10 Wrestling Moments That Literally Made You Jump
4. Hiroshi Tanahashi Walks Through The Storm
Kota Ibushi is a maverick who looks up to Hiroshi Tanahashi so much that he literally deifies him, and yet, he works an absurdly stiff and what appears to be a reckless style. If it were as dangerous as Ibushi makes it look, like the master he is, he wouldn't be working in 2020, much less to his incredible level.
Regardless, his style is one that Tanahashi has bemoaned. Tanahashi loathes the over-committed striking inherent to strong style because he considers it family unfriendly fare that can only result in disaster.
At once a disciple and a heathen, Ibushi, in an incredible, all-time great match, demonstrated precisely why Tanahashi hates that style by all but annihilating him with it. In the 2018 G1 Climax final, he twice dropped Tana on his head with brutal (and in this context, transgressive) signatures. In a moment of incandescent brilliance all the more life-affirming, with a deeper understanding of the man and his philosophy, Tanahashi absorbed a series of skull-rattling forearms launched by Ibushi in eerie, dead-behind-the-eyes mode.
Tanahashi walked through the storm, driven to no-sell it by his very make-up, practically glowing with fire in the middle of the Budokan.
The greatest fire-up spot ever, a moment that made you want to run through a brick wall, much less jump, it is quintessentially Tana that he elicited this feeling in the space between moves.