STARTING OVER 1^ST

May 12, 1988

Shigeo Miyato . . . establishes himself as the perennial towel boy of UWF right out the gate, before he even has an official match.

Yoji Anjo . . . ensures that Tatsuo Nakano doesn’t leave Korakuen without black and blue marks.

Kazuo Yamazaki . . . pelts Akira Maeda with some of the nastiest kicks you’ll ever see in a wrestling match.

Special Exhibition: NOBUHIKO TAKADA vs. SHIGEO MIYATO

The purpose of this is to introduce people to the UWF style of wrestling, which it does a decent enough job of. It emphasizes the stiff striking and matwork that one would associate with shootstyle, but some of the rules that UWF would establish later on aren’t present yet. There’s no sort of scoring, meaning that apparently there’s no limit to the number of times that one could be knocked down or use the ropes to escape a hold. In the ten minutes allotted for this exhibition, Takada taps Miyato out twice, first with a legbar and then with a juji-gatame. Even this early into the company’s life, it’s not exactly a shocker that this is more or less a squash for Takada; given that he’d been heavily featured during the UWF group’s run in New Japan while Miyato was much less so. Miyato throws a few nasty kicks, and he shows some surprises on the mat, but he’s no match at all for Takada. And how fitting is it that in the very first match on the very first card put on by the Newborn UWF, that we’d see one of their staples in the dualling legbar sequence?

YOJI ANJO vs. TATSUO NAKANO

This is one of those cases where watching a match with the benefit of hindsight really doesn’t benefit it. Anjo and Nakano work some smooth exchanges on the mat but knowing that Nakano wasn’t much of a mat worker makes it clear that they work so well because Anjo is doing the heavy lifting. Outside of a couple of times when Nakano loses his temper and starts swinging wildly, neither of them shows the personality that they’d develop later on. But, what does make this work is that, despite its length, they manage to keep it interesting; rather than being treated to seeing something like Anjo sit there and work a legbar for five minutes, he does it for about thirty seconds and Nakano hits a nasty kick to the head to make him let go. And the match is full of moments like that, where it seems like one of them is about to press the advantage, only for the other to do something to turn the tide.

The other main issue with this is that despite all that they do, and they do manage to pack a lot of work into 24 minutes, very little of it seems to matter long term. At one point Nakano finds success by focusing on the leg, he works a legbar that seems to hurt Anjo and then he catches a kick and takes him over with a Dragon screw, which gets a great crowd response, and does the single leg crab. Once Anjo gets free and takes over, it’s as though his leg is perfectly fine, and he had no problem at all teeing off on Nakano with his kicks. It’s the same thing when Nakano’s arm becomes Anjo’s target, Nakano’s selling makes it seem like Anjo is about to get the win and then Nakano surprises him with a sleeper with the good arm putting on pressure. Anjo manages to work his way out of the hold with another flashy looking escape, but once he’s out Nakano’s arm doesn’t seem any worse off and Anjo is looking for other ways to win, rather than continuing to attack the arm.

They seemed to be trying a finish out of a Fujiwara/Kido match from the previous UWF, with the idea that Anjo was a heartbeat away from winning until Nakano took the opening to surprise him, but neither of them was good enough at this point to pull that off. Then again, it’s probably unreasonable to judge this against the standards they’d set over the next two-and-a-half years. Anjo and Nakano (and really everyone else) would improve upon the weaknesses that this match displays, and this still has a ton of action and it’s two surly dudes trying to clobber the piss out of each other.

AKIRA MAEDA vs. KAZUO YAMAZAKI

I suppose it’s fitting that UWF’s first ever main event more or less epitomizes what the UWF-style is really about. Yes, it’s shootstyle, but unlike, say, Sayama/Fujiwara from 12/84, they don’t beat everyone over the head with the idea that this is ‘legit’. Sure, it’s got the things that you’d expect in a match like this; like stiff kicks and tight matwork, but despite their efforts to make everything look as realistic as possible, Maeda and Yamazaki don’t lose sight of the fact that what they’re doing is still pro wrestling.

The match doesn’t have anything obviously cooperative between them, but the key phrase is ‘obviously.’ If one looks closely, there are moments that show how they’re working together, such as Yamazaki’s errant kick that gets countered into a Capture suplex and Yamazaki escaping the crossface chickenwing and getting Maeda in a legbar. And one only has to look at their selling and reactions to see how much the match is making both of them look like absolute killers. A good example is Yamazaki’s use of the single leg crab hold. It’s certainly not considered a dangerous hold in the world of pro-style wrestling, but each time Yamazaki is able to get it applied, Maeda’s selling and facials tell the story, and the crowd gets louder and louder each time he gets it on. To the point that when Yamazaki takes him by surprise and shoots in for a takedown and starts to put it on, Maeda bails for the ropes immediately.

Maeda may come out of this the winner (and the actual finish is one of its only drawbacks), but, by and large, both come out of this looking great. Yamazaki shows just how much of a beating that he can put on Maeda, including some utterly wicked looking kicks in the last few minutes, and by taking Yamazaki’s best shots and making it to his feet before the ref gets to ten (even if it’s only by a split second), he shows exactly how tough he is. Again, the finish doesn’t come off as well as it was probably intended to, with Maeda rather clumsily putting Yamazaki in a sleeper, but considering the last few shots that Maeda took and the spin kick that he hit Yamazaki with before they went to the sleeper, it’s more than a bit plausible that one or both of them had their bells rung. But, even with that little misstep to the finish, the message the match sends is loud and clear; Maeda doesn’t win because he’s the top guy, he wins because he’s tough enough to take whatever his opponent throws at him and then throw it back.

Conclusion: The Newborn UWF gets off to a very good start. The two “official” matches are definitely worth checking out (and yes, I’m saying this about a Tatsuo Nakano match that goes over twenty minutes!).