These two always have a good slobberknocker in them and this was no different. They were staring a hole through each other before the thing even started and then Tenryu went about slapping all of the teeth out of Yatsu's mouth. From there Yatsu actually took most of the match, controlling with an airtight headlock and shutting Tenryu down almost immediately whenever a comeback looked on the cards. Yatsu made real use of the bulldog as well, a couple times just running Tenryu into the turnbuckles like he was a battering ram. Tenryu would try for the enziguri at points but Yatsu was having none of it and ducked out the way, jumping right on Tenryu after each miss. Of course Tenryu is inevitable and eventually the match spills to the floor, at which point Yatsu gets his head smashed into a guardrail or a ring post and then has a full table thrown at him. The blade job is a mere trickle but we appreciate the visual. When Tenryu does finally connect on those enziguris Yatsu takes a few nice face-first bumps, and I liked how when he seemed dead in the water he pulled out a desperation sunset flip to counter the powerbomb. In the end it wasn't enough, but the run to the finish was heated and maybe on another day Yatsu would've hit seven more bulldogs and walked out the champion. Then again, maybe not.
Genichiro Tenryu & Nobutaka Araya v Tatsumi Fujinami & Shiro Koshinaka (New Japan, 3/26/96) - GOOD
I don't think I need to say it again by this point, but there isn't a wrestler in all of history that I'd rather watch than Tenryu in a foul mood. When I first started watching wrestling from Japan I was all about the STORYTELLING~ and the layered psychology and how the wrestlers progressed both over the course of a match and then subsequent matches and then months and even years down the line. Like many of us getting into Japanese wrestling in the early-mid 2000s, it was still very much a 90s All Japan-dominated field, and the way that period of wrestling was talked about coloured my approach to watching and writing about wrestling going forward. And then the older I got the less I was interested in reading into the plot points and subtleties of every strike or move and what they all meant and more interested in the parts where people who didn't like each other just wanted to fight. I guess I've become a simple man in my old age and there's something about the simplicity of Tenryu punching someone in the cheek that just makes me smile. It feels good to know oneself even a little, you know? When he punched Koshinaka four times on the trot here it sounded like someone whacking a pock chop with a shovel and I found myself laughing at how unnecessary it was. A lot of what Tenryu did in this was unnecessary, really. He went straight for Akitoshi Saito before the bell, Saito standing minding his own business in his funky wee tracksuit only to get punched in the eye. A bit later Tenryu scooted out the ring unprompted and tried to throw Saito over the barricade, again for seemingly no reason. Koshinaka strayed too far towards the wrong corner at one point so Tenryu kicked him in the back of the head and Koshinaka never made that mistake again. The Tenryu/Fujinami exchanges were great and whet the whistle for their singles match at the Dome a month later. Seriously they just slapped the piss out each other and it was primal and amazing and this is the very best pro wrestling, let's be honest. Araya wasn't yet quite the surly menace he'd become so he got to play whipping boy whether he liked it or not. Koshinaka drove the point of his hip into the poor man's orbital bone several times, then Araya made an arse of a top rope hurricanrana so Tenryu came in, smashed Koshinaka to bits for a minute there, chopped his own partner on the chest and finally served him Koshinaka on a plate. "Go do it properly this time." I like that the crowd responded big when Araya hit that hurricanrana on the second attempt. It did not stop Fujinami from ripping his head off with a dragon sleeper, however.
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