The Voices Are Back. They Beg For IWE.

                          (Written by jom)

     I took a bit of an IWE break recently, mostly because I was just busy but also to refresh myself with other wrestling. Sadly, I have conditioned my brain too far. I couldn't help but watch and think "where are all the referee bumps?" or "why isn't there a 9ft tall cage around the ring?" I'm like a sick dog, ready to be taken behind the shed and sent to the angels. Until that happens though, I'll remain here, in my chamber of IWE. 

Rusher Kimura vs. Nick Bockwinkel (10/05/1979)

     Bock. Is. Back. Nick Bockwinkel returns to the IWE blog posts and once again delivers a really great match against one of the stalwarts of the company. Rusher feels like a great compliment to Kintaro Oki in that sense, similar in build and mobility but different enough in both the grounding and standing game. As usual, this match starts with nearly ten minutes of old school grappling, and I'm just in love with everything that happens. So much of the grappling portion is based around Kimura putting on side headscissors, and it works so well thanks to both Kimura's dogged determination and Bock's wily escape tactics. Watching them battle it out on the mat, I couldn't help but think that these kinds of matches feel almost similar to double acts from old vaudeville comedy, with each guy filling their own roles to work off one another. Rusher Kimura is the straight man, stiff and rigid in his work and entirely grounded. Nick Bockwinkel, meanwhile, is the banana man, flailing around wildly and crafting weird holds and escapes to get control over Kimura. It's a comparison that may not land all the way, but I hope my ramblings at least make some sort of sense. Everything beyond the grappling is great and exactly what you would ask for from the pairing. Bock is an incredible seller and Kimura is an incredible giver, and everything feels just so well done for the pairing. Truly, this is the perfect match that these two could give, down to the wonderful bullshit finish. Another strong non-brawling performance from Kimura, and another great match from Bock.

Strong Kobayashi vs. Lars Anderson (09/26/1973)

    As I've stated before, the usual Strong Kobayashi match format doesn't go entirely well with my sensibilities. I can enjoy a good bit of slow-burn grappling, but the slow crawl pacing of many of his matches is just a bit too slow for me. So you can imagine my excitement when I was skimming one of the early 70s compilation DVDs and stumbled across what appeared to be a Rusher Kimura-esque bloody brawl featuring Kobayashi! I have no interest in Kobayashi being Kimura, but I was just interested in seeing what Kobayashi would do in an environment like this one. And yeah, he's pretty good at this whole brawling thing. He's a little less active than Kimura is in his matches, more prone to just letting himself get beaten down, and his strikes definitely land with less oomph (especially the Hulk Hogan style chairshots), but he's certainly able to harness the spirit of a pissed off ace, throwing mean shots to the midsection and eventually taking out his frustrations on the referee. Lars Anderson, for his part, is fine enough too. He's pretty good at what he does here, which is mostly punching and kicking Kobayashi in the face, so he slots in nicely as a dollar store Blackjack Mulligan. I still anxiously await the Kobayashi match that'll blow me away, but this is a nice detour from snail-like matwork and an interesting look at another of Kobayashi's faces.

Rusher Kimura & Great Kusatsu vs. Danny Lynch & Butcher Lynch (01/07/1975)

    The quacking Humpty Dumpty duo returns. Last time we saw the Lynch Brothers, they gave us a very special Kimura bloody brawl featuring the very first instance of someone bleeding more than Kimura himself. Well, here they are once again, and they're game for another big Kimura bloody brawl, albeit one that's way more in line with the usual expectations. This match actually has one of Kimura's grosser bladejobs, as he spends the entire last half of the match with blood all over his head, arms, and torso. The Brothers Lynch are strong in control with their usual bizarre offense, complete with Danny Lynch throwing reach-around tummy punches and Butcher Lynch basically running across the ring to land uppercuts. They're great on defense too, bumping like lunatics around the ring for Kusatsu and Kimura, and Danny Lynch cranks it up even farther during Kimura's big comeback as he starts hitting backflips on every Kimura punch. It's selling that goes beyond the point of parody, but I love it very much. Certainly not one of the best tags from this era or matches from this genre, but a fun little time that makes me happy we have more Lynch Brothers footage.

Ashura Hara vs. Nelson Royal (10/05/1979)

    This is a pretty infamous match, less for the content and more for the ramifications. The long and short of it is that Nelson Royal's NWA Junior Heavyweight title defense wasn't considered authorized, and both NJPW and AJPW contacted the NWA to protest about the belt being defended in a non-NWA organization. This would result in Royal giving up the title and retiring, making this his last match (until he would un-retire four years later) and leading to the creation of another junior title because of more NWA in-fighting spawned by this. All of that is to say that most people don't remember this match for the match itself, which I think should be rectified. This is great! So much of Hara's late '79 run has been him proving his capabilities in as many facets of wrestling as possible, and this is his best showing when it comes to the slower minimalist grappling that dominated the Japan main event scene. Unlike the swift and complex matwork of Mile Zrno, Royal's brand of wrestling is concentrated on headlocks and sleeper holds, doing his best to trap Hara back into the chokes any time he would find a way to escape. Hara is great on defense, scrambling on the mat to escape Royal's clutches and selling Royal's knee strikes to the body like his appendix burst. The work is slow, but it's well-practiced, and the struggle is kept interesting enough to never lose me. It all builds to a great finishing stretch involving big suplexes and even bigger counters, the exact kind of ending this type of match deserves. I certainly wouldn't call this better than either of the Zrno singles matches, but it still stands out as a different kind of great technical match than what I'm used to seeing from Hara.

Mighty Inoue & Great Kusatsu vs. Mad Dog Vachon & Gypsy Joe (02/27/1977)

    Wild, wild fun. Honestly, I don't have a ton to say here. The biggest problem I have with these kinds of matches from a writer's perspective is that they leave little room for aggrandizing, and aggrandizing is, in a sense, my business. This tag wears its heart on its sleeve and spends no time at all attempting to apply subtext or hidden meaning or any of that other bullshit. What you see is what you get, and what you get is an unstoppable frenzy of Korakuen violence. These are four immensely talented brawlers being given the floor to brawl, and they do basically everything you'd want them to do in that situation. Gypsy Joe keeps finding assorted objects to attack people with, ranging from actual blades to big bins. Vachon repeatedly nearly kills fans with his crowd rampaging and gets into little fights with Inoue & Kusatsu multiple times. The home team throw their usual nasty strikes and get big comeback pops. It's textbook stuff from the four in question, and the execution is great all around. No need to try and think too hard about a match like this. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.