[1980-09-25-NJPW-Bloody Fight Series] Tatsumi Fujinami vs Kengo Kimura

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Superstar Sleeze]

Parv gave this **?!?!?!? Nevermind, he can keep what he is smoking.

 

WWF Junior Heavyweight Champion Tatsumi Fujinami vs Kengo Kimura - NJPW 9/25/80

 

Outstanding grappling match early on. Proto-shoot style. Hell that's more shoot style than a lot of the Original UWF I was watching. I love how things we take for granted in pro wrestling like an arm drag where not given, they were earned in this match! Excellent! I really did not get a sense of a narrative in the match, which hurts it, but I thought this was incredibly engaging mat wrestling. I like how things got heated, but they get back down to business. Wrestling should have a lot more missed and BLOCKED moves. This match had that in spades! The finish run started with a crazy flurry of dropkicks. When they dropkicked each other, they went for it! Never did get to see Fujinami hit a Dragon suplex. The finish run feels like a pro wrestling match as they start going for wrestling moves and the typical tropes are realized. Kimura hits a fucking near-Ganso Bomb on Fujinami! Holy Shit! Dropkicks him off apron and then comes crashing down on him. Love it! Kimura rushes Fujinami head first and slams his head into the post busting him open. Great countout tease. Fujinami looks to hit his suicide dive, but he crashes and burns and busts his head open on the railing. I love the symmetry of all this. Fujinami nails a dropkick to Kimura perched on the top rope. Both men are out and they call the match a draw!

 

Great grappling early on, hot finish run, the finish itself was perfect. This was a match of equals throughout and ends that way. Just did not feel that overarching narrative that I love. Really strong outing. ****1/4

[Jetlag]

Insanely tight matwork in this contest. While there's not a lot of spectacular moves, they really make up for it by working every exchange with maximum resistance and caution. Really sinking into hammerlocks or yanking at the leg. I liked how Fujinami didn't lose his cool in this one when he got slapped. The rope running and strike exchanges feel really frantic and dangerous. A double dropkick spot actually comes across as cool!! It builds to an epic last third with awesome blood, dives, one of the most brutal piledrivers ever, great momentum swings etc. I know a long grappling heavy between two guys in black tights is tough to get into but this is potentially the greatest junior match of the 80s.

[aaeo_]

Got really into this match after Fujinami starts applying a bicep slicer, Kimura tries to stack Fujinami up and lift him up. He exerts a lot of energy but it doesn't really work. Then Kimura slaps him and Fujinami doesn't react but he does sneak in a left hand before getting double underhooks on Kimura. It was wonderful. I've started to appreciate those moments a lot, and the way they work as tiny subversions of a formula. I agree that the matwork on this is incredible. Kimura is a bit wooden, but Fujinami is just such an excellent grappler and a more attentive seller than anyone in NJPW at this time. I've liked every match of his that I've watched from this era. I didn't expect this to hit the fever pitch that it did, and so I was really awed by it. Fujinami's missed tope was amazing. The draw finish was completely earned.

[Mr JMML]

Talking about escalation, the first few minutes were full of very good technical wrestling, what Fujinami usually brings to the table in his matches but there’s always the sense that this is about to get heated and heated exchanges we had, the entirety of the final stretch is full of big moves that both of them hit to put their opponent down, I felt like the match ending sequence was incredibly ironic, it’s the most fitting finish for something like that, Tatsumi Fujinami was great in this one, he has been great in every match I covered, there are many wrestlers with a high volume of great matches without being the best wrestler in those matches, Fujinami isn’t one of them, Fujinami makes every great match he has had and that’s something to consider in his Greatest Wrestler Ever case, everything I’ve covered from 1978 to 1980 proves it but let’s see how his career turned out, for now, he deserves a spot among the greatest to ever do it.

The match is amazing as a technical match turned brawl, I love how comfortable Fujinami feels in both scenarios, the brawling benefited Kengo Kimura’s style otherwise he wouldn’t have a chance against the wrestling wizard that Fujinami is and he took advantage of the situation making the match as difficult as possible for Tatsumi Fujinami, it’s a star-making performance by Kengo Kimura, he felt like a real threat to his opponent throughout the match, so much so that it ended in a double knockout draw and somehow that ending was inmensely satisfying, it wasn’t a problem for me, if two people go as hard as they did I feel like a double knockout is the only possible ending, the people at ringside had to helped them to get up afterwards.

I’d recommend this match to everyone who liked the previous one, I feel like this match it’s wilder than the last one although less technically sound.

[SAMS]

1980-09-25
NJPW
Kengo Kimura (c) vs. Tatsumi Fujinami
NWA International Junior Heavyweight Title Match
Hiroshima Prefectural Gymnasium, Hiroshima, Japan
Card
★★★★

Going in I didn’t realise that it was in fact Kimura who was the champion and the title at stake was the NWA junior heavyweight title, not the WWF one. Kimura has been so absent from the NJPW footage (at least in terms of what I’ve watched) that I had to double check he wasn’t an incoming IWE guy like Ashura Hara, as he appears most prominently in my memory from tags in that promotion, but no he was a New Japan regular. Either way, he apparently defeated Bret Hart recently for the vacant title.
There were large portions of the first half that I wasn’t in love with, but the action was so frenetic that it never dragged. Fujinami came in with an injured hand and it took Kimura until the 20th minute to even attempt to attack it, after which Fujinami immediately threw a stiff right hander to Kimura’s mid-section and then blew off the work for the rest of the match. However, this was such an interesting match to watch and believe that it is truly significant. It came across decidedly different to what NJPW had presented up to this point. It wasn’t a stark departure, but stylistically it felt off compared to other New Japan matches, specifically the Fujinami matches. There was far more struggle and far less token working of holds beyond a few headscissor spots. There was slight chippiness to start before the competitive juices overflowed at the finish. After a light simmer for ten minutes or so we had a frantic burst as one stiff kick brought about a retaliatory receipt and then both guys were flailing at each other in a vicious kick exchange. 
Both men displayed some character too, and clearly they were showing off how they had their opponent well scouted. The best example being when an early Dragon Suplex attempt from Fujinami elicited a naughty finger wag from his Kimura.
The finishing stretch really tied this up nicely, as they brought the energy up to 10, and at one point they had to give up using the hard camera as too many in the audience were standing up and blocking the action. Fujinami crashed and burned hard on a dive through the ropes and Kimura was busted open from the ring post. Back in the ring both were bleeding and thoroughly exhausted. Kimura made a final desperate attempt, climbing the ropes, however Fujinami caught him with a dropkick and he was down. The problem was Fujinami had nothing left either. Both men lay prone on the mat as the referee counted them both out for the double KO finish. I don’t really know where they go from here, but it feels like they elevated Kimura with this match. Fujinami felt like the better man, but Kimura hung with him every step of the way and the double KO finish put over him really strongly. I will have to wait and see how this progresses.