Search the Community

Decided to rewatch this and was startled at how tight and great everything before the finish was. While Kimura has the judo prowess, Rikidozan simply uses his strength to counter his attempted throws and submissions, easily shoving him away most of the time. Kimura's fear of pins is so refreshing-he immediately gets his shoulder up, kicks away and/or rolls to his stomach, no sign of even allowing a pin, let alone any counts. Kimura seemed to have a strong graps of selling-loved how he desperately fought off the headscissors and just recklessly threw himself out of them first chance he got. Rikidozan's offence may have been quite basic but there's nothing quite like hearing a gigantic thud made by someone bouncing off the mat, and I struggle to think of seeing anyone with better bodyslams than the ones Rikidozan executed here. There was some fun finisher teasing which the crowd bit on, especially when Rikidozan would go for his big Neck Chop, I totally bought into him making Kimura flinch. The finish somehow looked even more violent on another watch, it's basically a combination of Bas Rutten vs Funaki and Fujita vs Bob Sapp, you get the world's nastiest palm strikes combined with brutal soccer kicks, but even PRIDE didn't allow fighters to basically stomp someone on the back of the head. Of course the match is an amazing piece of historic footage, but the work rules too. ****1/4

Full card: https://www.wrestlingdata.com/index.php?befehl=shows&show=155790 The matches featured, in order are: World League semi-final: Rikidozan vs Mr Atomic (Clyde Steeves) 2/3 fall tag: Toyonobori & Kokichi Endo vs Lord Blears & Danny Plechas World league final: Rikidozan vs Jesus Ortega (Mighty Ursus/Bull Ortega) Without spoiling anything, the big takeaway from all this is that the Rikidozan era of Japanese wrestling involved very little selling from the Japanese side. The foreign talent was there to make them look good with very little being given back in return. Different time, different expectations.

Nowhere near as cool as it sounds. A two minute clip shows Antonio doing a feat of strength in which he pulls a full buss, a lot of crowd shots and a JIP with some fun brawling before a count-out finish. Worth a watch for the novelty of it at least.