxing beyond reason, where that crowd is just living and dying on every single thing those old guys do.
I thought everyone in this was legit incredible. Every performance, start to finish. If Baba only had one good night left in him then he was going down emptying the clip and this might be the best example of his chops working on a level that very few strikes in history ever have. I don't care if they look a bit ropey, a thousand wrestlers today throw chops that sound like a shotgun blast - and probably hurt like one too - but none of them elicit the crowd reaction of Baba palming Tenryu in the head here. The Tenryu/Baba stuff works even better within the context of Tenryu's 1989. They matched up a few times throughout that year in six-mans and regular tags, and Tenryu showed nothing towards Baba but disrespect at best and contempt at worst. He didn't care for Baba's legacy and he showed it any chance he could, yet Baba would almost never bite, would never stoop to Tenryu's level no matter how far he was pushed. The tope at the beginning here is one of the best "you fucking WILL acknowledge me" moments ever, paying off about a year's worth of build. Obviously Baba's selling on the floor and then on the apron was amazing, rolling around like he's taken a gut shot from a cannon, milking every second of being incapacitated, selling that tope as he paces up and down the apron waiting for the tag. You knew the place would erupt when he got that tag, IF he got that tag, but Rusher got to take centre stage for a while first. For a guy at this point who can really only headbutt folk and eat chops you can't ask for much more. There were times where he was too broken down to actually move out the way of something, so instead he just braced himself as much as possible, grimaced and took whatever shot was thrown at him, sometimes defiant, sometimes too beaten to know where the shot had even come from. I love how the headbutts worked for a while until Hansen and Tenryu tried to take that head and just break it open like a coconut. The table shots looked brutal. The initial one even SOUNDED disgusting, then Tenryu came over while Rusher was sprawled on the floor and started ramming the table into his face. The beating Tenryu and Hansen laid on him mostly consisted of kicking and punching him in his cut open forehead and it would be hard to make a punch-kick heat segment on a 50-year old man any more compelling than this. They swarmed him, cut him off emphatically, wound up smeared in blood and none of it was their own, and after a while you knew all Rusher was trying to do was survive on the off chance Baba could halfway recover. There was an unreal bit in the middle of the beatdown where he blocked a Tenryu chop, grabbed him by the hair to throw another one of those headbutts that served him so well early, but this time Tenryu blocked it and walloped him with an overhand to the neck. It was a little thing but it was an amazing touch, one that reinforced how absolutely fucked the old man was.
Then Tenryu tries to lariat him in the corner and Rusher just lowers his head and Tenryu runs face-first into it like a fucking maniac. Which was the perfect setup to the hot tag, but also highlighted a broader point of Tenryu being absolutely world class at eating strikes in this match. He made every headbutt, chop and big boot look like death, largely because he had no compunction about leaning ALL the way into them. There were four moments where he could've lost teeth because he was determined not to telegraph that he was about to be hit, so when Baba brought the foot up to counter the lariat Tenryu was taking that thing square in the face at fifty miles an hour (and the subsequent bump off it was indescribable). Every time Baba caught him with a surprise shot it actually felt like a surprise. Tenryu never slowed down before running into it, never changed the setup to whatever he was theoretically intending to do before Baba struck him, so those moments were some of the most immersive in the entire match. Like the beatdown on Rusher, Tenryu and Hansen working Baba's ribs was probably more compelling than it had any right to be. Partly it was down to Baba's selling but more than that it was because Tenryu and Hansen went full crowbar and tried to punt him up and down the place. The bit where they were taking turns dropping elbows on his sternum was almost disturbing. Baba stumbles into his own corner at several points after managing to survive onslaughts only to find his partner still sidelined, so the longer he needs to go it alone the less you believe he has a chance.
Then Rusher goes down in a blaze of glory. In fact you can't even call it that, because blaze of glory makes it sound heroic, like he jumped on the proverbial grenade or took someone down with him, when in reality he did neither and had no say in the matter. The moment he trips Hansen from the floor makes you think he might've just bought Baba enough time, especially considering Baba had just eaten a double powerbomb (which was a great little piece of booking as it meant Baba didn't need to kick out of a death move immediately). When Rusher manages to drag himself back onto the apron you wonder if the crazy fuck might actually get back in the match. Hansen beheading him with the lariat before he's even upright was such an emphatic cut-off. You want your heroes to succeed, to pull it out even in the bleakest of situations, but you know what? Sometimes what you want and what the world gives you are at odds and you could practically feel the lariat rip the heart out that crowd. Baba ducking the next lariat and reversing the powerbomb was biblical, but in the end there was no chance. Even still, the struggle on Tenryu's face as he hoisted the big man up pretty well told the story.
What a match. Selling, timing, NARRATIVE~, offence, heat, workrate, hope spots, cut-offs, whatever the fuck else -- it ticked all the boxes. One of the best of the decade.
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