Dragon Kid vs. Darkness Dragon Is Great Spectacle, But Not a Great Match

Sometimes watching something for the first time leaves you with more questions than answers.

Toryumon

I first watched this match a couple of weeks ago, with my best friend, while we were both a little high and celebrating their birthday. Don’t worry, I wasn’t trying to convert them into a wrestling fan – I had my window of opportunity years ago and decided against it due to whatever miserable bullshit WWE was up to at the time – they were doing their dailies on ESO, so I put on a BIG EGG match and let it fly. 

Upon a second watch I can tell you: I was way too zooted to remember any specifics. The most coherent note I took was “Dragon Kid has all the cool moves from No Mercy and SmackDown.” Why mention this? Well, I do remember how the two of us reacted. Me, I’ve been watching wrestling for a long, long time, but I still audibly pop when some crazy shit goes down. A lot of crazy shit goes down in this match, beyond even the aforementioned create-a-wrestler moves. I was hooting and hollering, and Cary, too, was caught up in the spectacle of this match, right up until the third fall where M2K started interfering a ton, to the point that both of us laughed through most of it.

Every other week or so, someone on Wrestling Twitter grabs some serious #engagement by asking what match they’d show to someone who was new to or only had a passing interest in wrestling. The answers are usually pretty boring, and not entirely in a “safe” way. They involve the major stars of WWE or AEW and come with a mountain of context, as if to enjoy a wrestling match you have to know the story that goes into it.

You don’t, though. Lord knows that, for BIG EGG, I frequently don’t, and as the less responsible half of this newsletter, I’m far less inclined to dig into backstory or previous matches or even the full-length show something is on. I am big on context, but also, a wrestling match provides all the context it needs from bell to bell. You have a babyface. You have a heel. Both want to win. The rest is embellishment.

So I find myself pointing to matches like this, an apuesta between Dragon Kid and Darkness Dragon, because in my experience what’s most appealing to a non-fan is the spectacle of in-ring competition itself – storylines and angles can wait, I just want you to see this match where some dudes are popping off with high spots, or this match where the ring explodes, or Toru Yano. Great wrestling matches teach you how to watch them. A lot of them are even sweeter with foreknowledge, which is something the King’s Road style is evidence of, but if we’re talking about the inexperienced viewer, you’re not throwing on a 45-minute Misawa match. At least I hope you’re not. 

I do not think Dragon Kid vs. Darkness Dragon is a great match for a novice viewer. It helped that we were high and Cary’s attention was also on their game. It is the kind of match I’d reach for though, like Onita vs. Funk or Sting vs. Vader, complete stories with life-or-death stakes. And there’s zero burden of explaining who the wrestlers are or what their deal is. I wasn’t watching Toryumon in the 2000s, and this is the first time I’ve dipped into it beyond when Ultimo Dragon’s students made the occasional appearance in WCW. Your guess is as good as mine, but holy shit look at that hurricanrana.

I was sober the second and third time I watched the match. It’s fine. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun, but in the cold, hard light of mental clarity, the third fall’s marathon of interference still registered as comedic, somewhat out of place with the utter sincerity of all of the blood and mask-ripping that precedes it. I see the utility of it – Dragon Kid’s bravery in the face of insurmountable odds, his refusal to lose, everything prior to Yasushi Kanda turning on M2K is meant to convince you that Dragon Kid is losing what little remains of his mask.

Maybe it works better if you’re more familiar with M2K, but the way Darkness Dragon unmasks only serves to further undermine the work he and Dragon Kid put into the opening two thirds of the match. There are, in my experience, two ways for a heel to hold up their end of a lost wager: they’re either forced into it in humiliation, or they man up and surrender their mask or hair like a warrior. 

Darkness Dragon did not earn the warrior’s defeat. He’s a coward with the deck stacked in his favor to an extreme usually reserved for a Stone Cold Steve Austin WWF Championship match in 1998. Fuck this guy! He deserves Dragon Kid’s scorn, not a hug!

That said, the parts that work really work. Mostly, that’s the fire Dragon Kid wrestles with. He is spectacular in this match, beyond how well Darkness Dragon works as a base. The two move so quickly and in such close proximity that Kid is an orbiting body around Darkness Dragon, except on those occasions where he’s a meteor crashing down on him. If you cut this down to GIFs or a highlight reel, you have about four solid minutes of legitimate wonder. That isn’t easy to come by! It’s an achievement!

Unfortunately, I don’t make GIFs or highlight reels. I deal in complete narratives, and the one guiding this match falls apart. Here, I am the first time viewer, and I am left with far more questions than answers at the end. “How do I see more of this” is one of them, but that’s based more on Toryumon/Dragongate’s reputation than anything I saw here.