Kakutogi Road Presents: 1992 Year in Review Part 3: Union of Wrestling Forces International
*Editor’s note: Both Michael Betz’s and Mike Lorefice’s comments will be preceded by their initials. *
ML: The UWF-I might not have released an official anti-Bosch mission statement, “Takada counts, and nobody else counts”, but that was certainly their philosophy. Though building a shoot promotion around a performer who lacks even the most basic understanding of how to control and maneuver on the mat wasn’t quite as dubious an endeavor in a world that had, for the most part, yet to be introduced to Royce Gracie, and accepted monks leaping 20 feet in the air as a normal part of elite hand to hand combat, it still presented the major problem of having to concoct opponents for Takada while providing busy work for the rest of the roster, other than Gary Albright, who would run through the opposition far more easily than Takada, and even temporarily dethroned him in order to give the promotion a single rematch that made actual sense.
Shockingly, the amount of effort put into matches that literally didn’t matter to anyone but the fans was nothing short of outstanding. Outside of Tatsuo Nakano, who tended to be a bit sluggish but still managed to be involved in the best tag match, literally every native on the roster put the truly lackluster efforts of Takada to shame, and overall, as with RINGS, the promotion was worlds better than in their fledgling 1991 efforts. To his credit, Takada did utilize the never rattled calm, controlling, and commanding persona almost to the perfection of Masakatsu Funaki, the crucial difference being that Funaki consistently made the proper technical maneuvers to legitimately back it up, whereas Takada was looser than Gary Albright’s singlet on a newborn.
Luckily, '90’s puroresu was set up for the undercards to deliver, not built around bloated and padded main events that were supposed to be epic by the sole virtue of being 30+ minutes, even though they mostly just contained more or less the same 5 minutes of actual action once you suffered through all the stalling. In spite of UWF-I’s unwillingness to even contemplate utilizing their actual skilled natives on the marquee, the UWF-I had the deepest talent roster of the 3 shoot promotions from a working standpoint by such a wide margin that they not only dominated the top 10 matches and workers, but at least during the first half of the year, the third best match on their show was often better than anything RINGS or especially PWFG had to offer because they always had a number of good workers going up against good workers, rather than Volk Han trying to work miracles with a greenhorn or Minoru Suzuki facing the same opponent, yet again. It’s crazy that Masahito Kakihara isn’t even in consideration for a spot among the top 5 workers in the promotion given he is not only one of the most exciting performers in shoot style, but he certainly became one of the 10 best workers in the genre on talent, and had a much better year than the couple PWFG guys that you’d rank ahead of him if you were simply listing the most skilled fighters without considering what they actually produced over the course of the year.
The roster was greatly expanded in 1992, for better and for worse. The first half of 1992 was truly outstanding for UWF-I, in good part because the opening match rookie battles between Hiromitsu Kanehara and Masakazu Maeda were the best series of opening matches we’ve ever seen in pro wrestling. The truly extraordinary efforts of Kanehara & Maeda were groundbreaking examples of going all out each and every second the way one must in a real fight, doing everything they could to momentarily gain a slight edge, which the opponent would then counteract with his next movement. Outside of the opening match, where we certainly weren’t complaining when Kanehara vs. Maeda was producing a series of the best, most urgent and realistic matches we’ve seen in the genre, they did a pretty good job of trying to keep the matchups fresh. Unfortunately, that not only kept the talented fighters apart, but also steered them further and further from delivering the native vs. native focus that had separated the 1st two incarnations of the U.W.F. from what All Japan & New Japan were doing in the 1980’s.
Kiyoshi Tamura was ultimately still the man, finding new ways to display his an amazing brand of speed and creativity within a semi believable context. While many of their workers were ultimately better in 1992 than they were in 1991, Tamura was arguably the only major performer that had an even stronger second half of the year than first (Kakihara was likely another), with great matches against Yoji Anjo & Kazuo Yamazaki. Though his improvement was steady, much of the reason he stood out more in the second half had to do with terrible booking that, after a standout match against Miyato on the first show, saw him stranded in meaningless tags and/or anchored to green gaijins. However, with the uncoordinated oaf Yoshihiro Takayama replacing Maeda in the endless rookie match, and way too many native vs. gaijin matches otherwise, the overall quality of the cards fell way off in the second half of the year to the point that 18 of the 27 recommended matches took place before July. Still, this was overall an excellent year for the promotion, almost amazing by todays dubious construct where the main event is practically the only thing that “matters” given the combined output of the two top stars was a single good match from Albright by virtue of the wizardry of Yamazaki & Tamura, an embarrassment even more staggering when you consider that broken down legends Nick Bockwinkel, 58, and Billy Robinson, 54, managed to come out of retirement for one night and have a good match, basically without even notice or preparation.
MB: The story of the UFW-I in 1992 is yet another ribald yarn of taking two steps forward only to turn around and take three more back. There is no doubt that the most spectacular moments from 1992 came from this outfit, which was nothing short of a miracle, considering they seemed intent on doing everything they could to squander their massive talent advantages by virtue of insisting that Takada was more suitable to be in the pantheon of Greek gods rather than fledging puroresu stars. This outfit gave us so many awesome moments, almost in spite of the many hurdles that Booker MIyato and Anjo-San put forth. From a historical perspective, it was fascinating to watch this year’s progression between the three shoot-style companies as we saw that Akira Maeda was a much wiser man than any of us probably gave him credit for. While he severely lacked any semblance of homegrown talent, he was shrewd, and was able to maximize the most out of his various foreign partnerships, and was even willing to check his ego at the door when it was good for business, whereas the UWF-I was never able to come anywhere close to fully maximizing their huge talent advantages. I don’t want to sound overly negative, however. Even with their faults, they gave us some fantastic action, a lot of which still holds up well today. In fact, the series of matches between Hiromitsu Kanehara and Masakazu Maeda are nothing short of fantastic, with their 3-17-92 outing being of such an elite status that almost nothing has even come close to replicating that even to this very day. Also, 1992 saw the UWF-I largely move away from completely relying on Tennessee stumblebums for their foreign talent, with an impressive coup of acquiring a legitimate array of Americans with some seriously impressive wrestling bona fides. Dennis Koslowski, Dan Severn, Steve Day, and Gene Lydick were all some very impressive additions to the roster, despite their relative inexperience with submissions or the mechanics of pro wrestling.
The UWF-I also did well by setting the correct tone for their shows by having footfighiting phenom Makato Ohe open up their cards. While it would have been nice to see a few more additions to their kickboxing roster, Ohe always delivered a great performance, win or lose, and could often be counted to have one of the best matches of the night. It was also great seeing catch wrestling’s equivalent of Mount Rushmore get behind this outfit, with Lou Thesz, Danny Hodge, and Billy Robinson all acting as brand ambassadors. Granted, these promotional efforts were simply smoke and mirrors from the UWF-I, as from their standpoint, it was an easy way to capitalize on each of their considerable legacies. But despite that, you always got a sense of legitimacy with the endorsement from men like these. One must assume that they all longed to see pro wrestling take a legit turn into the realms of shooting, or at least being taken seriously, and since MMA only barely existed at this point, this was the closest thing that they knew of that they could throw their hat into. Overall, we saw both the best and worst moments of 1992 from this group, and in a way that isn’t a bad legacy, because win or fail, they always went big and made an impression. It will be interesting to see how things take shape as we go into 1993 since Fujiwara will be largely out of the picture for the first six months, and then the Pancrase and the UFC upping the overall global awareness of true shootfighting in the latter part of 1993.
UWF-I’s Best Matches of 1992
1/9/92: Hiromitsu Kanehara vs. Masakazu Maeda 15:00
MB: These two stole the show a couple of weeks prior, and while I’m surprised, they would go back to the well so quickly, I won’t complain as any day Kanehara is in action is a good one, indeed. They don’t waste any time, and other Maeda is looking a lot more confident this time out, as he immediately goes guns blazing towards Kanehara with a litany of palm strikes but is taken down quickly when he misses an Ushiro-Tobi-Mawashi-Geri (reverse jumping roundhouse kick). Maeda was able to quickly get out of Kanehara’s mount and ended the rapid sequence with a soccer kick to Kanehara’s back. We aren’t even a minute into the match, and this is looking good so far. Maeda continues to press the action with a variety of strikes that Kanehara can parry before closing the distance and executing a tasty Ippon-Seoinage (one arm throw). Kanehara looks for a quick Kimura, but other Maeda does a good job of scrambling, and his constant movement stifles Kanehara’s submission attempts, which causes Kanehara to simply stand back up and give several soccer kicks of his own. What followed was nothing short of excellent, as there was a total non-stop flow between two men that, outside of a few questionable suplexes and a couple of Boston crab attempts from Kanehara, never felt hokey. It also helped that other Maeda exuded a lot more confidence this time around, although you can tell that Kanehara is the better athlete. Unlike their first bout, where there were sequences that felt like Kanehara was just letting Maeda do what he wanted, everything here felt organic and earned. There was one great spot where Kanehara was on his back, reaping the knee of other Maeda, looking for a leg attack, in which Maeda countered by twisting around on one leg while stomping the body and face of Kanehara with the other. This sequence, along with others in this match, started to show an evolution in pro-wrestling logic that had rarely been seen up to this point, where a wrestler had to find creative solutions to a submission as opposed to simply crying and screaming until he inched closer and closer to the ropes, looking for an escape. Speaking of which, there was a great moment in this match where Kanehara had other Maeda in an armbar, and as soon as he arched his back to put pressure on the elbow-joint, Maeda shrieked in pain and immediately exploded towards the ropes, in what came across as a realistic approach to being put in this predicament, as opposed to the usual contrived theatrics. The fight ends in a 15min draw, and this was a great way to start the year. I suspect that this will wind up being in the 1992 year-end highlight reel, and if they can manage to keep Kanehara and give him a proper spot as the main player, then that coupled with Tamura could be enough to push them over the top into the preeminent shoot-style promotion going forward.
ML: I can’t in good conscience call this a rookie match given it’s more evolved than at least 95% of the matches we saw in '91. Maeda made incredible strides in just a few weeks, now fighting with the confidence of a seasoned performer. That’s really the difference here, as Maeda can be aggressive, taking it to Kanehara in standup where he has the advantage because he now has the belief to let it rip. While Kanehara is still the superior performer, the gap has lessened enough that they can do an organic, back & forth counter laden bout where Maeda has the advantage in standup & Kanehara has the advantage on the ground, but from the viewer’s perspective, it doesn’t matter where they are because the quality is very high regardless. The matwork was better in the 1st match because it was more focused on Kanehara working his magic, and thus had some more evolved transitions, but the standup was 10 times better here, with some impressive flurries in the later stages, mostly by Maeda. While an incredible match for fighters a few weeks into their career, this in no way hinted at the amazing matches we’d see between these two over the next 4 months. The chain grappling was nice, but rather than transitioning between breakneck paced standup, it largely stayed in that domain, and never felt incredibly urgent or desperate the way their great matches would. ***1/2
1/9/92: Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Yuko Miyato 8:11
MB: Both men brought great explosive energy to the ring. Right off the bat, Tamura charges in with a high kick and a relentless palm-strike assault, but Miyato stands his ground and fires back with several stiff slaps of his own, before downing Tamura with a spinning back kick to the stomach. So far, this is very intense and believable. Tamura gets back up, and Miyato tries to clinch with him while throwing some knees, but Tamura slickly switches behind him and nails a standing rear-naked choke followed by a takedown. Yuko spent a while deflecting the choke from being fully sunken in before being able to pry out enough to attempt a straight-armbar against Tamura, who countered with a beautiful cartwheel and right back into a rear-naked choke. However, Tamura made the same mistake that many BJJ white-belts do when he crossed his feet while attempting the choke, which allowed Miyato to attack one of his ankles. They are now both back on their feet, and Tamura quickly goes for a wrist tie-up with Miyato, and after he gets it starts to shift his body weight side to side, in something similar to a feint, as if he is weighing his next move, when suddenly Miyato explodes into the finest fireman’s takedown we’ve yet seen. Miyato then gives us some interesting ne-waza when controled Tamura’s head with a modified leg-scissor while fishing for a Kimura. Once he gets the Kimura, he quickly forgoes the head control and explodes into the submission, causing an instant rope escape and a cry of anguish from Tamura. The rest of this bout was total fire, as it saw Tamura dwarfed on the scoreboard by Miyato, as his occasional submission was worth a lot less than Miyato’s knockdowns. Eventually, Tamura was able to get Miyato in the center of the ring and secure an ankle-lock for the victory. This was another excellent match, and it has me rethinking my opinion of Miyato. Before this, I kind of just looked at him as an unassuming and middling figure that could be good but was too tethered to the old UWF ways to be of much interest, but he proved me wrong here, as a motivated Miyato is capable of a top-tier performance, and he really shined here tonight.
ML: The much-anticipated rematch of the 2nd best UWF-I match of ‘91 was total fire, as these two just blitzed each other from start to finish. One of the great things about Tamura is he’s able to up the speed, pace, and intensity in a manner that is not only believable but based on the urgency that’s so lacking in ordinary pro wrestling, where fighters are more concerned with playing to the crowd & posing, just stalling at every opportunity when the opponent is down so they have to do less. His pythonesque execution of submissions in this match is as impressive an example of exploding into submissions as I have ever seen. You first notice the speed in which he’s moving to secure the holds, but what’s most impressive is that his movement to change the position until the opponent’s body is jerked into the prone spot corresponds almost equally with him gaining more and more leeway by coiling tighter and tighter around Miyato. It’s never just a takedown or a sweep, it’s always at the same time a tighter and tighter squeeze until the hold is in so deep in all areas by the time, they’ve settled that the opponent would be done before they knew what hit them if it were a shoot. I really believed in the early near finishes because they were working at the rate that others can only approach when they kick it into high gear for the last minute or so. There was a great early sequence where Miyato countered into a hammerlock when Tamura was trying to pull him back into the center to reapply the rear naked choke, but Tamura did one of his crazy one-armed headstands to pivot into a position where he could retake Miyato’s neck. Another great sequence saw Miyato do a hip toss into an armbar, but Tamura countered with a backwards roll into an Achilles’ tendon hold. The whole match was back & forth like this, with Tamura ultimately getting the better of the grappling, but Miyato being scrappy and having fast flurries of strikes. The only downside is it was even shorter than their 1st match, which was perhaps the shortest match I’ve ever rated great. I’m glad they never slowed down, the whole match had the feel of a finishing sequence because of that, and it was really brilliant, though their previous match was perhaps a little better because it was longer, or I was slightly disappointed that they ran through the points so quickly it was obviously not going to last much longer. Regardless though, this was one of the most amazing examples of why an all out short match is far more riveting than a stalling “epic”, and it will surely wind up being one of the top matches of '92. ****1/4
2/15/92: Hiromitsu Kanehara vs. Masakazu Maeda 15:00
MB: Normally I would be prone to gripe about the same match three times in a row, but these two just keep getting better. If they continue to keep improving like they have, I would be fine with them opening as many events as they please. Things start off with Kanehara taking the initiative as he bull rushes Maeda with a litany of stiff palm strikes, but after being initially taken off-guard Maeda was able to regain his composure and return a volley of his own. Kanehara started to find himself on the losing end of this slap-fest, so he wisely opted to shoot in with an explosive double-leg. However, Maeda is continuing to increase his skills from match to match and was able to effortlessly switch from standing firepower to an effective sprawl. However, Kanehara is simply too crafty with his grappling and was able to negate the sprawl by continually “turning the corner” until he was at an angle where he could forgo the takedown altogether and shift to attacking the leg of Maeda. He used this leg threat just long enough to create an opening to move to side mount, all the while subtly throwing in strikes on his grounded opponent so he could continue to move and tweak his positioning. So far, this is light years ahead of what anyone in the game has produced outside of Tamura/Funaki/Han, which is amazing considering these two are rookies, and this is only their third match. Kanehara squandered his superior position with a failed armbar, which allowed Maeda to get up and start soccer kicking at will. Kanehara was able to fight his way back up and get the action back down to the ground but not before taking another barrage of palm strikes for his trouble. The next couple of minutes saw the two go back and forth on the mat, exchanging positions and submission attempts, but unlike most matches up to this point, or even a lot of future Pancrase matches for that matter, they would be willing to strike each other on the ground to create an opening for an attack. We have seen a little bit of this so far, but not in such a fluid and sustained way from both competitors, so this gets a nod for being far ahead of the curve. Even the old and tired Boston crab got a breath of new life here, as there was one sequence where Maeda was going for the single-leg variation, and unlike every other pro wrestler in history, Kanehara was actually not cooperating with this, so Maeda started frantically kicking Kanehara in the back to try and force a way for him to continue to finish the maneuver. It didn’t wind up succeeding but was brilliant all the same. The next 10 minutes wound up being total lava, as they went to a 15-minute draw with a non-stop barrage of strikes, position changes, and submission attempts that were traded between both men, with absolutely no let-up or dead space in-between. This might be one of my favorite matches so far and will surely go down as one of the best matches of '92. Even if the rest of this card winds up being hot garbage, it won’t really matter, as this was worth the price of admission all on its own. ****3/4
ML: Kanehara arrived as one of the top 5 worked shooters in the world in this truly revolutionary bout! This was the first UWF-I match that came out of the gate looking like a shoot, and somehow it never really stopped, because they never stopped going full force, even for a second. This seemed a truly amazing test of stamina at the time even if it were simply a 5 minute match, and they certainly went the whole 15 giving all they had and then some, but honestly, while it still looks nothing like basically any pro wrestling match you’ll see today, it essentially looks like every MMA match outside of the useless lardass division where they more or less either nearly die over the course of 15 minutes of standing around doing nothing or one fighter collapses from exhaustion the first time a punch actually connects. That is not a knock on Kanehara & Maeda by any means, but simply to point out that, arguably before anyone else, Kanehara realized that what separated real fighting from show fighting was that both fighters were always trying to attack and defend themselves at all times. This was one of the most intense worked matches you’ll ever see! The speed and aggression were just off the charts. That was absolutely the difference here, and totally the key to their success. They were throwing really fast open hands and scrambling hard and fast on the canvas. There was simply no sense of cooperation at all, anywhere. Everything one fighter did, the other fighter fought against, as if for their life. If every worked match looked like this, there almost would have been no need for actual MMA. While this doesn’t have the I need to rewind this awe factor of Tamura’s works, it was the most relentlessly aggressive fight we’ve seen until this point in time. These guys were pretty nasty too, it always felt like they were trying to hurt each other because that’s how you open win through strikes or open things up on the mat, and there were some particularly nasty shots to the ribs, and soccer ball kicks. Maeda was dead by the end from going so hard for so long. A classic! ****3/4
2/15/92: Kiyoshi Tamura & Yuko Miyato vs. Tatsuo Nakano & Mark Silver 18:23
MB: The fierce challengers from last month, Tamura and Miyato, will now be teaming up. Miyato and Nakano start first, and Miyato opens fire with some crisp kickboxing but is completely overpowered in the clinch and just winds up on the ground where Nakano can put all his weight on him. For whatever reason, Nakano just decides not to bother with it and tags in Silver, who is able to move a lot quicker than his size would seem to suggest. After a brief back and forth, Miyato tags in Tamura, who takes a minute or so to feel out his opponent before taking it to the canvas and giving us our first memorable moment. This change was due to Silver trying a primitive toe-hold attack while seated behind Tamura’s back but found himself quickly countered with a slick armbar entry. Tamura and Silver continue for a couple more minutes, and Silver is moving well for a rookie. At this stage, he is showing some decent wrestling and kicking skills, placing him above Burton and Boss but beneath Scott, so with some more refinement, I could see him being a solid addition to the roster. Silver tags Nakano back in, which prompts Tamura to really turn up the volume as Nakano desperately tries to get a takedown, but Tamura scrambles and contorts in every way imaginable to prevent him from being successful. The fight eventually winds up on the mat when Tamura dives in for a kneebar, but only winds up plopping down on his backside, which allows Naknao to smother him, before eventually securing a kneebar of his own, prompting both a rope escape and a tag back in for Miyato. The match continued to be an entertaining and brisked pace affair, which really shined every time Miyato was in the ring. He brought all the same fire and intensity that he was showing us last month, and because of this, he was able to really elevate this match from standard boiler plate to an above-average entry. That’s not to say that the others didn’t do a good job (they all did), but he brought his A-game, which forced Silver and Nakano to rise to the occasion as well. Tamura was a bit more subdued than usual, taking on more of a counter-fighter role, but even though this wasn’t his flashiest showing, it was still Tamura and thus good. I would give this a solid *** 1/2 as the only real drawback here was the randomness of the match/contestants, which caused it to lack any real emotional satisfaction and simply served as a high-quality time killer.
ML: The biggest problem here was the pairings. We didn’t get to see more of the best rivalry in the UWF-I (although after the opener, they probably ceded that mantle to Kanehara/Maeda) because Tamura and Miyato were on the same team. On one hand, the debuting Silver did pretty well, but they kind of sacrificed Tamura & Miyato to achieve that. Nakano was more lively than one could have expected, and actually everyone was really doing a much better job tonight with the scrambling, as if they got a memo about being more urgent. While Tamura was, of course, good, it was really Miyato’s energetic striking exchanges that made the match. While hardly a classic, it was a great example of a great team being able to still have a good match despite lackluster opposition. ***
