IRS > Dangerous K | NITRO MASTERLIST XTRA #2
AJPW is in dire straits in the year 2000. With three of the four pillars gone, what's a struggling promotion to do? Have the fourth drop a tournament to Irwin R. Shyster!
Things in World Championship Wrestling were bleak by the time the promotion folded in 2001, but never quite so bleak as I imagine the rudderless, post-exodus, post-Baba AJPW was when they decided to not only bring Mike Rotunda in, but have him win the Real World Tag League over the only pillar who chose to stick around. Unless there’s some really stellar nWo Japan/Team 2000 work I’m missing out on, his reunion with Dr. Death Steve Williams and four year run in AJPW is alarming, if understandable: AJPW’s roster in late 2000 looks like a list of dudes who washed up on a deserted island after a shipwreck — it’s either this or handing the ball over to the hot new team of Sabu and the Botswana Beast.
How did I arrive here? Well, sometimes in my watching and writing about WCW Monday Nitro, something about the show catches my eye and makes me curious about something else. The La Parka/DDP/Macho Man angle got me thinking about a CM Punk/Samoa Joe angle from 2023. The mention of Buff Bagwell's run in NJPW made me curious to actually see it. Sting firing up on Arn Anderson and offering to join him and Flair to fight off the nWo fed into my praise of the Adam Page/Jon Moxley death match at All In Texas. That same Nitro featured a better than expected match between VK Wallstreet and "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan. My lizard brain remembered marveling at the fact that Hacksaw and Rotunda locked horns in IWA Japan, for no less an occasion than Rotunda's retirement match, and when I went to Cagematch to confirm the date, I saw a lot of All Japan dates in the back half of his career, with this match in particular standing out.
Colette Arrand
As I am finding out for another project (more details soon), footage from Japanese promotions in the early 2000s is not extremely easy to come by if you're not a tape trader or data hoarder, or generous with either of those means of footage preservation. "Luckily," there's someone on YouTube who happened to be a pretty big Dr. Death obsessive, and a lot of the last part of his life and career is archived on that channel, including a FIVE HOUR LONG compilation of Varsity Club 2.0 matches. I would have watched the whole thing, but I'm trying not to be sad about professional wrestling in 2025. Here's the comp, though: If the embed doesn't start at the match, scobble forward to 36:43. It's important to start there, because you need to know how much the Dr. Death and Mike Rotunda reunion mattered to the promotion that was about to end its year with them on top: That's a fucking photo of Mike Barton and Jim Steele.
Dr. Death and Dangerous K start this one off, but I’m not here for this revisiting of their dynamic. It isn’t what it used to be. It can’t be. Steve Williams is in as much of a rebuild as AJPW, and Kawada is the strongest man left in a ruined world. Dr. Death takes a few holds from Kawada and quickly backs into the corner, where he is rescued by fuckin’ Irwin R. Shyster. Nothing about this feels good, even when Kawada is outwrestling Rotunda, because it will soon be followed by moments where he is being outwrestled, and once that’s where you’re at, where exactly do you go?
While pondering this abyss, I began to wonder why Kawada refused to tag out. Masanobu Fuchi is a somewhat weatherbeaten 46 years old, a whole four years older than ol’ Captain Mike, but it’s Kawada doing the heavy and light lifting for the team. He doesn’t really need the help — he’s straight up battering Williams around the ring, but there’s a moment where Fuchi has his hand out for a tag and Kawada … just doesn’t see it. He puts Williams in a death lock, and while it can’t possibly be the end of the match, it really kind of should be. Kawada continues to beat the tar out of both members of the Varsity Club, then the camera zooms in on Fuchi’s outstretched arm. Kawada sees it, but keeps wrestling. He gets suplexed out of his boots by Williams for his effort, then wrestles Rotunda for a bit.
“How would Kawada look as the babyface in a heat segment on a mid-tape Coliseum Home Video Exclusive” is not a question I had ever thought to ask, and the answer is, dispiritingly, just like anyone else. When Dr. Death is in the ring he and Kawada are able to partially reanimate AJPW’s spirit, but Rotunda lands a legdrop on him so soft that it kills that spirit dead. There’s no special drama when Fuchi tags in, it’s just a tag — Kawada had no real beef or reason for ignoring the tag all this time, he just didn’t want to do it. It is at this moment that I am pressing pause to go outside for a moment.
To be a wrestling fan for any length of time, one must accept that there will be moments, sometimes long moments, where your favorite wrestling company is just putting on a show because they have to. People get injured, contracts expire, an unfortunate number of main event wrestlers are found to have purchased steroids from the same steroid doctor, the critical and spiritual core of the promotion abandons ship because they’re fucking tired of the way things are going and want to do their own thing — if the venue is booked and money is changing hands, none of that matters: the show must go on. That said, there is nothing worse as a wrestling fan when it feels like what you’re watching is just happening, when it’s just punches and kicks and throws and submission holds with no purpose, no light at the end of the tunnel, no sense of the fucking tunnel whatsoever. When Masanobu Fuchi inserts himself into this match and he and Kawada start doing double team moves on a guy whose peak was an NWA TV Championship run that ended 12 years ago, that’s what you have: meaningless wrestling, the bland passage of time.
What makes this feel like even more of a grind is the fact that everybody is competent. Nobody does anything embarrassing, nobody gets hurt, nobody finds a new level or reinvents themselves — they’re all just there. Painfully, unendingly there. Rotunda has been there the longest, someone whose fire went out a decade ago and never had a reason to come back. I don’t learn anything new about him here, he’s just an okay first mate for a Dr. Death who finds himself on a sinking ship.
The fans get into this towards the end, when Fuchi is taking sloppy double team powerslams from the middle rope, but one suspects that it’s less about the fine-but-unspectacular wrestling than it is the notion that Kawada might make the save. He does, but it’s too little, too late. Rotunda and Williams win, and it’s not exactly one to write home about. Given last year’s winners (Akiyama and Kobashi) and Williams’ tag partner the last time he won (Terry Gordy), it’s actually something one would rather forget. Not to paraphrase The Mask, but the next time I’m interested in Mike Rotunda, somebody stop me.
Rating * & ¾