Tenryu Should've Been a Cowboy, He Should've Learned to Rope and Ride, Wearing His Six-Shooter, Riding His Pony on a Cattle Drive

Genichiro Tenryu & Masao Orihara v The Great Kabuki & Koki Kitahara (WAR, 7/14/92) - EPIC

Well, start as you mean to go on, I guess. This was the main event of the WAR debut show and if you had any questions as to how things would be done in this particular Tenryu fed then they were answered pretty quickly. What a spectacular festival of violence this was. It almost felt like the best possible version of your classic WAR formula threaded through a dramatic double heat segment AWA tag. It had the extended beatdowns and the hope spots and cut-offs. It had the hot tags and even hotter finish. Only here the extended beatdowns were attempted homicides and the hope spots and cut-offs a hundred times more vicious. Here the hot tags led to someone's orbital bone getting demolished and the even hotter finish had someone getting dropped on their neck. The match starts with Tenryu and Kabuki pairing off, a couple guys who've worked together for years settling into this new home they've come to share. So Tenryu just chops him dead in the trachea inside twelve seconds. Just a totally inordinate and unnecessary response to what had been a simple shoulderblock. Kabuki is left rolling around clawing at his throat and I half expected the ref' to give him an emergency tracheotomy. And basically we're off to the races from that moment on. Orihara was tremendous in this and it felt like a true star-making performance. He gets absolutely smashed to bits. Him and Kitahara is a match-up that fucking ruled in SWS because Kitahara would just beat the brakes off him, but nothing like this. At one point Orihara did a kip-up and backflipped out of a top wrist lock and Kitahara obviously hated it because he made his life a total misery thereafter. There was one part where it looked like he was going to hit a piledriver, but then he muscled him up a bit further and hit a fucking Ganso Bomb! Kabuki never could backflip very well so he made the kid's life a misery too. I don't think I've ever seen Kabuki work stiffer than this. Everything he did was the most potatoey version of it possible, from his neckbreaker to his uppercuts under the chin, then he'd tag in Kitahara and Orihara would be kicked full force in the ear and neck. And what really made it was the way Orihara kept trying to fight back. He'd always try to throw punches or struggle to create some distance, although it usually only ended with him getting walloped even harder. It made everything feel uncooperative, like he did not want to be set upon like this and that he wasn't just there to take a beating and tag out, which at times almost made it an uneasy watch. The first hot tag was pretty much perfect as he fought back by kicking lumps out of Kitahara in return, then Tenryu came in taking heads off and from there everything went up another few notches. The back half of this had something wild or awesome or outright barbaric - sometimes all three at once - happening every few seconds. Orihara's second heat segment sees him get the shit kicked out of him even worse than before but he fights back by crushing Kabuki with two dives. Tenryu breaks a chair over Kabuki's back so later Kabuki superkicks him in the throat. The partner saves are just stupid brutal even for WAR as Kitahara ends up with his eyebrow split in half. All of the Tenryu/Kitahara sections towards the end were incredible and Tenryu trying to punt his spleen through the uprights was fucking unbelievable. It honest to god might've been the most hellish beating he's ever delivered to someone. I mean think of the SCOPE of that! Just amazing front to back. The WAR Main Event Tag is an acquired taste, but this was a classic of the genre and might be the best WAR match of them all.


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