Pro Wrestling Chronicle

El Samurai vs Shinjiro Ohtani (New Japan 1/29/96)

El Samurai has a pocket of fans, but when I first got into the Japanese Super Juniors style he was always an also ran to me. As in, here’s a great match Chris Benoit had. It’s with (fill in a name like Ohtani). Or, M-Pro had a big ten man. It featured a bunch of good names and a few other guys (like El Samurai). So this is the first time I’m really going to be looking at how he carries his half of a match. It’s for the UWA title and thankfully it’s against arguably my favorite junior of the decade, Ohtani (babyface o’ fire).

This was # 20 on the DVDVR New Japan 90s rankings, to give you some idea of where this is held smark-wise (or was almost a decade back). Ohtani is such a vicious prick early. I love him. He works the leg with submission cranks and a few limited strikes, but it’s all about the little things like grinding the elbow into the thigh during a hold. Samurai gets little comebacks, but Ohtani keeps cutting it off at the knee – literally. Samurai comes back working the arm at the elbow. Samurai is still good on the leg so he throws in a high spot or two on the outside, and Ohtani matches him. He’s bleeding from the nose or mouth, which will probably make for a good visual later.

Ohtani starts getting frustrated and mixes in some flat out choke-a-bitch tactics with the leg work he’s still doing. Odd transition as El Samurai hits a forearm strike, a pile driver, and it sets up an arm bar. At least the body part focus is consistent. Things pick up with some quick big moves and motivation about 12-13 minutes in. Samurai passes up pins to try and make Ohtani tap and transitions well into arm bar finishers. He’s not quite my cup of tea, but he’s sold. The whole mask thing for him is a detriment to me, but not because it’s a mask. I just thing his gimmick costume isn’t all that interesting.

Ohtani’s selling in the final stretch is the exact reason I got into him in the first place. It’s the young babyface with fire/fighting spirit who refuses to stay down. You feel it, and his pauses and power ups before each move make me get into the match deeper. He does his classic spring board right into a missile drop kick of the knee, going back to the original work he did. Great stuff. No one goes for pins in this for a stretch. It’s a can you top this submission match without the stips. By the twenty minute mark they’ve got these people going in the crowd. A lot of this has since been done in America in countless times so it’s hard to gauge how cool it was then. Finish is awesome with Samurai coming back, hitting an arm breaker, a flying knee to the arm, and then the arm bar in under ten seconds for the win via tap. Extra love for the post match selling by Ohtani.

Not blow away by today’s standards but the love this gets is probably for the psychology, and that was pretty great stuff. Definitely would recommend checking it out, and had it had English commentary selling the story, it probably would be far more pimped by me.