10 Introductory Matches To The Unrivalled Art Of Japanese Wrestling
If you like Shinsuke, you'll love these.
The art of Puroresu has gained traction in the West in recent years, not least through the meteoric rise of new NXT champion Shinsuke Nakamura.
All Japan Pro Wrestling became the promotion of choice for hardcore tape-trading fans in the nineties; the venerable Wrestling Observer Newsletter to this day has reserved the majority of its five-star ratings for the promotion, the epic and brutal matches presented by which are widely considered high-water marks of the wrestling art.
When the majority of its talent splintered off to form Pro Wrestling NOAH in protest at Motoko Baba's intentions for the company following her husband and owner Giant Baba's death, the Observer, after 2005, wouldn't award the fabled rating to a Japanese match for over seven years.
Puroresu wasn't in great health by the turn of the millennium. The All Japan warriors had been battered - tragically, in one case - by the King's Road style they innovated. New Japan Pro Wrestling had embarked on a series of embarrassing MMA misadventures, leaving their critical reputation in tatters.
Happily, the NJPW triumvirate of Hiroshi Tanahashi, Nakamura and Kazuchika Okada have since restored it, propelling NJPW into a golden age in the process.
Puroresu has its own distinct psychology, and values in-ring storytelling and realism over frivolity and bombast. It is for the patient, attentive and the cerebral - but certainly not for the faint of heart...
10. Shinsuke Nakamura Vs. Kazushi Sakuraba - NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 7
The memories of New Japan's awkward flirtation with MMA a few years' prior mitigated expectations for this match, which pitted part-time wrestler and full-time shoot fighting hard-case Kazushi Sakuraba against Shinsuke Nakamura, full-time pro wrestler with some MMA experience.
The two men however had sufficient experience in both disciplines to carve out a mesmerising fusion of them.
Unlike the majority of Puro bouts, which are escalated tentatively in order to sell the threat of both men and the grandiosity of the occasion, after scene-setting displays of ground and pound and stand-up, the frenetic pace and the MMA stylings engender an environment in which a knockout or submission could end it at any time.
Astutely timed at 11:12 - suspension of disbelief would have been compromised, given the worked shoot approach, had it dragged on any longer - the match was almost too realistic. Sakuraba, after a picture-perfect suplex, nails Nakamura with a knee to the face which knocks him out cold.
The amalgam was beautifully crystallised during the match's best spot, which saw submission specialist Sakuraba catch Nakamura's trailing leg and reverse his Boma Ye into an arm-bar.
The two men hugged in the post-match following Nakamura's win in a fitting display of sportsmanship.