It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

Yes, it’s Voices of Wrestling Secret Santa time again, everyone. The brainchild of JR Goldberg (@wrestlingbubble), VOW Secret Santa sees all participating website contributors give their fellow contributors, the greatest gift of all: wrestling matches!

VOW Secret Santa Archives: voicesofwrestling.com/category/vow-latest/columns/vow-secret-santa/

Toshiaki Kawada & Taichi vs Genichiro Tenryu & Katsuhiko Nakajima
All Japan Pro Wrestling
September 25, 2004

Reviewed by Abraham Delgado (@adr012)

Gifted by Gerard Di Trolio (@GerardDiTrolio)

What’s a better present than seeing two old assholes mad and trying to beat each other up while ordering baby Taichi and baby Nakajima to do their bidding? This was a really fun, chaotic, violent match that had the guy inside of me that used to hate Taichi laughing in glee when Tenryu abused the poor man. 

When you press play on the video, you will see the ending of a commercial where there is a vertebrae, then a woman putting her shirt on, and a guy with a box that had the drawing of a human with red body parts. Just saying that when you put it on, don’t worry, it’s the right video and not some weird softcore porn. The commercial had the brand Kowa on it, which is a cotton fabric wholesaler.

The more you know. 

After the non-softcore porn commercial, we are treated to a montage of Kawada and Taichi kicking the asses of other teams and winning a trophy. We even get to see Taichi’s finishing move, the Black Mephisto. That’s all you need to know: one team is kicking ass, their finisher, let’s go to the match. 

The best way to describe this match is that Kawada and Tenryu seemed like coaches that were telling their upstarts what to do and to wrestle it out. They only got in when it was necessary. Nakajima tried to get Kawada into the match early on, even ignoring Taichi, but that was his mistake. Most of the match is Nakajima fighting the onslaught of Kawada and Taichi, with Tenryu doing awesome mad guy stuff to help Nakajima out. For example, when both teams were out on the floor, Tenryu picked up a table and just threw it into them. When Nakajima and Kawada were goading Tenryu while dominating Nakajima, more than once he threw a cup of beer at them, with one of those knocking Kawada down. 

When Nakajima finally tagged in Tenryu, he was just abusing Taichi non-stop. As a former Taichi hater, I was loving this. Tenryu just killed him with lariats, chops, a brainbuster that looked too close to the ring, and a chairshot. Match ended with Nakajima and Taichi wrestling it out in the middle of the ring like it started, but instead of the veterans doing nothing in the corner, they forgot they had a tag match and started beating each other up on the corner of the ring while their partners were reversing each other. Taichi hit the Black Mephisto and it was over. 

I really enjoyed this match, so thank you Secret Santa.