Mariko Yoshida & Aja Kong v Ayako Hamada & AKINO (ARSION, 2/18/00)
How many teams have a better balance of grace and brutality than Yoshida and Aja? A team that can beat you in a dozen different ways, from ripping your arm off to caving your face in, choking you to the point of unconsciousness, suplexing you through the mat, even several combinations of those things. Hamada and AKINO had to bring all the fire and underdog fury they could and even then it might not be enough. They tried a few different strategies, each almost in response to whatever the situation presented them. They tried to take Aja's arm out briefly but it never stuck, although the double stomp off the top to Aja's extended arm was sick. They tried to isolate Yoshida but Aja was a menace and Yoshida isn't the easiest to keep a hold of anyway. What they had was heart and if they were going down then they weren't going down without a fight. Yoshida and AKINO had a stunning match a year earlier where Yoshida was as ferocious as she'd ever been and at times it felt like all AKINO could do was delay the inevitable. She's a year more experienced here, a year more assured, and she wasn't for giving any quarter in that opening exchange with the Spider Queen. Hamada was pretty spectacular by this point in her career, everything she did full of snap and she also had a couple stellar exchanges with Yoshida. The dynamic with Kong is great as well as Aja will just try and brutalise her while Hamada refuses to step back. Towards the end Hamada and AKINO create another strategic opening and try to submit Yoshida with the ankle lock, Yoshida doing what she did better than anyone and scrambling to the ropes right as you think she's about to tap. She sells that the ankle is never quite right in those closing minutes, sometimes with a subtle stumble to remind you. The Yoshida/AKINO pairing takes centre stage towards the end, with AKINO frantically going for that ankle lock again while Yoshida twists the poor lass into all sorts of hideous shapes. But before that was the moment of the match, when AKINO used a kneeling Hamada as a launch pad to hurl herself at Aja who was atop the turnbuckles, only for Aja to fucking destroy her with a slap in mid-air.
Black Terry v Mr Condor (Zona 23, 12/5/21)
You can never really be sure about such statements, but this at least FEELS like it has to be the best blood-soaked fist fight between two men in their 60s in a dusty junkyard you'll ever see. I don't have a clue about the backstory here and I haven't seen a Black Terry match in about eight years. I assume he and Condor hate each other to death because they're immediately punching each other in the face and the camera is almost uncomfortably close. You can see the blows land and you see both of them grimace and grit teeth with every blow. When my grandfather was in his 60s he worked nightshift driving busses. One night a couple of scumbags decided to rob the depot and beat the shit out of my grandfather in the process. He grew up in the same mining town I grew up in, only he actually worked those mines back when they still existed. He was a hardy old fool, though not really a fighter. As a kid it never even occurred to me that a man in his 60s would do anything in a fight with two 20-somethings with pipes and baseball bats OTHER than get the shit kicked out of himself. Most men half his age wouldn't win that fight. And yet I watch this and can't help but figure Black Terry would've dragged those two men kicking and screaming to a point of deep regret. Condor absolutely would've thrown one of them through a bus window. And here they were dishing that out on each other. Two pensioners probably don't need to be putting themselves through this but if you're a sicko it's hard to complain when someone catches it on film. Some of the shots were brutal, the sound almost shocking. Terry was bleeding profusely after a few minutes and Condor was walloping chairs off his head and ramming him face first into the hood of a car with 300,000 miles on the clock ready for demolition. Condor had cut Terry open in the first place by stabbing him in the head with a broken beer bottle and of course the cameraman was just about close enough for us to see the skin split. Right before it the camera panned out to a view of the crowd so we didn't see Condor actually smash the bottle, but we did hear it and the sound made me actively sit up. When he smashed another one later in response to being punched several times I half expected him to legitimately slash Terry. And then Terry picked up and smashed a bottle of his own, both of them at a standstill with broken bottle in hand, and I couldn't help but laugh at what I was watching. It was damn near maniacal, that laugh. When they both dropped the bottles and went back to the pugilistic art of cracking each other with fists you thought maybe a bridge of respect had been built, and that from there on out they'd go at it clean, yet every bit as messy as two guys punching each other in the eye would be. Then Condor picked up a fucking car windshield and smashed the thing over Terry's head and I guess making assumptions is a fool's game.
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