Khali. Shibata. Arena Mexico. The world in all its wonder.

This is the first post of BIG EGG's 2025 membership drive. Help us get to 100 paid subscribers! Get 31 fresh EXTRA BIG EGG essays in return! This one is free, others won't be, click here for more info and click below to sign up if you haven't already!

You're going to want to flip back and forth between these two versions of the match:

Whoever was booking CMLL in 2002 was a genius. I know nothing about the promotion at that time and am fine with my ignorance, but look at what they did here with three men — The Great Khali, Katsuyori Shibata, and Watoru Inoue — sent their way for a couple of dates in April 2002. When providence sends you a gigantic man and a junior heavyweight tag team, you don’t ask questions: you book something like this and let history tell you what you’ve done later. The Great Khali. Katsuyori Shibata. Teaming up in Arena Mexico. There’s no rush quite like stumbling onto a match where two of my favorite wrestlers, who may as well occupy entirely different universes, meet up, like a wizard blessed a copy of Fire Pro Wrestling with the ability to make exclusively shit that I want to see happen appear, like magic, on VHS tape.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here in terms of the storyline, but in terms of match structure, CMLL is doing NJPW a solid here, booking the match around getting Khali (here known as Gigante Singh, but I’m going to keep referring to him as The Great Khali) in the ring against Giant Silva, a former WWF prospect whose post-Fed career is a fascinating run as a featured performer in NJPW, CMLL, PRIDE, and HUSTLE. How much of that saw him reach the promise foisted upon every 7-foot giant whose found themselves within the confines of the squared circle, I do not know, but it rules that it happened, and it’s impossibly charming to me that, when given two very tall dudes to work with, NJPW did the most 1980s territory days shit possible and teamed them up for a spell before splitting them up for the inevitable battle of the big men. 

You absolutely want to see that shit if you’re at Arena Mexico, too, but you’re going to have to wait a minute while two of NJPW’s young lions, Katsuyori Shibata and Wataru Inoue, testing themselves against two of CMLL’s best in Shocker and Dr. Wagner Jr. It’s Inoue and Shocker who start things off, with Inoue playing rudo as big as he can, going into fight stances and exaggerating the motion of his going in for a two-handed choke like he’s working a WWF house show in 1986. There’s a nice bit of struggle between the two early, when Inoue tries to lock in an Octopus hold, has it reversed into a hiptoss, but is cognizant enough to hang on to Shocker’s arm and go for a cross arm-breaker, forcing the more experienced luchador to take the rope break. 

Inoue wears Shocker out, working the shoulder, then tags out to Shibata. Immediately, he’s the more outwardly cruel of the two, sneaking in a subtle neck crank and boot scrape before nailing a high-velocity dropkick and senton for two. Shibata is so fast, man. The concussive force of his blows isn’t quite there yet, but he’s not far off — everything he does is simple and effective and looks like it hurts, even the slap that’s mostly meant to insult Shocker, who manages to tag out after interrupting a Shibata-to-Inoue alley-oop with a counter dropkick. Wagner’s hot tag rules, a big sea change where he’s throwing low dropkicks and dragon screw leg whips and power slams, playing to the crowd as if they’ve waited months to see him punish these to fellas from Japan. When Shibata stops a second dragon screw, Wagner slaps him so hard he recoils, which is a shock when you’re used to Shibata’s chop battles with the likes of Suzuki, Ishii, and others. He fires back but is quickly slapped down. A young man whose callouses have yet to develop. He’s still The Wrestler, though, feinting Wagner into an ankle lock that puts the rudos back in control. They even make quick work of Shocker when he comes in to save Wagner from an ill-gotten armbreaker, which leads to this moment of zen:

Shocker not only kicks out from the resulting barrage, he’s rescued by Wagner, and the two technicos nearly clinch the victory by putting Shibata and Inoue into submission holds. Thank God for the Great Khali, who very casually boots the two of them off of his partners and hoists Dr. Wagner Jr. up in the air for a gorilla press slam, which brings in Giant Silva to catch him in a way that looked far more painful than the bump would have been. Here we fucking go, baby. 

Usually, big man battles aren’t as good as they should be. There’s a few reasons for this. Sometimes the big men in the big man battle aren’t any good. Sometimes the big men in the big man battle have been cowed by house style to tone down their athleticism and slow things down. Sometimes the big men in the big man battle feel a need to consciously rebel against that house style and do something like chain wrestling or topes when a perfectly good punch to the eye would suffice. A choice was made at some point in the 1980s such that one is shocked by the notion of a dropkick battle between Earthquake and Tugboat, which is the exact sweet spot between Kane and Big Show chain wrestling and the NXT iteration of Keith Lee vs. Donovan Dijak. The Great Khali and Giant Silva don’t know a goddamn thing about any of that. They’re just two big men fated to rumble, and they do.

Is it the stuff of “Great Khali was actually great in the early 2000s” videos? Of course not, because that genre of video is fucking terrible. The Great Khali was actually great, no qualifiers, and the fact that he’s kind of quick and shredded like his main line of work is still bodybuilding in 2002 doesn’t make the fact that he and Silva wrestle like men in kaiju suits more awesome — it’s just awesome, end of story. Silva has to bump around for Khali a little and gets winded quickly — eventually he decides that he’s fucking done running ropes and halts on an Irish whip to skip that part before getting a comeback clothesline. He takes nothing off of an elbow drop, crushing Khali, then goes to the top rope and does it again with a big-ass plancha. Every time Khali takes something, he groans like a Thwomp hitting the concrete in Super Mario 64. All of this rules, including a Khali chokeslam that Singh refuses to leave both of his feet for. Especially Silva’s spear and goddamn top rope cross body combo that makes Khali sound like 1,000 Thwomps dying at once. 

They fight for what feels like forever, until Khali hits a wind-up lariat that takes Silva out of the ring, allowing the smaller, faster, less physically spent guys to pick the pace back up. Shibata obliges with a middle rope Pele kick to Shocker, which rules but shouldn’t be stolen by anybody anytime soon because Shibata lands right on his neck from it. With Khali distracted on the outside, Wagner and Shocker rally quickly. Shibata misses a clothesline, gets picked up by Wagner, and takes a combination springboard dropkick/spinebuster, which is a combo a tag team should steal. Wagner picks up the win with the Wagner Driver, Shocker trapping Inoue to prevent him from breaking up the pinfall, Khali and Silva brawling the whole time. Great matinee wrestling, even though it didn’t cough up a Shibata/Khali screengrab that I could turn into a sticker.

Rating: *** & ½