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Kakutogi Road Presents: 1992 Shoot Wrestling Year in Review
*Editor’s note: Michael Betz’s comments will be preceded by their initials. *
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ML: 1992 was perhaps the best year to be a shoot wrestler. You presumably were paid pretty well to perform about once a month rather than the dozen or more times wrestlers worked in NJPW, AJPW, or especially AJW. Very few people knew about Shooto, so there was no real pressure to actually shoot, as any chicanery they came up with was going to look way more realistic than a trancing voodoo man sporting a smoking skull causing one of the actual performers in the match to lose via falling of the apron, convulsing on the floor trying to decide whether to sell his stomach or his beloved stolen wristband that led to the curse, until he’s wheeled to the back, where he proceeds to vomit green gunk on the medical attendants.
Pretty much all of the shows seemed like big events because there were so few of them, and while attendance may not have been that great when you stopped to consider that the 2,000 plus they drew for the smaller shows were all the tickets they were selling for the entire month, the stars were increasingly developing that larger-than-life combat icon status that had previously largely been reserved for boxers. Though PWFG was the most modest and conservative of the promotions, they managed to be the only promotion to run a card in the USA, or anywhere outside of Japan for that matter, as well as the only one to run the Tokyo Dome, a feat no one would have expected from them, especially when it was predictably Akira Maeda headlining and Nobuhiko Takada in the semifinal on the lone Dome show U.W.F managed on 11/29/89.
1991 was largely defined by the three new promotions just trying to get organized, figure out what their roster would be, and who they could run out against the promotion leader. With every promotion needing new stars, the younger wrestlers from the U.W.F. era such as Minoru Suzuki & Kiyoshi Tamura began to come to prominence, but it was in 1992 that we really began to understand what gems the new promotions had unearthed. In fact, three of the four best workers- Volk Han, Hiromitsu Kanehara, and Masakazu Maeda - debuted in December 1991. These fighters, and other new faces, really changed how the sport was evolving.
Han truly revolutionized the complexion of the submission game. Before him, submissions, which were largely cobbled together from a mix of practical judo training and impractical pro wrestling fantasies, mostly seemed little more than a very predictable means to the end. Someone would grab a crab, and either the fight would impractically end, or the opponent would eventually grab a rope. I’m using the worst possible scenario, but even in the best cases, the submissions were really a liability in trying to win over the pro wrestling crowd because the big payoff was so visually lacking in comparison to what they were used to (unless they still loved Pedro Morales). It wasn’t so much that Han introduced a series of new submissions from his practical sambo training, and his own wild imagination, although that was the case, but rather that he was constantly a threat because he would chain submissions together, endlessly adjusting and using the opponent’s position and offensive attacks against them. Tamura’s rise to prominence had some parallels, as what he lacked in inventive submissions, he more than made up for by being the first performer in the genre to overwhelm his opponent through grappling speed (we’d seen Sayama beat people through speed and athleticism, but in the standing game). Both had styles based on being one step ahead of the opposition that were great to watch, with Han changing the position through a new submission, while Tamura beat the opponent to the position then applied the submission.
Kanehara & Masakazu Maeda offered a “new” brand of cardio based reality. There was nothing revolutionary about what they were doing if you’ve ever watched or participated in any competitive real bout in any form of fighting, but because pro wrestling is a lazy form of showbusiness where people endlessly lay around telling the opponent where they are hurt rather than actually defending themselves, an entire match where the competitors actively refuse to let their guard down or be sluggish in seizing positions that are so obviously there for the taking was something largely unheard of even in the more prideful wrestling variation the shoot leagues provide. We’ve seen aspects of this before from other fighters, particularly Tamura is always relying on speed and explosions, but no one else always makes such a specific effort to constantly push maximum pace.
In terms of quality pro wrestling, UWF-I finally really ran away with the lead, which is actually what we had expected them to do from the get go because they maintained most of the U.W.F. roster when the league splintered into three. While in 1991, PWFG had both 3 of the top 6 matches and workers, in 1992 there was so much depth on the UWF-I roster that even though Yuko Miyato was screwing a lot up booking wise, just pulling straws to determine the matches couldn’t have failed to put a few potential winners in place. Certainly Han, Suzuki, Masakatsu Funaki, & Ken Shamrock did good work in 1992, but it was ultimately hard for their output to compete with their comparable UWF-I counterparts because there were so many more talented performers in UWF-I to keep things fresher, more varied and interesting. That being said, all Maeda’s hard work in assembling a worldwide roster of discipline experts really began to pay off in the second half of the year, to the point that they actually had one more recommended match during that period than UWF-I did, 10 on 5 shows compared to 9 on 6 shows for UWF-I.
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Although UWF-I was the least realistic promotion and PWFG was the most realistic, it’s wasn’t so black and white, and UWF-I, whether by accident or through the luxury of selling enough tickets they could afford to pay an extra 6-8 workers to appear on their shows, began to trend in some more positive directions as the year progressed. While I prefer the longer match format of the PWFG from a pro wrestling sense, the UWF-I was far more unpredictable when it came to match lengths and finishes, and that helped to hold things together from a “shoot” sense, and make the general movements and progressions feel more urgent and important. While removing much of the cooperation, PWFG definitely clinged more to the pro wrestling concept of the big matches being very long, if not just draws to avoid a loser. PWFG generally had more build to a predictable finish, while UWF-I tended to vary the lengths of the matches outside of the opener a lot more, and guys could just lose from getting caught in something, which is the most important break they actually made from pro wrestling. It’s shocking that this never caught on, and in 2022, with 10,000 examples of MMA fighters rarely winning with the same hold more than a few times to every one Aleksei Oleinik Ezekiel choke specialist, that pro wrestling still can’t get beyond the idea of the finishing hold. Getting back to 1992 though, this is part of the reason that PWFG was frustrating because they never elevated any of their capable young fighters through a “fluke” finish where they made a good move to catch the veteran or the veteran simply got caught in a mistake. Similarly, Gary Albright seemed especially boring because a Kazuo Yamazaki match, for instance, can almost go any way (except the path that leads to him being of box office value) at any time, whereas you know Gary’s match is going to be super short, one-sided, and end with a big suplex. To a lesser extent, Takada suffers from always winning with the armbar, especially since it’s so sloppy, whereas his kicks probably carry the highest impact of anyone in the genre. All this being said, the most urgent and realistic UWF-I matches, and overall the most similar works we saw to actual shoots, did come in the first half of the year, with the Kanehara vs. Maeda matches being the best examples of both fighters going all out all the time that we’ve seen in pro wrestling. If the more patient mat style that PWFG increasingly developed into looks more realistic in 2022 than the create and seize the opening style of Tamura, Han, or Kanehara, that probably has more to do with both the evolution of BJJ and amateur wrestling in Japanese fighting coming later on, and the eventual trend toward the much safer position over submission style of grappling being an influence of the UFC.
Reality is certainly the area that set RINGS apart, as with RINGS, we don’t need to talk about shoots only in conceptional terms. Though Akira Maeda could barely hobble through a worked fight most of the time, he at least saw the value in testing the true meddle of the fighters on his undercard, and we began to see a core of fighters including Mitsuya Nagai, Nobuaki Kakuda, Willie Peeters, Koichiro Kimura, & Masayuki Naruse who were not only a possibility for a shoot, but even an entertaining one. RINGS was truly a mixed bag, running the gamut between the most real fighting and the most horribly executed works, but overall, they had a really compelling mix of real and fake, actual and entertaining, while PWFG, for all their good intentions, really had a hard time getting beyond the same hard gym sparring where the guy who would win the shoot would dominate the work because they weren’t surrendering positions to make the match more back and forth and competitive, hence losing the excitement of both the work and the shoot. There was definitely a lot of merit to what PWFG was doing, but it was less effective because for the most part their only alternative to that was Yoshiaki Fujiwara’s semi comedic shenanigans. All in all, I’m most optimistic about the overall product RINGS is presenting going into 1993, but I’d still expect UWF-I to once again be the overall best promotion to watch because they aren’t totally reliant on Tamura to deliver every time out the way RINGS are with Han.
*Editor’s note: Michael Betz’s comments will be preceded by their initials. *
p1798×1000 182 KB
ML: 1992 was perhaps the best year to be a shoot wrestler. You presumably were paid pretty well to perform about once a month rather than the dozen or more times wrestlers worked in NJPW, AJPW, or especially AJW. Very few people knew about Shooto, so there was no real pressure to actually shoot, as any chicanery they came up with was going to look way more realistic than a trancing voodoo man sporting a smoking skull causing one of the actual performers in the match to lose via falling of the apron, convulsing on the floor trying to decide whether to sell his stomach or his beloved stolen wristband that led to the curse, until he’s wheeled to the back, where he proceeds to vomit green gunk on the medical attendants.
Pretty much all of the shows seemed like big events because there were so few of them, and while attendance may not have been that great when you stopped to consider that the 2,000 plus they drew for the smaller shows were all the tickets they were selling for the entire month, the stars were increasingly developing that larger-than-life combat icon status that had previously largely been reserved for boxers. Though PWFG was the most modest and conservative of the promotions, they managed to be the only promotion to run a card in the USA, or anywhere outside of Japan for that matter, as well as the only one to run the Tokyo Dome, a feat no one would have expected from them, especially when it was predictably Akira Maeda headlining and Nobuhiko Takada in the semifinal on the lone Dome show U.W.F managed on 11/29/89.
1991 was largely defined by the three new promotions just trying to get organized, figure out what their roster would be, and who they could run out against the promotion leader. With every promotion needing new stars, the younger wrestlers from the U.W.F. era such as Minoru Suzuki & Kiyoshi Tamura began to come to prominence, but it was in 1992 that we really began to understand what gems the new promotions had unearthed. In fact, three of the four best workers- Volk Han, Hiromitsu Kanehara, and Masakazu Maeda - debuted in December 1991. These fighters, and other new faces, really changed how the sport was evolving.
Han truly revolutionized the complexion of the submission game. Before him, submissions, which were largely cobbled together from a mix of practical judo training and impractical pro wrestling fantasies, mostly seemed little more than a very predictable means to the end. Someone would grab a crab, and either the fight would impractically end, or the opponent would eventually grab a rope. I’m using the worst possible scenario, but even in the best cases, the submissions were really a liability in trying to win over the pro wrestling crowd because the big payoff was so visually lacking in comparison to what they were used to (unless they still loved Pedro Morales). It wasn’t so much that Han introduced a series of new submissions from his practical sambo training, and his own wild imagination, although that was the case, but rather that he was constantly a threat because he would chain submissions together, endlessly adjusting and using the opponent’s position and offensive attacks against them. Tamura’s rise to prominence had some parallels, as what he lacked in inventive submissions, he more than made up for by being the first performer in the genre to overwhelm his opponent through grappling speed (we’d seen Sayama beat people through speed and athleticism, but in the standing game). Both had styles based on being one step ahead of the opposition that were great to watch, with Han changing the position through a new submission, while Tamura beat the opponent to the position then applied the submission.
Kanehara & Masakazu Maeda offered a “new” brand of cardio based reality. There was nothing revolutionary about what they were doing if you’ve ever watched or participated in any competitive real bout in any form of fighting, but because pro wrestling is a lazy form of showbusiness where people endlessly lay around telling the opponent where they are hurt rather than actually defending themselves, an entire match where the competitors actively refuse to let their guard down or be sluggish in seizing positions that are so obviously there for the taking was something largely unheard of even in the more prideful wrestling variation the shoot leagues provide. We’ve seen aspects of this before from other fighters, particularly Tamura is always relying on speed and explosions, but no one else always makes such a specific effort to constantly push maximum pace.
In terms of quality pro wrestling, UWF-I finally really ran away with the lead, which is actually what we had expected them to do from the get go because they maintained most of the U.W.F. roster when the league splintered into three. While in 1991, PWFG had both 3 of the top 6 matches and workers, in 1992 there was so much depth on the UWF-I roster that even though Yuko Miyato was screwing a lot up booking wise, just pulling straws to determine the matches couldn’t have failed to put a few potential winners in place. Certainly Han, Suzuki, Masakatsu Funaki, & Ken Shamrock did good work in 1992, but it was ultimately hard for their output to compete with their comparable UWF-I counterparts because there were so many more talented performers in UWF-I to keep things fresher, more varied and interesting. That being said, all Maeda’s hard work in assembling a worldwide roster of discipline experts really began to pay off in the second half of the year, to the point that they actually had one more recommended match during that period than UWF-I did, 10 on 5 shows compared to 9 on 6 shows for UWF-I.
p3530×534 37.7 KB
Although UWF-I was the least realistic promotion and PWFG was the most realistic, it’s wasn’t so black and white, and UWF-I, whether by accident or through the luxury of selling enough tickets they could afford to pay an extra 6-8 workers to appear on their shows, began to trend in some more positive directions as the year progressed. While I prefer the longer match format of the PWFG from a pro wrestling sense, the UWF-I was far more unpredictable when it came to match lengths and finishes, and that helped to hold things together from a “shoot” sense, and make the general movements and progressions feel more urgent and important. While removing much of the cooperation, PWFG definitely clinged more to the pro wrestling concept of the big matches being very long, if not just draws to avoid a loser. PWFG generally had more build to a predictable finish, while UWF-I tended to vary the lengths of the matches outside of the opener a lot more, and guys could just lose from getting caught in something, which is the most important break they actually made from pro wrestling. It’s shocking that this never caught on, and in 2022, with 10,000 examples of MMA fighters rarely winning with the same hold more than a few times to every one Aleksei Oleinik Ezekiel choke specialist, that pro wrestling still can’t get beyond the idea of the finishing hold. Getting back to 1992 though, this is part of the reason that PWFG was frustrating because they never elevated any of their capable young fighters through a “fluke” finish where they made a good move to catch the veteran or the veteran simply got caught in a mistake. Similarly, Gary Albright seemed especially boring because a Kazuo Yamazaki match, for instance, can almost go any way (except the path that leads to him being of box office value) at any time, whereas you know Gary’s match is going to be super short, one-sided, and end with a big suplex. To a lesser extent, Takada suffers from always winning with the armbar, especially since it’s so sloppy, whereas his kicks probably carry the highest impact of anyone in the genre. All this being said, the most urgent and realistic UWF-I matches, and overall the most similar works we saw to actual shoots, did come in the first half of the year, with the Kanehara vs. Maeda matches being the best examples of both fighters going all out all the time that we’ve seen in pro wrestling. If the more patient mat style that PWFG increasingly developed into looks more realistic in 2022 than the create and seize the opening style of Tamura, Han, or Kanehara, that probably has more to do with both the evolution of BJJ and amateur wrestling in Japanese fighting coming later on, and the eventual trend toward the much safer position over submission style of grappling being an influence of the UFC.
Reality is certainly the area that set RINGS apart, as with RINGS, we don’t need to talk about shoots only in conceptional terms. Though Akira Maeda could barely hobble through a worked fight most of the time, he at least saw the value in testing the true meddle of the fighters on his undercard, and we began to see a core of fighters including Mitsuya Nagai, Nobuaki Kakuda, Willie Peeters, Koichiro Kimura, & Masayuki Naruse who were not only a possibility for a shoot, but even an entertaining one. RINGS was truly a mixed bag, running the gamut between the most real fighting and the most horribly executed works, but overall, they had a really compelling mix of real and fake, actual and entertaining, while PWFG, for all their good intentions, really had a hard time getting beyond the same hard gym sparring where the guy who would win the shoot would dominate the work because they weren’t surrendering positions to make the match more back and forth and competitive, hence losing the excitement of both the work and the shoot. There was definitely a lot of merit to what PWFG was doing, but it was less effective because for the most part their only alternative to that was Yoshiaki Fujiwara’s semi comedic shenanigans. All in all, I’m most optimistic about the overall product RINGS is presenting going into 1993, but I’d still expect UWF-I to once again be the overall best promotion to watch because they aren’t totally reliant on Tamura to deliver every time out the way RINGS are with Han.