Tanomusaku Toba Documentation #3

 

  Tanomusaku Toba & MIKAMI & Takashi Sasaki vs. Great Takeru & Phantom Funakoshi & Asian Cougar (5/25/1998) - GREAT

Good times with the DDT crew. You see, these guys can do some basic matwork and exchanges, put a match with a solid structure together and have no problem crushing each other with big highspots and stiff blows, which is absolutely enough for me to have a good time. I continue to be impressed with Phantom Funakoshi, his arm popping submissions are awesome, and he basically holds his team together, as Asian Cougar is just a highspot freak and the Great Takeru is just pure mediocrity. Funakoshi and Toba have a particularily great exchange where both guys keeping baiting eachother until Funakoshi grabs a series of armbars, Toba gets pissed off and demolishes Funakoshis shoulder with a series of nasty strikes. This was really early into Tobas career but he looks awesome, his punches were a bit less showy than later, he did lots of ducking and stance movements, but he still had such a cool variety of strikes and was willing to get crushed by his opponents spots, he also busts out the springboard wheel kick which is an awesome reckless spot from a guy not wearing shoes. Speaking highspots, Asian Cougar is an absolute psycho in this rolling out dive after dive and crushing dudes faces with the gnarliest leg drops you’ve ever seen. Really you can watch a ton of old japan indy wrestling and always come out with refreshed appreciation for the crazy ways of Asian Cougar. Mikami and Sasaki are in their infancy stage but they do well here and Mikami is over as the DDT homeboy to have an exciting finish with even Takeru. Such cool stuff, checking out Tobas career is an awesome journey.

Tanomusaku Toba & Tomohiko Hashimoto vs. Super Uchu Power & MIKAMI (DDT 7/19/2001) - GREAT

So much fun to be had here, DDT missed the boat big time when they stopped doing hybrid shoot matches like this. Tomohiko Hashimoto is all judo throws at this point, and he and the pure striking based style of Toba make a fun team. MIKAMI for a junior can handle himself with the shooters, he hit an awesome flying armbar counter to one of Hashimotos throws, and generally sticks to offense that requires little cooperation, mostly just hitting cool sentons and open hand strikes. Super Uchu Power is totally awesome in this match, the shooter alien is such a great menacing monster crowbarring dudes with kicks like baseball bat shots, locking in shoulder popping shoot submissions and dropping ridiculous bombs. He also works some really nifty exchanges with Hashimoto, there is a cool moment where the alien goes for a gi choke and Hashimoto reverses into a Fujiwara armbar, and several great spots centered around Super Uchu Power trying to block Hashimotos STOs and other throws. Toba narrowly avoiding destruction and and catching the beast with some hard punches and backfists was great. The finish was between Toba and MIKAMI and while it wasn’t as epic as the best Toba faceoffs it was fun.

Tanomusaku Toba & Ranbo Yoshida Okuntun vs. Kota Ibushi & KUDO (DDT 8/8/2007) - EPIC

This was from a Shin FMW style show where Kota Ibushi was in every match. It was also kickboxing style tag where everyone had gloves and there were rounds. It easily could’ve been bad, but it ended up pretty awesome. We get some slow opening sparring between Toba and KUDO before Ranbo Yoshida (who I assume is a legit kickboxing outsider) tags in and rules the show the with awesome Eddy Gordo style handspring kicks. The 2^nd round begins, Ibushi & KUDO start brawling and now we get kickboxers fighting up the entrance way in their gloves. For some reason floor brawling in Japan with dudes who wear gloves always is way better. The 3^rd round is just an awesome Rocky style frenzy where everyone is throwing down and blocking punches with their face. I thought Toba/Ibushi was gonna be the obvious final pair, but instead Ranbo tagged in, decided to stiff up Ibushi with some hard knees to the gut and we got more chaotic fighting. I can’t believe Japanese wrestling just collectively decided to stop having these kind of crazy spectacles and instead just quietly replace them with slogs of soulless elbow exchanges.

 

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