MOVING ON 5^th

August 24, 1991

Kiyoshi Tamura . . . steps into the ring with the same person he’d debuted against, and hands him his ass on a silver platter.

Yoji Anjo . . . expects to have his way with another American scrub, and winds up getting suplexed into oblivion.

Billy Scott . . . gets a chance to redeem his prior loss to Yamazaki, and also teams with the company Ace.

KIYOSHI TAMURA vs. YUKO MIYATO

For Miyato, this serves as an example of just how fast life moves. Two years ago, Tamura was making his pro debut and getting punked out. Now, Tamura is putting on show-stealing matches and even teaming with Takada. What’s Miyato doing? He’s still jerking the curtain and in his never-ending feud with Nakano. This only shows why there’s already such disparity. Tamura spiders his way all over Miyato and seems to be thinking three moves ahead. Miyato gets on exactly one hold that’s considered dangerous; a chickenwing armlock, and Tamura manages to escape and counter it without needing the ropes. Meanwhile, Tamura can seemingly counter whatever Miyato throws at him, almost at will. He counters Miyato into a sleeper to tap him out, but it’s something like the third or fourth time that he’d done it. Tamura even does a freaking snap suplex, for no reason other than to show that he can do pretty much whatever he feels like and Miyato can’t do jack about it.

Luckily for Miyato. Tamura is kindhearted enough to let him look good before finishing him off. While he didn’t need the ropes for the chickenwing, he does use them when Miyato does something like crank his ankle while he’s got a sleeper on, and when he rolls to escape a legbar and Miyato rolls with him to keep it on, Tamura uses the ropes. He also lets Miyato get a decent sized point advantage by punting him for a couple of knockdowns. But Tamura’s efforts don’t create more than a sliver of doubt about the finish. It was already implied when Tamura handily beat Tom Burton in June and then Burton scored his only win to date in July over Miyato, but the direct result here confirms just how fast Tamura is rising while Miyato continues going nowhere.

YOJI ANJO vs. GARY ALBRIGHT

Although this is Albright’s debut and sets the stage for him as the U-Inter top foreigner, this says almost as much about Anjo as it does about Albright. Albright’s size, suplexes, and wrestling ability mean that Anjo has practically zero chance of winning, but he never acts like it. Even after Gary surprises him on the mat or ties him up and shoves him into the ropes to stop Anjo from kicking away at him, Anjo’s ever-present smirk is still there. For his part, Gary’s performance is fine; looking at the track record of both foreigners and big guys in Maeda’s UWF as well as here (Bart Vale, Johnny Barrett, J.T. Southern…), expectations weren’t exactly high and Gary has no problem meeting and exceeding them. Aside from an early ankle lock that he uses a rope break for, and a couple of times when Anjo is able to fire off kicks while he’s on the mat, Gary never has very much trouble. It looks like Anjo might finally get one over on him when he pulls a quick reversal and snags Gary’s arm, but Gary makes sure that Anjo can’t get the hold locked in, and Anjo winds up letting go in favor of going back to his kicks. But anytime that Gary is on his feet, Anjo is pretty much screwed. The match technically ends with an elbow strike for a TKO when Anjo can’t answer the count, but Gary hits a brutal pair of Germans beforehand that were the real cause. Hell, Albright could have probably looked at Anjo too hard and knocked him down.

NOBUHIKO TAKADA/BILLY SCOTT vs. KAZUO YAMAZAKI/TATSUO NAKANO

For the second time in as many shows, the main event is an overly long tag match with capable workers that comes off as underwhelming. The one thing this has going for it is the anger and intensity; you know what to expect before the bell rings when Yamazaki and Nakano won’t even do the customary handshake, and that anger never wavers. But that’s pretty much the only consistent positive.

In the first ten minutes, we see every combination of the wrestlers against each other, and nothing is especially thrilling. Scott and Nakano knee each other in the face at full force and blow off suplexes like a precursor to Kobashi and Sasaki, and it looks even more out of place after seeing Albright pretty much murder Anjo with them. Outside of the first knockdown, Yamazaki’s kicks aren’t shown to be all that dangerous. The remarkable segment is between Takada and Nakano where Nakano gives Takada all of his best shots and gets the crowd excited, and then he hooks up Takada for his vertical suplex and the big oaf falls on his ass while Takada stays standing, and he’s easy prey for a cross kneelock. But segments like that and the finish between Yamazaki and Scott are more exceptions than rules, and it’s especially disheartening that the first encounter between Takada and Yamazaki in this company is so mild.

Although none of these four are as pedestrian as Jim Boss was the month before, it’s obvious that they’re somewhat holding things back and that their main objective is to eat up time. After failing to suplex Takada, Nakano is able to hit it on Scott, and instead of letting the ref call him down and potentially take off four points (three for the suplex and one for the down) Nakano goes right to a sleeper and Scott gets the ropes and only loses one point. Speaking of sleepers; that seems to be Takada’s hold of choice. His M.O. for a good portion of this is to get Yamazaki and Nakano on the mat and get them in the sleeper which they always manage to break with the ropes, or Yamazaki cranking on Takada’s ankle to send him to the ropes to ensure that the point totals are close. They do have a good finishing stretch, with Nakano impressively holding out on a Takada half crab to force a double tag and Yamazaki finally showing some nifty matwork by blocking a juji-gatame and tapping out Scott to the crossface chickenwing. But that’s about thirty seconds of a match that goes upwards of thirty minutes. Between the history of Takada/Yamazaki, the buzz surrounding Billy Scott after his match with Yamazaki and the anger involved from everyone, they could have cut this in half, if not more, and put on something much more tight, smartly worked and overall more memorable than this.

Conclusion: Despite the main event not delivering, this is still a show worth checking out for the further evidence of Tamura’s growth as well as Albright’s debut.