NJPW POWER STRUGGLE 2016

New Japan Pro Wrestling
Power Struggle
Prefectural Gymnasium, Osaka
5th November 2016

About a week ago here in my home country of the United Kingdom (not merely England) there was a taping of another attempt at rebooting the old ITV wrestling show known to most as World of Sport (though of course World of Sport was the name of a sports show of which wrestling was one of many delightful cultural strands alongside football, hockey, lacrosse, motorsport, and weird stunts like jumping over barrels. For some reason World of Sport has become synonymous with the wrestling alone). The previous attempt I sort of remember in the early part of the previous decade, where ITV2 (to my overseas readers, ITV is one of the original 5 channels UK viewers received on the basic package of the analogue era. It is mostly entirely filled to the brim with steaming hot piss. ITV2 is even worse) took over the FWA or maybe IWA:UK promotion, one of the ones that had Alex Shane and that Hammerlock guy who trained Devitt, and tried to tack on the old aesthetics of rounds and slightly camp grappling to the modern style of jumping and flipping and leaping. Needless to say it was a miserable failure on several levels (bored commentator roped in from real sports duty, set that looked like a bouncy castle, tiny joke ring) and cancelled so quickly that I can barely find trace of its existence online to the point where I feel I may have dreamed it.

The way we were

Regardless of the success of the new show (and I wish it well) the producers of the new show have drawn a firm line in the sand that I applaud. Here is someone on reddit who wrote out as a short one-act play of an interaction that they saw as a problem that is, to my mind, a big plus:

Masakatsu Funaki vs. Tatsuo Nakano and life.

So last month a project was vaunted in which people would write articles about one wrestling match which they felt somehow summed up life and meaning within its parameters, the results of which would be collated somehow and sold. This created a bit of a ruck in some quarters of the online content provision quarters, with some feeling that recompense automatically be granted to anyone who stumps up the requisite insight and wordcount.

What those moaners did not grasp is that this project was to benefit the great Terry Brunk, known to you and I as wrestling (I hesitate to use this word sometimes but it is applicable) legend Sabu. This man who has undoubtedly sacrificed everything in his body for our amusement/bemusement has hit hard times and it was to be our way of paying back.

As things are wont, the project went south. Nonetheless, I wrote an article I think I may as well share. If you'd like to donate something, anything, to Sabu, then follow this link.

And without further ado...

MASAKATSU FUNAKI vs. TATSUO NAKANO
UWF Fighting Square Hakata, Fukuoka
July 1989
watch

Where carefully-cultivated fakeness exists and overwhelms, the insertion of violent reality (or the illusion of said) is the most thrilling thing. In wrestling, The Montreal Screwjob, CM Punk and his pipebomb, or Andy Kaufman getting slapped across the chops by Jerry Lawler may spring to mind.