wrestling / Video Reviews
Views from the Hawke’s Nest: UWF-I High Tension 1996
March 1, 1996
Tokyo, Japan
The first match on the show was Kenichi Yamamoto vs. Tatsuo Nakano. The story of this one was the veteran Nakano taking the young boy Yamamoto to school. While the majority of the match was Nakano kicking Yamamoto’s ass, the most entertaining part was the young boy desperately attempting submissions and them having no effect whatsoever for a portion of the match. That made it all the more shocking and exciting that Yamamoto later caught Nakano in a version of the guillotine to force the veteran to tap! Despite some of the lulls in the action, this was just fun enough to be an effective opener. (**3/4)
Kazushi Sakuraba took on Kiyoshi Tamura next. When you hear about the potential pitfalls of the “shoot style,” this is a match that makes me see a lot of validity in those concerns. There were some cool sequences and moments in this match. However, for a match to just end out of nowhere with a submission that was not built to at all (Sakuraba tapped out to a sudden ankle lock), you really need a level of intensity and violence that this match did not come close to reaching. I preferred the opener for sure. (**1/4)
Masahito Kakihara vs. Shinjiro Otani was next. While the last match was a showcase for the pitfalls with working shoot style, this match proved how exciting the style could be. You truly felt like you could not take your eyes off the screen for this match because it could have conceivably ended at any second. They set that tone immediately, and the match was compelling all the way through as a result. Ideally, the match would have finished a tad earlier as they started to lose momentum, but this was still really cool to watch. Kakihara won with a sleeper. (***1/4)
Champa then battled Hiromitsu Kanehara in a kickboxing match. A worked kickboxing match is about as exciting as it sounds. It went to the judges, and Champa was ruled the winner. I hope to never watch anything as boring as this again! (DUD)
We finally got a tag match on this show: Golden Cups (Yoji Anjo & Yoshihiro Takayama) vs. Kazuo Yamazaki & Takashi Iizuka. This match had a lot of cool sequences and spots, and thus it was quite easy to watch. The lack of in-ring story held it back to being a merely fun match than anything special. Anjo got the win for his team with a painful-looking leglock. Solid stuff. (***)
Keiji Muto worked the semi-main event against Naoki Sano. I went into this match quite hyped up because Muta is Muta and Sano is in one of my favorite NJPW matches ever. The match did not live up to my expectations, but this was neat submission battle. Sano went after Mutoh’s left leg repeatedly with submissions, and Mutoh would occasionally come back with a submission on Sano’s legs of his own. Mutoh managed to make Sano tap first. I was hoping for some absolute brutality from Sano here. While that was not the case at all, this was good enough. (***)
The main event saw Nobuhiko Takada defending the IWGP Heavyweight Championship against Shiro Koshinaka. Well, this turned into a hot battle. While there was nothing terribly interesting going on in terms of story, Takada fending off constant submissions from Koshinaka led to some great drama (even if it was a bit derivative of the previous match). The excitement down the stretch was like nothing else on the show, and it made this match feel special despite not substantively grabbing me. Takada ended up winning with a cross armbreaker. (***1/4)
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