Jushin Liger and The Great Sasuke are Icons in the Coolest Sense of the Term
Jushin Liger and The Great Sasuke are Icons in the Coolest Sense of the Term
They're, like, living metaphor, man. Words made flesh and whatnot.
I have been thinking a lot about how we talk about masks in professional wrestling. Not in the sense of history or prestige or gimmick, but as something of a hindrance, particularly when it comes to an audience’s ability to connect with a wrestler. Every time I watch someone like Rey Mysterio or Jushin Liger or Hayabusa or The Great Sasuke, a bell goes off in my head and I find myself thinking “wow, it’s crazy how clearly I’m able to read their emotional and physical body language through their gimmick.” Within 90 seconds of Liger and Sasuke’s extremely famous encounter in the 1994 Super J-Cup Tournament, I found myself thinking this.
And then I said, “Well, duh, one of the theatrical purposes of masks is to project emotion.”
And, let me tell you, I feel dumb right now. I don’t know if others feel the same way about wrestling masks, or where I picked up the notion that masked gimmicks are inherently more difficult to pull off because wrestling fans need to see a real, flesh and blood face, but that it’s been floating around in my brain for decades, even as something I disagree with, makes me mad because it just isn’t true. Beneath comment, despite how the introduction to this piece is going.
I’m overthinking this because both Liger and Sasuke are fully covered, head to toe, in their respective gimmicks. You can see Sasuke’s eyes, you can see a small area around their mouths, and that’s about it. And that’s really all you need because both men are icons — living metaphor, if you will.
I’m being fatuous, but only a little. Wrestling, being a narrative of pain, encourages fans to look at a wrestler’s face, through which much (perhaps most) of a wrestling match’s emotional information is transmitted to the viewer. The less of a wrestler’s face an audience can see, the less surface area there is for a reaction between wrestler and fan to take place. This is, I am guessing, a very high-minded way of making the argument that masks are a hindrance or a ceiling, a reason for taking the mask off of Rey Mysterio, Jr. in 1999 instead of, I don’t know, merchandising an instantly recognizable and endlessly cool trademark.
I am still inside two minutes of this match, and it’s because I’m hung up on how the masks (and bodysuits) Jushin Liger and The Great Sasuke wear are like magnifying lenses applied to their approach to this match. You don’t get to see a lot, but both wrestlers radiate a sense of purpose and determination that eludes most of their peers. Sasuke’s flavor of determination is more grim than Liger’s, who carries himself like a hero. You know so much about Liger and Sasuke before they begin exchanging holds because their masks are a means of projecting their differing philosophies of professional wrestling. Patience. Aggression. Pride. The kind of things other wrestlers need their whole face to put over.
I’m about seven minutes in now, and this has played out the way those differences suggested to me before the bell: Sasuke is the aggressor, but Liger approaches him with patience and wisdom, and before long he’s rocked his opponent with his trademark capo kick and tilt-a-whirl backbreaker. A shotei! A tombstone! A chickenwing submission! It is as the saltiest professional wrestling commentators have said since the dawn of time: a technical wrestler will alway have the advantage over a striker. Now look at this screencap of Sasuke, mid-arm wringer:
He is in pain, and not the kind a wrestler shrugs off after a sudden blow. Jushin Liger has created and is exploiting a weakness, and while what we have available to us through the murk of old footage is Sasuke’s mouth and the face-shape the design of his mask makes.
He looks like he’s weeping.
By contrast, Liger is placid, a man getting his task done. Turned perpendicular to the camera, you can’t see what his mouth is doing, and there’s mesh over the eyeholes of his mask, so he’s a technician focusing on Sasuke’s joints. He’s not emotionless – he’s in control and he knows it, but he also knows that there’s nothing to get excited about until he wins, or to express frustration with until Sasuke shows him something.
The beating Sasuke takes is thorough. He has absolutely no defense against Liger, who seamlessly transitions from hold to hold, cutting off a fleeting second of hope by countering a sudden headlock into a backdrop driver. There are several moments where Sasuke sells something Liger does as if he’s knocked out. But between the two, he is the risktaker, the guy who lives and dies by hurling himself full-bore into his opponent, and when Liger loses sight of this to go for a top rope dropkick, the fact that he mostly lands it does not matter: he has entered Sasuke’s world. He’s playing by Sasuke’s rules.
We’re now 14 minutes into this one, two-thirds of the way through it, according to how it’s constructed. In the first, you get everything you want out of a dominant Liger performance. In the second, you get the same from Sasuke. They throw bombs but don’t trade them – until Liger explodes at the 15 minute mark, the way this match builds drama is by asking if each man is capable of surviving the other’s onslaught.
They are, of course, so when we enter the closing stretch of this match, Sasuke finding ways to nearly steal the match, Liger losing focus and going for bad pins, you see them at the inverse of where they started. Liger is no longer calm. Sasuke, even getting his ass whipped, has forced Liger into wrestling his style of match.
What really makes this match is the finish, a real miracle of a moment where Liger’s reaction to Sasuke slipping from the top rope on a springboard is better than anything either man could have planned. Liger turns for what is, I assume, meant to be a springboard rana, and when he sees Sasuke eat shit, he mockingly applauds his opponent before full on taunting him. He is dismissive. He is arrogant. He was frequently both, but never quite to this level, so it feels incredible when Sasuke catches him with a rana for the win an instant later.
And again, you see everything you need to see in an unbelievably small window: Sasuke’s triumph, Liger’s disbelief. It’s a brilliant piece of work, establishing, unraveling, and rebuilding Liger’s confidence as the style and pitch of it gradually shift to Sasuke’s favor, with the finish serving as a perfect encapsulation of what made both him and Sasuke so special.