The wrestling and the romance! Wrestling WITH the romance??? I'll leave that up to you.
Exactly what you want in your 8-minute WAR opener. Is Ohara underrated? For a guy who's supposed to be muck he has a bunch of good matches and a couple absolute scorchers. This wasn't a scorcher but it was a super fun Ohara performance, one you can't simply pass off as a by-product of being in there with Hashimoto or Tenryu. In those matches he was fighting from underneath against lumpy WAR bastards, or later in the year against Hashimoto. I guess you could call that underdog Ohara. Yasuraoka was a WAR junior heavyweight mainstay and the sort of guy you'd see on a tape list against Ultimo Dragon or Lionheart Chris Jericho and that was the match you'd buy the tape for without realising the Ashura Hara v Haku match was the REAL reason you'd want to fork out some cheddar. He was 22 here and probably hadn't won a match yet. So Ohara got to work dominant for a change and by christ did he make the most of it. Yasuraoka slaps him in the face at the start and it sends Ohara into a frenzy. Yasuraoka's mullet is almost a ponytailed version of whatever Kensuke Sasaki was doing at the time so perhaps the mauling put upon him was warranted even without the slap. Ohara punches him directly in the throat and shreds him with A+ chops, even graded on the WAR scale (which is like A+++ for every other promotion at the time). Ohara whips him into the corner and Yasuraoka can't even put one foot in front of the other and goes tumbling like a toddler flying out of a playground slide. He gives the poor lad a front suplex across the top rope and Yasuraoka ends up on the floor, then maybe as a show of contrition Ohara holds the ropes open so Yasuraoka can climb back in. Yasuraoka trapping Ohara's leg in the ropes and going after the knee was a great little transition and I loved how Ohara's SURLINESS allowed him to just power out of a half crab. Ohara responds with THE bastard of all piledrivers and covers Yasuraoka with one foot on the chest. That he put this thing to bed by showing Yasuraoka how to actually apply a half crab was quite fitting. This was perfect WAR.
Samson Fuyuki v King Curtis Iaukea Jr.
These two lumpy gents get down to brass tacks right away as Iaukea charges up the aisle to meet Fuyuki at the curtain and throw him into a stack of chairs. You're thinking - understandably - that this is going to be a fun contest but unfortunately that doesn't really materialise. For this much beef in a Tenryu fed they never did much clonking and most of the match was spent sitting in basic holds. Fuyuki does hit one great shoulder tackle and the lariat at the end looked like one Iaukea maybe didn't expect to be thrown at his neck like that.
Masao Orihara v Kengo Kimura
This was more of a slow burner, but as always with WAR v New Japan/Heisei Ishingun everything had that underlying malice to it that we all hope for. Kimura was sort of dismissive of Orihara early, gave him a few cheapshots out of rope breaks, and it's a wonder Orihara never retaliated. Orihara is one of those guys who always seems angry. He's not short enough for it to pass for Napoleon Syndrome but that much testosterone in a bigger body and he might've been a real menace to society. Either way he waited for his moment and eventually crushed Kimura with a senton to the floor, which looked killer from the handheld camera angle on the other side of the ring. He tried to tombstone Kimura at one point and Kimura flatly refused, wriggled free and upkicked Orihara from his back. Then Orihara gave him a full blown Ganso Bomb on the top of his head and you understand why Kimura did not want to be piledriven by that man. After all, Orihara is someone who actively chose to be bald despite having a fully functioning hairline, joining the likes of Low Ki and Kazunari Murakami on that particular list of psychopaths. It's hard to blame Kimura. The running knee to the face at the end was befitting the environs of WAR.
El Samurai v Ultimo Dragon
These two have shockingly good chemistry together. I think you could make a decent argument that Samurai is Ultimo's second best opponent behind Casas, though we have established many times over the decade-plus in which I have been writing words on this nonsense of a blog that I am not the biggest Ultimo Dragon fan you're likely to encounter. Maybe it's the WAR influence (it's probably the WAR influence) but their matches together were always tetchy, and if Ultimo worked with an edge like this more often he might've been more palatable. This wasn't Ohtani v Orihara as far as New Japan v WAR junior heavyweight superclassics go but it did the trick. It started with some okay grappling and they'd needle in some striking, pretty much bypassing the mutual respect part of the match and establishing that they didn't quite like each other even if they weren't stabbing each other in the head with scissors or whatever. Ultimo threw some mean kicks to the spine then literally walked over Samurai's prone body, which he paid dearly for later when Samurai powerbombed him on the floor. It didn't feel like a 17-minute match and the finishing stretch had some nice heat, even if it was a wee bit roll-up heavy for a second there.
John Tenta & King Haku v Dino Ventura & Yoshiro Ito
This had an interesting Tenta/Haku dynamic, which made a match that already felt longer than it was feel slightly less long than it might've done without it. Tenta is in full Earthquake gear and comes out to his WWF music, while Haku gets no music. Was Haku still even with the WWF at this point? Did they have a lower card feud going on Superstars or something? Either way they don't much like each other and it leads to a few amusing bits of infighting. One of them will tag in without the other's permission and they'll almost come to blows, like when Earthquake raised his arms wide in the corner to show that he was allowing for a clean break, so Haku just reached up and politely tagged himself in. They get into a shoving contest a couple times, then as the match goes on they start working together, even try a double team where Haku holds Ventura so Tenta can clobber him, and naturally Ventura moves and Haku gets bowled to the floor. I don't have a clue who Dino Ventura is and initially I wondered if it wasn't actually Dino Bravo trying to rebrand, but it turns out Bravo had been whacked by the mob a couple months prior so I guess you can write your own WITSEC joke if you want to. He wasn't the worst wrestler on the card, at least. Prolly. Haku threw some nice chops and headbutts, Tenta had some big stomps, a cool headbutt to the sternum and a really nice elbow drop. Ito isn't really a lumpy boy nor is he a roided up block boy but he had one or two shoulder blocks that landed with a smack. This was a wrestling match that happened.
Takashi Ishikawa & Super Strong Machine v The Great Kabuki & Akitoshi Saito
Obviously this was good, in that obvious way that a match like this will be good. Lots of clubbering, lots of impact, lots of ill will, everyone throwing killer strikes, exactly what you want in your WAR v New Japan. Both sides got a chance to run a semi-extended beatdown in the body of the match, Kabuki and Saito first beating on Ishikawa followed by Ishikawa and Strong Machine isolating Saito. So essentially you're giving these guys four or five minutes to thump the daylights out of someone and I'm expected not to love it? Saito had some great kicks, really rotating through the hips and whomping guys in the sternum, ditching the top half of his gi in a way that suggested the crowbars were about to fly. Ishikawa's downward lariats always rule, Strong Machine was throwing big headbutts and had a killer one off the top while Ishikawa held Kabuki in place, and of course Kabuki fucking ruled with the uppercuts and thrust kicks. A couple of the kicks were particularly amazing here as he was almost off balance throwing them, the best one coming just as Ishikawa was stepping through the ropes. I'll take 12 minutes of these four hitting each other over most things these days.
Genichiro Tenryu & Koki Kitahara v Kuniaki Kobayashi & Masashi Aoyagi
I'd seen this before, several moons back now. It was good then and naturally it's good now. Kitahara and Kobayashi had a great little violent match on a WAR card a couple months prior to this and they pick up where they left off here. Right at the beginning Aoyagi and Kobayashi just mug Koki and drag him to the floor. Crowd cheers this because for whatever reason EVERYBODY hates Kitahara. When Kitahara throws a single kick in return they boo him. Eventually he seems to realise he'll be booed no matter what and goes "fuck it, I'll just spit on people instead." And so he spits on people and cares not a single shit about this crowd. There's a great moment late on where he breaks up a pin attempt by casually kicking Kobayashi in the eye with the toe of his boot, and I always love that as a way to break a pin attempt. Aoyagi got to look really strong here (kayfabe-wise), giving Kitahara nothing at points and once or twice he even shuts Tenryu down completely with kicks. Tenryu is fairly low key and doesn't REALLY let loose, but he will still haul off and chop you to shreds and he does that several times. His selling for everything Aoyagi and Kobayashi throw at him is pretty much immaculate as well. I genuinely bought him going down to a Kobayashi cross body, which is ridiculous and awesome at the same time.
Ashura Hara v Shiro Koshinaka
I may have mentioned it before but WAR v New Japan truly was the best. This was more or less exactly what you'd want out of these two, if what YOU want out of these two is the same as what *I* want out of these two. It's interesting to see how WAR took the All Japan strike exchange and missed move sequences of the time and put their own potatoey spin on them. Rather than trading forearms these two just clonked each other with headbutts. Rather than blocking and reversing and countering suplexes that landed them on their neck, this ended with Koshinaka jumping hip-first into Hara's face. Some of the best parts of WAR matches are when one guy will do something unnecessarily nasty at a point where nobody would do shit like that anywhere else. There was one such part in this where Hara kicked out of something and sat up groggily so Koshinaka threw a headbutt to the back of his head. Koshinaka was stomping Hara in the corner, so Hara blocked one of those stomps by grabbing Koshinaka's leg, then stood up, leg still in hand, and clotheslined him directly in the face. For all the violence though, the match had a nice story as well. Koshinaka was confident early and other than being stupid enough to go headbutt for headbutt with Ashura Hara, you felt that confidence was warranted. Then as it went on Hara started picking up steam, started hitting harder, and big time New Japan guy Koshinaka began looking very much the underdog. Hara hit peak surliness when Koshinaka was crawling around in a daze and Hara was kicking him repeatedly in the eye. The best pro wrestling.
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