10 Wrestling Matches Fans Can’t Agree On
8. Mitsuharu Misawa Vs. Kenta Kobashi - AJPW 26th Anniversary Show
Many - your writer included - perceive the series of singles matches between Kenta Kobashi and Mitsuharu Misawa as the absolute high watermark of professional wrestling.
Brutal masterclasses of untouchable psychology, every last move matters and informs what happens next. Absolutely nothing is deployed arbitrarily - and nothing is deployed without a bone-crunching, wince-inducing degree of realism. If you watch pro wrestling to suspend your disbelief, there is no better example of the art.
Some of the series' most ardent supporters, however, find the sheer amount of content in the 31/10/1998 iteration difficult to reconcile with what they are willing to accept as plausible. At 43:42 in length, it is already asking a lot of the audience. Given that the first ten minutes are almost entirely comprised of Kobashi, forever the lesser man of the two, unleashing a savage and (kayfabe) career-best onslaught, their suspicions are understandable. The abuse Misawa takes is inhuman.
But so too was Misawa himself. A stoic destroyer, his aura was built through his unprecedented perseverance. The final quarter of the match is a sickening exchange of dangerous neck-centric suplexes - each struck with such ferocity that it was almost impossible to believe that the two men could fight through them. But fight through them they did, in storyline and reality. Those suplexes looked hellish because they were hellish.
The psychology behind the finish wasn't just believable - it was self-evident.