Yuki Ishikawa & Hornet vs Fuminori Abe & Kenji Takeshima, Battle Arts Canada 2/20/2016
A few years ago somebody made a documentary on Yuki Ishikawa and BattlARTS. It included a few matches including 2 from Ishikawas stint in Canada which I haven’t seen online before. This was just 1 year into Abes career and he and Takeshima are introduced as the POTATOE BROTHERS, which may be a one-time joke or the name of their actual team in Sportiva (yeah, Abe is another Sportiva guy!!). I like that most Japanese wrestlers coming to foreign lands will tweak their act a little, maybe slow it town, be paltable for Western audiences, but not Yuki. Yuki doesn’t give a fuck, he’s there to kick ass and do BattlARTS style matches. This was punishment style alright, just 4 guys smacking and stretching each other. No punches pulled, I think Takeshima gave Ishikawa a headbutt like 2 minutes into this and started bleeding. It wasn’t even a showy hard hitting match like you sometimes see on the US indies, where guys will hit each other hard in really showy ways, waiting for the other guy to come over, doing a sneering face, letting yourself get hit and selling it for the back row, this was guys cheapshotting each other in nasty ways and scrambling on the mat. I liked Abe and Takeshima a lot here, Abe all spunky and smacking people in the face, Takeshima hitting gnarly headbutts. Ishikawa was Ishikawa, he did a lot of falling elbows and knee drops which I dug, at one point he was dropping elbows and knees on Takeshimas head as if Greg Valentine had absorbed Khabib. Hornet is a guy who comes in with this really tassely neon outfit but he is really game to roll with this, he was pretty good at scrambling on the mat, locking peoples legs up in cool ways, and trading hits. At one point he hit a fist drop and then started working an armlock which is totally cool with me, because it was a decent fist drop and that’s something junji.com would do. It’s really fun to see a Western audience react to this stuff, like they don’t react to this unstructured brawl in the same way they would to a face vs. heel match or a spotfest or whatever, but they clearly react and all these guys got over. People are clearly way into Yuki Ishikawa, they are into Hornet, they are into Abe and Takeshima as a pair of goofy pricks, they are clearly in shock whenever someone would land a particularily gruesome smack, and even with the complete absence of high spots (I think the biggest move was a double suplex) they enjoyed the match. And this was just a bunch of guys hitting each other and scrambling on the mat and trying to twist each others legs off. This was just a really good time.
Yuki Ishikawa & D-Man Parker vs Freedom Wallace & Bradford Montague, Battle Arts Canada 10/7/2016
It’s Ishikawa working a parking lot indy show, baby. This is Ishikawas “Hashimoto stiffing Dylan Night in Pennsylvania” or “Negro Navarro stretching Quackenbush in a bar in delaware” moment, he is just there to kick ass and punish these guys. Like seriously anytime someone was down he would punch them in the kidney, kneedrop their head/throat, stomp them, punch them in the head some more etc. It was a total uninterrupted, messy asskicking that the crowd didn’t know what to make of. The other guys fuck up a lot, although Ishikawa working his signature reversals and submissions is a lot of fun, there are at least some tentative attempts at BattlARTS style where a scrub would try to work a leglock or armlock and that is enough for Yuki Ishikawa to carry you. The big spot of the match was some guy hitting an elbow drop off the second rope on Yuki. D-Man Parker is some skinny kid with kickpads and he was barely in this. The ending has both scrubs working segments against Ishikawa and they seemed to find their groove a bit there. Crowd mostly has no idea what to make of this as they are not sure who to cheer and who to boo but they pop for the Octopus Hold finish and you have to love that.
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