Section 1- Results
Dragon Gate: Among the notable King of Gate round 1 results on Sunday were Gamma over CIMA, Fujii over Magnitude, Mochizuki pinning Yokosuka, and Yoshino beating Horiguchi after a botched assist from Ryo Saito. Seeds were planted for Mochizuki to leave M2K, and all signs point to him winning the tournament.
New Japan: Tanahashi made it through another coin-toss title defense, beating Nakamura on Sunday. Both the heavyweight and junior tag champs retained as well. New Japan seems to have acquitted itself well attendance-wise in the big Aichi Prefectural Gym venue.
NOAH: Misawa won the GHC title for the third time, pinning Marufuji after numerous big moves were exchanged between them. Sugiura & Kanemaru retained the junior tag titles. Kobashi appeared to confirm that he will return to the ring next year. Attendance and ticket sales numbers are hard to come by as usual but it was far from a legit sell-out.
Section 2- News
1/4/07 Dome: The full card was announced, and each match is interpromotional. There are some tags with co-promotional teams, including a Voodoo Murders reunion with Bernard rejoining his old partners and a 10-man junior tag. With Tanahashi moving on to defend against Taiyo Kea, Nakamura will be the one to go up against Kawada. The TenKoji vs Chono/Mutoh tag is currently on top of the card.
Dragon Gate: The round 2 matchups take place this weekend. They are Fujii vs Dick Togo, Mochizuki vs Doi, Gamma vs BB Hulk and Ryo Saito vs Yoshino.
NOAH: Misawa’s first defense will be against Morishima on the 1/21 Budokan show. Morishima got the pin on Sano in the tag title match, squashed Go on Sunday’s show, and perhaps most importantly he wants to avenge the intense loss to Misawa in March. SUWA announced that he will retire in 2007, and I would expect that he will move to running the NOAH dojo full-time. The Briscoes will be on the next tour.
Section 3- Here be links
I don’t even want to touch this, but I’ll go on record as saying that it can’t point to anything good for Antonio Inoki to be representing New Japan.
Section 4- Trying to relive glory days
On October 8, 2001,, New Japan ran the Tokyo Dome and the main event was an interpromotional tag match with old-guard veterans against younger stars. Sound familiar?
On June 8, 1990, Mitsuharu Misawa headlined a show at the Tokyo Nippon Budokan against a chunky, black-wearing Japanese wrestler whose main finisher was the backdrop suplex. The theme of the match was the promotion’s ace against its top rising heavyweight. Sound familiar?
In the case of 10/8/01, the match was Mutoh & Hase versus Akiyama & Nagata. It was the first (and only?) time where All Japan, New Japan and NOAH were all represented in a match. It was two big ‘90s stars against two of the probable aces of the ‘00s. Akiyama came in as GHC champ, Mutoh was holding the Triple Crown, and Nagata had beaten Mutoh two months prior in the G-1 final. Though the follow-up Dome main event of Akiyama vs Nagata was marred by Nagata’s brutal loss to Cro Cop, at the time it came off well and did reasonably good at the gate. Nagata went on to a good IWGP reign, while Akiyama remained the most successful of NOAH’s younger stars until the fateful Rikio push last year.
In the case of 1/4/07, there isn’t nearly as much ‘future potential’ involved. Kojima has a long, drain-the-well-of-challengers Triple Crown reign and a Champions Carnival win in his pocket. Tenzan has won the IWGP title and the G-1 Climax multiple times. Both are 16 year veterans and neither has turned out to be the savior for their respective promotions. Mutoh & Chono, meanwhile, don’t have a heck of a lot more rub to give. They take ‘on their last legs’ to its most absurdly literal end. And what’s more, this matchup of the 1997 New Japan Tag League winners against the 2001 Tag League winners is technically interpromotional but is in reality 100% Shin Nihon. My point, I suppose, is that I can’t see a good reason to use the Tokyo Dome unless you can get something better than this lined up in advance.
Meanwhile, NOAH is having enough problems trying to fill the Budokan. The lack of Kobashi and some risky title matches have made this NOAH’s worst year since 2001, which coincidentally enough also had Kobashi leaving and an Akiyama title win. Now it seems as if NOAH is doing its best to bring back memories of the halcyon days of yore, when Jumbo was carrying everything and everyone around him to great matches and the Four Corners of Heaven raised the bar for all time. NOAH pushed Marufuji vs Misawa as the next Misawa vs Jumbo, though the match was worked far more like Marufuji vs KENTA than anything the J-man was ever tied to. Funny thing, the match didn’t draw as well or come across as an affair for the ages.
Misawa vs Morishima is almost like an inversion of Jumbo vs Misawa. There, the smaller, younger wrestler was using cutting-edge moves against the simple, stodgy, pudgy veteran. Here, the pudgy young gun uses a mix of Jumbo, Terry Gordy and Shiro Koshinaka against the veteran who used a top-rope high-angle modified side slam to win the belt. Morishima gives me hope for the future of NOAH’s main event scene, with his hard work and non-overwrought moveset. He better understands how to get the crowd excited than his counterpart Rikio, and unlike Akiyama he has high-end standing strikes (which are crucial for most Japanese headliners). If they can do a more expanded version of their first match and have Morishima get a convincing win, that would be a very big step forward after a year of step backs. If Misawa wins because it “isn’t Morishima’s time yet”, well, I’ll probably be doing more columns about old matches next year.
