10 Best Wrestling PPVs Of 2019
4. NJPW G1 Climax Day 3
Virtually every day of the 2019 G1 Climax - wrestling's greatest ever tournament, until the next G1 Climax - yielded awesome, over, next-level pro wrestling action with the most important of stakes and the most motivated of elite-class performers.
Consider this a pick 'em of sorts.
Every New Japan fan will likely hold a different night closer to their hearts. Other nights featured subjectively and objectively better matches, but Day 3 intersected all that was great about the best time of the year to be a wrestling fan.
Will Ospreay and SANADA was just a ridiculously precise display of athletic oneupmanship, of the sort that informs so much wrestling storytelling nowadays that that the extraordinary can veer, somehow, into the ordinary. This was different. This was too impressive. Kazuchika Okada and Zack Sabre, Jr. wrestled the sort of match even Okada's few detractors could not deny: it was as tight at, 12:05, as it was expertly worked. In a year in which his excellence also felt familiar, at times, this was Okada in fat-free undisputed Best In The World form. Kota Ibushi took that as a challenge and surpassed him by weaving the shoot ankle injury he had no physical right working through into a gripping masterpiece of babyface sympathy opposite EVIL.
KENTA Vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi stood in awesome contrast to the rest of the show: a towering d*ckhead performance on KENTA's part, when Tanahashi clutched his leg to block the PK, it got the blood pumping for the most unadulterated wrestling thrill of get-f*cked babyface vengeance.