10 Cult Wrestling Matches To See Before You Die
Notes from the underground.
There is too much pro wrestling. There is too much phenomenal pro wrestling.
Even putting aside WWE and AEW - companies that together will produce nine hours of weekly content from October - and NJPW, which presents lengthy and absolutely unmissable cards across the calendar year, there is too much pro wrestling. The remaining Impact diehards rave about the current product which, cruelly, is far more coherent than it ever was when it was relevant. ROH suffers from a very poor reputation, but those precious few in attendance are adamant that the product does not reflect it: the Briscoe Brothers are carrying the ancient Rock N' Roll Express to improbably good matches in 2019, for f*ck's sake. It's unreal. Even the most irrelevant and stagnant promotions are putting on very intriguing matches. It's impossible.
Oh, and Spain has recently announced itself as a wrestling hotbed, just to spoil us all further.
That said: access to pro wrestling's absurdly rich history is easy in 2019. The following is a list of tape-trader sensations and matches the traders once couldn't dream of getting their hands on.
It is impossible to watch every wrestling product in 2019, but this sh*t is mandatory viewing...
10. Kenta Kobashi & Tsuyoshi Kikuchi Vs. Doug Furnas & Dan Koffat - AJPW, May 25, 1992
This, it could be easily argued, is the perfect professional wrestling match - and almost certainly the loudest.
It's a match that grabs a weirdly timeless take and smashes it with a Burning Hammer in minutes. "Japanese crowds are quiet" or "They're hot...for a Japanese crowd" is this bizarre ignorance of the rhythms of a puro match - a misinterpretation of the initial, expectant, respectful hush before the storm of noise. But this is different: it's an instant cauldron set ablaze by a perfect dynamic perfectly worked.
It's a match pitting two spirited and distinct Japanese babyfaces - the smaller speedball Tsuyoshi Kikuchi and the formidable destroyer Kenta Kobashi - against two flexing, colossal American d*ckheads in Doug Furnas and Dan Koffat who, in borrowing three of the most killer double-team finishers of the era, use this heavy artillery in an attempt to crush the sprit of their opponents. That spirit, however, is indomitable, no matter how brutal the assault on Kikuchi's back. The selling, the fire, the timing, the lava atmosphere, the incandescent comeback - it's all total babyface perfection taken in by a cup final crowd.
The dynamic is the very premise on which puro was built - a cathartic backlash against the oppressor - fused with the perfected, advanced in-ring art form that it became.