What hasn’t been said about this match? It’s a masterpiece we all know it, the pace is unreal, the near falls are nail biting and there’s a lot of gnarly bumps that shall never be replicated for the sake of wrestlers’ safety in the ring.
There’s more to this bout that what meets the eye, the tension between this to tag teams can be felt even without context but the greatness of what this four performers did in the ring the 9th of June of 1995 is way more meaningful than any casual viewer could ever imagine. First, the stakes are as high as ever, being in the main event of AJPW’s Nippon Budokan show for the third time in a row and as they say 3rd time’s a charm, they delivered better than anyone expected under so much pressure because of their last 2 outings in the same venue, the second greatest stadium in Japan in front of more than 16000 people which is impressive to say the least.
How this four men are related to each other is what makes this match stand out above the rest beyond the bumps and the disregard for human life, it’s so emotional watching 5 and a half years of wrestling one another in singles and tag team competition culminating in around 45 minutes, reminds me of Tehching Hsieh’s Time piece where he showed every hour of his life for a year in 10 minutes. This is what peak performance means in wrestling, two different teams or wrestlers with a history together battling and putting their lives for glory only being powered by fighting spirit that motivates them to push forward and always get up, for me is what this art form is all about and very few matches had been able to represent this as well as 6/9/95 did. Only two matches in the history of wrestling had been able to match this one: Akira Hokuto vs Shinobu Kandori in Dreamslam 1 4/2/1993 and Kazuchika Okada vs Katsuyori Shibata in the first Sakura Genesis 4/9/2017 that’s how great this is.
Honourable Mentions: Mitsuharu Misawa vs Akira Taue 4/15, Chigusa Nagayo and Dynamite Kansai vs Devil Masami and Mayumi Ozaki GAEA First Gong 4/15