Fuji Yamada, Rollerball Rocco, and the Breadth of the Wrestling World
This World Heavy Middleweight Championship match between Fuji Yamada and Rollerball Rocco is great, and that’s the least interesting thing about it.
Nuts and bolts stuff first though. There’s a great energy to this match from the get go. At this point in time, Rocco and Yamada have traded the Heavy Middleweight Title back and forth a few times already, and that sense of history and animosity gets conveyed in the opening seconds. The ring announcer and referee struggle to keep the two wrestlers separated before the bell as they’re liable to just rip each other apart otherwise. The crowd is eating it up as well, fully bought into both Yamada as the exciting champion against the dastardly Rocco.
Yamada’s mechanically very sound throughout this whole match. He executes everything with a crispness and fluidity that hints at what he’d come to achieve later on in his career, but it’s Rollerball Rocco that steals the show as far as this match goes. He’s very clearly the one dictating the pace as the heel, he’s the one more comfortable playing with the English audience, and he’s just a loudmouthed bully throughout the entire runtime.
Not only that, but he’s vicious in the ring too. He has two main points of attack throughout the match—the ribs and the legs. Between the two, he’s able to focus on the ribs much more, sneaking in stiff punches to the side, stretching out Yamada, or just kicking him right in the damaged area. It’s really great, focused stuff, and if Yamada had some slightly more concentrated long term selling, it might have made this match even better. That being said, everything that Rocco sets up throughout comes to fruition by the end of the match. The two falls that Rocco wins with come from a butterfly suplex and a tombstone piledriver which complement the body work he spends much of the match executing.
More than any of the action itself though, I came away from the match thinking about how large the world of wrestling is, and always has been.
For one, there’s the neat little surprise that Rocco comes into this match as the heel. In a match where both participants come down to the ring bearing their national flags, it’s a nice twist to have the English crowd so firmly embrace Yamada as their hero in this. It makes the action feel just the tiniest bit grander that the audience dynamic doesn’t have to strictly obey the divisions of nationality.
Next, I can’t help but get some demented glee from how Rocco chooses to taunt Yamada throughout the match. In the second round, after initaiting his body work, Rocco slaps Yamada into an abdominal stretch while calling out “Mr. Inoki,” a thinly veiled shot at Antonio Inoki’s own Cobra Twist. In the third round, after targeting Yamada’s legs, he locks in a sasorigatame while calling out Riki Choshu. Does that mean anything to the English fans in attendance? I don’t know. Probably not for most of them, but it certainly means something to Fuji Yamada, a product of the New Japan dojo. The commentator’s sharp enough to catch the dig at Inoki, but misses the dig at Choshu, and it’s just rewarding to see a wrestler all the way back in the 80s incorporate the realities of the wider wrestling landscape into their work in this way.
I can’t help but imagine all the bad faith posters who work themselves up into the most performative rage imaginable when an international star receives some level of spotlight on mainstream American television. You know the types, the ones that demand every single piece of unfamiliar information be spoonfed to them lest they actually lift a finger to just Google a wrestler that exists beyond their comfort zone. They came out of the woodwork when El Hijo de Vikingo got his recent Dynamite booking, but similar tactics have been used against talent like Konosuke Takeshita before him.
Companies bringing in international talent aren’t new trends, and the response to them coming in should never be an immediate knee jerk reaction to turn one’s nose up at them. It has never been easier in human history to learn more about professional wrestling from every region and every era than it is today, and it’s truly remarkable that there are those that consider that to be an unjust burden instead of an immense opportunity.
Matches like Yamada vs. Rocco serve as a nice reminder that wrestling has always been bigger than any one promotion. No single company, wrestler, or fan holds the key to every facet of the industry, and professional wrestling has always been better when it not only acknowledges that fact, but embraces it. Wrestling will always be bigger than you, don’t ever forget it.
IS IT BETTER THAN 6/3/94? No.
Rating: ****
"I've just been watching WWE for twenty years and never even heard of "_____" so obviously they can't be a star!" Same shit, different day with these folk. Love the essay and very excited for (hopefully) the World of sportification of Joseph's work.