RINGS Maelstrom: 2nd (4/26/96)

Jacob Hamilton v Michael Stam 

At six minutes long you could argue this was mercifully short. You could also argue it was still about four minutes too long. I think both cases could be compelling. It was inoffensive, to be fair. I've never seen either guy before but apparently Hamilton is a mixed martial artist from Australia. He pretty much did nothing well and really just got smothered by Stam before tapping to a scarf hold. Stam is a hefty American fellow with very heavy breathing - almost disconcertingly so - who made this one and only appearance on the Fighting Network. At least he went out with a 100% record. 

Wataru Sakata v Todor Todorov 

What a fun wee seven minutes. Todorov is usually game for a spirited contest and this was no different. Some of the throws were a bit easily come by, but they looked pretty enough and Todorov has some really explosive hips, which is a thing I'll always be impressed by as an S&C coach. That finish is one of the coolest armbars ever too. I'm not sure I've even seen Han pull that one out. 

Mitsuya Nagai v Glenn Brown

I don't know if this was a shoot or not because it lasted all of exactly 40 seconds. Brown I have never seen before, but he looks like a wealthy anime villain who condescends to the main protagonist in an obnoxious British accent, slicked back hair with a very visibly taped up nipple. Just the one nipple. Which you could possibly argue is not pertinent information. Brown comes out in a quirky crane stance and throws a couple kicks that I think drew a laugh from the crowd. Nagai threw kicks that were no laughing matter and Brown immediately started backing up like "ew this is not what I was expecting please behave" and feebly tried to reach the ropes after Nagai took him down. Feebly quickly turned to unsuccessfully and there's yer choke inside one minute. I actually don't think this was a shoot. Gun to my head I'm saying work. Brown's kicks were quite frankly too terrible. Sorry, Glenn. At least you are by far the least cretinous white man named Glenn to wrestle in a Japanese shoot style promotion in the mid-1990s. 

Willie Williams v Bitsadze Tariel 

Willie by god Williams! I had no clue that feller was still doing the shoot style in 1996. There's a sort of endearing quality to Williams, a giant lummox with a heart of gold (prolly), and while this was a lumbering nonsense of a thing there have been worse uses of 12 minutes in RINGS. Both guys are quite tentative, though it seemed that tentativeness was more a result of them not wanting to look stupid throwing ropey strikes than them not wanting to be struck. Tariel has at least a couple really good bouts in RINGS, one against Tamura the following year that I remember being great, but he looked very not good here and Tamura was outrageous in '97 so who knows. I did not buy that finish, however I was also not the one being kneed in the guts by a big giant hairy bastard Georgian karateka. So who knows. 

Dick Vrij v Maurice Smith 

Well damn, I didn't know Mo Smith fought in RINGS. I don't think I've actually seen a single worked fight that Smith was in, even though he's done some stuff in UWF and PWFG (and Pancrase, but I have no clue if those were worked or not). And apparently he fought both Kohsaka and Tamura in RINGS! What the hell? How do I not remember that? Anyhow, this was like four minutes and I'm guessing it was a work. They mostly traded some tentative stand-up before Vrij went for a takedown that in actual fact was more of a falling down while grabbing the other person, and it was pretty amusing seeing Smith take Vrij's back with ease and attempt a choke while wearing boxing gloves. Nice knockout finish. Is it any wonder Smith would take the UFC heavyweight title a year later? Not at all. 

Volk Han v Nikolai Zouev

How about this for a PRIME cut of the Fighting Network? Han comes out like a whirlwind at the start, throwing a flurry of palms and knees that didn't all land the cleanest, but when you throw about a dozen of them then you'd expect at least one to hit flush. Sure enough a knee caught Zouev and down he went. That set us up for the next few minutes, with Han taking a comfortable lead in points, forcing Zouev into using a few rope breaks after that early knockdown. It's been a hot minutes since I've watched any Zouev but he was looking very much like a Dallas Mavericks second round draft pick out of Slovenia. I'll tell you what though, he can hold his own with the master and some of the grappling was excellent. The overhead camera really gave us an awesome look at the way they shifted for position, grabbing one limb to create an opening for another, sometimes snatching two appendages at once. Zouev hitting a shoot style DDT was amazing and when he grabbed that cross armbreaker he had Han scrambling for the ropes. Even if Han was way out in front on points, there was always a sense that Zouev was capable of catching him and finish things. After Zouev uses up his last rope break he has no choice but to go for the throat and the ridiculous armbar at the end was a fitting way to cap off a fight between these two. This was pretty great. 

Tsuyoshi Kohsaka v Yoshihisa Yamamoto 

This was also pretty great. There have been better fights up to this point in RINGS history, but this one almost felt like a precursor of what would come in the next 2-3 years. You still had Han and a few of the other Eastern Europeans doing their thing right until the end (or at least until the promotion went full MMA in 2000), but what peak RINGS had that the earlier years didn't was that holy trinity of Tamura, Kohsaka and Yamamoto, all of whom were at THEIR peak. Even if Maeda was the centrepiece of the promotion before, he had half a working knee from basically the very beginning and missed stretches of time as a result. A lot of the earlier shows were loaded with random Bulgarians or Dutchmen who were way more interesting than the natives; bland guys like Nobuaki Kakuta and Masaaki Satake who couldn't really do much. Nagai was fine enough but he was nothing on UWFi Tamura never mind peak Tamura. Most of the best RINGS stuff of those years had foreign talent involved and this was a departure from that. Stylistically it was also very reminiscent of some of the top tier RINGS bouts, things like Tamura/Yamamoto, Tamura/Kohsaka, the later Yamamoto/Kohsaka fights, Han against all three. A less spectacular version of those fights, but a glimpse of that particular, wonderful future. Obviously the matwork was exceptional. Yamamoto was on one and raced out to an early lead, forcing Kohsaka into a few quick rope breaks. Then he'd unload with strikes and drilled Kohsaka with an overhand slap for a knockdown. It felt like Yamamoto had an answer for everything Kohsaka threw at him, like when Kohsaka ripped him to the mat with a gorgeous takedown, rolling into a calf slicer, only for Yamamoto to reverse even that. When Yamamoto is finally pushed into using a rope break, losing his first point of the fight, Kohsaka is visibly fired up and it feels like HE feels like the comeback is on. Can he pull something out the bag before the points gap kills him? 

Complete & Accurate RINGS

Meiko and Kana hit each other very hard

Meiko Satomura v Kana (Triple Tails, 2/13/11)

This might be as close to joshi FUTEN as I've ever seen. I don't just mean the stiffness or how they worked it stylistically -- I'm talking right down to the presentation with the smaller crowd, the tightly-packed environment, even the dodgy close-up camera shots. You could hear eeeeeverything in this and it gave the very obvious brutality an even more visceral edge. There have been outright stiffer matches in joshi, things like Hotta/Aja coming to mind, but where this was remarkable was how CLEAN the striking was. I think there was one strike that looked a bit whiffed and it was a running shining wizard from Kana. Other than that, if they threw, I don't know, 50 strikes in total, 47 of them were a 9 or 10 out of 10 on the execution scale. It was absolute god tier striking. And of course they laid it in something fierce. Kana was throwing roundhouse variations and spin kicking Meiko in the lungs, winging urakens that about made Satomura's eardrum explode, full force Wanderlei punting her in the dish. While Kana doing this to people is nothing new, Meiko isn't someone I'm used to seeing work as Ikeda, at least not to this extent. But she was absolutely drilling Kana with shots and that cartwheel knee to the back of the head was an absurdity of a thing. There was one strike exchange towards the end that nearly veered into your rote "you hit me and I'll hit you and we'll show everyone how tough we are" nonsense, but even in the moment it felt like it was rooted in Kana operating with a chip on her shoulder. The way she celebrated at the finish reinforced that as well, how it came across like this was an actual combat sport contest and she'd just beaten one of the very best, someone that maybe nobody expected her to beat. Plus the strikes themselves looking amazing will make something like that a little more tolerable anyway. The grappling wasn't necessarily flashy and you've seen better Battlarts/FUTEN matwork, but it was undoubtedly aggressive and competitive, everything being fought over and when they locked something in it always looked like they were going for the tap. Nothing felt like it was applied merely to further the match or to bridge from one series of strikes to the next. And the chicken wing choke at the end really did look killer. 

Tamura and the Super Vader!

Kiyoshi Tamura v Super Vader (UWFi, 6/10/94)

Yeah, this is one of the best sub-10-minute matches ever. It had been so long since I'd seen it that I remembered nothing about it other than the result, so I found myself getting roped into the moment by those early leg kicks just like every person in that building. Tamura slapping Vader before the bell was amazing as well, Vader then flinging off the mask and kind of tilting his head like "oh, son...I really wish you hadn't." Tamura sticking and moving felt like the obvious strategy from a shoot standpoint, but it's not always easy to make the obvious strategy come off as convincingly as this. I thought he was incredible as this undersized demon with rapid fire strikes and determination from here to the moon and back. There was this palpable sense of dread when he got backed into the corner for the first time, then Vader took a massive swing at him and JUST before it took his head off Tamura ducked and shot out into the middle of the ring. When it happens a second time Vader manages to tag him and you're thinking THIS time he's fucked for sure, but he fires back and catches Vader with a shot to the mouth and the place goes ballistic. Still, this only works as well as it does because of Vader and how he sold the progressive toll of those leg kicks. He went from being irritated by them to showing that they were actively stinging and something he wanted to avoid, and by halfway he was damn near crippled by them. His howling like a plains bear after every shot was spectacular. It's one of my favourite performances from the big man and it really shows his versatility, even if he was still very much Vader being Vader when you get right down to it. I think it shows Tamura's versatility as well, in that he'd never done anything quite like this in his career, which was still in its early stages if we're going by actual matches wrestled. Just an amazingly smart bit of work. 

Santo and Parka! Bleed everywhere!

El Hijo del Santo v La Parka (Monterrey, 12/23/01)

Well shit son, how about this for one of the all-time great lucha brawls. I'm sure I've said this here before, but for a guy we associate with graceful dives and gorgeous wrestling sequences, the son of El Santo is a fucking animal when it comes to brawling. He went at Parka with a vengeance in that first fall, just a relentless force that wouldn't let up. He was an absolute pitbull. The way he then blended the beauty and the savagery with that tope was absolutely top drawer. Parka ripping rows of fixed seats off the ground with his body didn't hurt either. It was a total domination of an opening fall and Santo's viciousness was something to behold. After his comeback Parka maybe could've sprinkled in a little more selling of the beatdown he'd just received, at least in the early stages, but you forget that as soon as he starts yeeting Santo face-first into rows of seats. Santo's gusher is a horror of a thing and he BLEEDS EVERYWHERE and leaves literal trails of blood wherever he goes. There were pools of blood on the seats he'd been thrown into! He got hung upside down in the corner at one point and that part of the ring looked like a murder scene. By the tercera Santo's silver tights are half red, his silver mask is full red, and Parka's swank white bodysuit is covered in patches of blood with very little of it being his own. Parka ramming the back of Santo's head into the ring post is also legitimately one of the nasties post shots I've ever seen. Where Santo is on an island almost of his own is the way he sells blood loss. He was incredible in the deciding fall here, putting across the toll of what he'd sustained, even in how he'd climb the turnbuckles like that alone was an arduous process. Of course the dives were spectacular and there are very few things more lucha libre than spectators fleeing for their lives, scrambling to remove their children from harm's way, praying for the elderly in the front row too slow or frail to withdraw, as a wrestler ends up out in front of them as another wrestler runs the opposite ring ropes. And all of those people were right to retreat because Santo fucking obliterated Parka with that tope. I had no memory of what the actual finish was even though I knew it was something ropey, so I was preparing myself for it. To be honest though, I didn't think this was even in the top two or three tiers of horse shit Monterrey finishes. Santo needed to just be RID of Parka and the way he volleyed him in the balls was at least a hell of a spot on its own. A real Monterrey classic. 

The art of the hair match

El Dandy v Pirata Morgan (Hair v Hair) (EMLL, 9/23/88)

What a sensational bloodthirsty masterpiece. One of the highlights of any Pirata Morgan apeustas match is him lapping up someone's blood straight from their forehead and spraying it in the air like a demented vampire, and he did that within about a minute and a half here so we got an early indicator of how good this was going to be. He wiped the floor with Dandy in that first caida and while Dandy maybe over-milked the ref' preventing him from throwing retaliatory punches, I at least appreciated how quickly Morgan pounced on the advantage that presented itself. There was no quick second fall to tie things up here either; Morgan kept going at Dandy with a vengeance, then when Dandy made his comeback they stretched it out a little longer than usual. Of course Pirata Morgan does what he always does in wagers matches and bleeds like a psychopath. I love Dandy getting some payback from earlier by biting Morgan's open wound and spraying the blood in the air, albeit with less grizzly proficiency than his opponent. The tercera might genuinely be my favourite deciding fall in an apuestas match ever. I had no recollection of it being this great but jeez louise these two were fucking incredible in this. The blood-loss selling, the desperation, the PUNCHES, the bumps, the big dive, everything. Dandy tries a falling headbutt at one point and Morgan mule kicks him right in the face and it was the best counter to a falling headbutt I've ever seen. Some of the moves off the top looked not one bit graceful and they were all the better for it, especially Morgan's attempt at a senton where he barely mustered the energy to flip himself over, only to crash on the mat like he'd been flung out a catapult after Dandy rolled out the way. I was so wrapped up in the moment that it didn't even register that they hadn't yet hit a dive, so when Dandy flipped Morgan to the floor and hit the ropes I got legitimately giddy. And of course Dandy's tope over the top hit like a fucking torpedo. Morgan's determination to put the figure-four on Dandy after Dandy won the second fall with it was always going to be his downfall and sometimes the most obvious payoffs are the best ones. Holy fuck this was tremendous. 

DUMP running riot

Dump Matsumoto v Yukari Ohmori (Hair v Hair) (AJW, 3/20/86)

Well this was...a lot! I'm not really sure what to do with it, honestly. I mean on the one hand it's not really my cup of tea, but on the other hand maybe it is? And then on the third hand it's absolutely one of the wildest spectacles in wrestling history. The whole thing was six shades of bonkers and some of it was sort of jaw-dropping. Dump's entrance with the shogun uniform was godly and then the madness started immediately, with some of the most satisfying *THUNK*s you'll ever hear off of microphone shots. She was absolutely clonking Ohmori with that thing and I've not got a clue what Dump was shouting in between strikes but it felt like people were perhaps aggravated by it ever so slightly. I think where I sometimes struggle with the Dump and Co stuff is the extent to which they run the interference spots. I've seen enough 80s AJW to know that no match is getting thrown out for some good old fashioned chicanery. Referees will routinely be flung about by the wrestlers and once or twice they'll end up getting stabbed by scissors as well, so it's not that I can't suspend my disbelief that the ref' hasn't stopped the match or whatever. I think it's more the frequency of the interference that wears me down. To be fair though, it's the kind of thing I imagine I'd get used to before long, which I guess is true of any tropes associated with a particular wrestling style. If nothing else this crowd lived and died on allll of it and it's hard not to appreciate wrestlers working an audience into such a frenzy that people are literally in tears. The mid-match pull apart lost me a little, but it was certainly frantic and Chigusa walloping Dump with a metal container was amazing. People lost their mind during every second of this in case you were wondering, and the pop for Chigusa and Ohmori hitting the double dropkick was one of the loudest you'll ever hear.

My favourite part of the match came right after the restart (or when they'd cleared everyone else out the ring), with Dump trying to look as amiable as possible for a disgusting psychopath in demonic face paint who'd just tried to choke the life out of someone with a chain, offering a handshake with her most beatific smile. People were shrieking themselves hoarse and pleading with Ohmori not to fall for it and then Dump just grabs her anyway. I never knew she'd hid the scissors in her singlet so I flipped when she produced the things from nowhere and stabbed Ohmori in the face. Honestly, I don't think Dump is really for me, but all things considered her performance here was one of the most extraordinary I've ever seen in a match. Obviously she was a complete maniac and the point that's often made about her being a cartoon villain come to life is true. She has no boundaries and while the constant interference grates a little, there's no doubt that it builds heat and anticipation for comeuppance, because you know that for as disgusting and terrifying as she is, she needs her cronies to bail her out time and again. And even if she DOESN'T need them we're never really given the chance to find out, because they almost always come to her rescue within seconds anyway. The beauty of her performance here, even more than the wanton savagery, was that brief stretch where she actually got to show some vulnerability, when the cronies were held at bay for a minute or two. The way she sold being in danger, how rocked she was by Ohmori finally stringing together some offence, her sell of Ohmori's piledriver, it was pretty phenomenal. I guess that's the double-edged sword -- I might not love watching all the bits of interference, but they make something like that all the more special, how they delay that gratification, really allowing the fleeting comeuppance to resonate. Dump going fully off the rails after that and literally stabbing Ohmori in the arm with scissors was fucking absurd. A pair of bastard scissors just hanging out her arm! And you know what, it tells you Dump was desperate enough to go that far.