Shingo Takagi's 2019 BOSJ Showdown Against Dragon Lee As a Cure For Anxiety
In 2019, Evan Minsker found relief from his anxiety in the form of a Pumping Bomber. And SSRIs. The Pumping Bomber helped though.
Evan Minsker is the creator of see/saw, a newsletter about punk music. I’d list the credits that came before this project, but really it’s see/saw that’s the jam here: weekly briefs on sick bands I’ve never heard of, a podcast with the equally brilliant Nina Corcoran, tabling at shows and zine festivals, flyering to spread the word — Evan’s putting in the work to build something new and spectacular in the continuously fracturing world of music journalism. Check it out!
I was a Goldberg boy. I had a Goldberg poster and a blocky Goldberg action figure that my dad bought me when I was home sick from school one time. (It looked nothing like Goldberg to me; the disconnect made me feel impossibly woozier.) I’ve been thinking back to how anxious I was around that time, how my social life specifically at school had a light stink of awkward and youthful desperation.
Goldberg clicked into place—an intense dude so untouchable that it took a taser to fell him. In Goldberg, I saw an undefeatable resolve that I could never possess. With Goldberg on the television, anxiety left the room. Spear, jackhammer, 1-2-3, “who’s next”—a formulaic balm, a total escape, a rush of adrenaline I’d never experience in my actual day to day, but vicariously, it hit real good on a Monday night.
I can’t go back to those simple joys. Having watched wrestling since then, the Goldberg week-to-week “holy shit nobody’s going to stop him” spectacle doesn’t hold up. The matches are short and boring, and worse, I know how the story ends. (Foolishly.) The fans going nuts are still fun and I like how Bobby Heenan puts some bass in his voice to shout “the man!,” but otherwise, the nostalgia fizzles. I’d rather watch some new shit or an old All Japan banger or something.
I’m still an anxious person, but never more so than in mid-2019. Five years ago, my wife got a job in Wisconsin while we lived in Michigan. What followed was a whirlwind of massive life changes—buying our first house, driving nine hours there and nine hours back for walkthroughs and inspections, signing massively consequential legal documents. I got prescribed an SSRI because every day at 1pm by the clock, my chest would tighten. It sucked.
The other key memory of that time was packing boxes of records while watching the 2019 Best of the Super Juniors tournament. I was into New Japan at the time on a macro level, but desperate for an escape, I watched every single match of this tournament. I felt like I was losing control on a literal physical level. One thing that helped ground me was a different wrestler with intensity, charisma, aura, massive crowd support, and undefeatable resolve: Shingo Takagi.
Shingo debuted in New Japan the October prior, and from May to June of 2019, he was BOSJ’s shop-wrecking hoss. Honestly I feel bad for all the Goldberg stuff in the beginning, but here’s the main shit where Shingo in 2019 reminds me of peak Bill—the way the entire crowd would just go absolutely nuts for him. “TA-KA-GI, TA-KA-GI,” a crowd so hungry to see a bunch of little guys get that Pumping Bomber lariat in the throat so hard that they do at least 1.5 flips. The Goldberg comparisons of course end when we get to wrestling ability. Like, Bill couldn’t do any of the shit Shingo does—this explosive strong style approach.
There were no bad Shingo matches in BOSJ, which would lead to Shingo entering the G1 that year and eventually becoming world champ during the pandemic. My favorite Shingo match of the tournament came on a crucial day. I was in an Airbnb somewhere in Madison, Wisconsin; it was a stopover on the way home from a house inspection. I remember sitting at a desk in this weird room watching Shingo versus Dragon Lee, the then-IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion. It was a dragon against dragon fight; that billing makes for a reliably good wrestling match. Dragon vs. dragon is the wrestling equivalent of the time Verzuz did DMX vs. Snoop Dogg in a battle of the dogs.
There’s a moment when Dragon Lee comes out where this dude in the crowd is wearing a Dragon Lee mask and holding up a Mexican flag, just stoked as hell for his champ. Then when the bell rings, it’s over for that dude: “TA-KA-GI, TA-KA-GI.” The match really illustrates the dynamic of the entire tournament—a smaller guy throwing literally everything he has at his explosive hoss opponent. Superkick, running knee, hurricanrana, tope suicida, tree of woe, that running punt thing—nothing keeps him down, and at every lull, the crowd urges this tough-as-shit side-shave motherfucker back to life even though he absolutely doesn’t seem to need their help or encouragement.
Their chemistry seems pretty solid. There was another match in this tournament with SHO where Shingo’s opponent is hell-bent on proving he could hang with New Japan’s strongest dudes. Later in the year, Shingo would wrestle with Tomohiro Ishii in a G1 hossplosion to remember. But this one feels less like a muscle-off; it’s more a contest to see whose offense is more explosive.
There’s this pacing to New Japan matches where it leads to this mutual exchange of power moves and big finishers, a formula that either overdelivers or feels pretty predictable and rote. Here, there’s not exactly a move-for-move moment. Shingo puts Dragon Lee over as a strong champion while still getting the win. There’s this sequence where Dragon Lee throws all of his finishing moves in rapidfire succession at Shingo and when he goes for the pin, it‘s a fucking one count. Shingo has to pull out a desperation Last of the Dragon to secure a tenuous three-count.
My memory of this match is coated in a feeling of relief. I was sitting in some stranger’s house, unsure if there was anybody else around the property, just laughing my ass off while watching Shingo weather the sitting champion. Coming back to it, I wondered if it would’ve lost some of its magic as this story, too, has a foolish ending—Shingo lost the BOSJ to Will Ospreay. (Fuckin’ boooo.) I revisited it in my living room. I’m still dealing with anxiety on a day-to-day basis, but this match actually served as a reminder of how I got to the other side of that panic-filled era. When Shingo kicked out at one, I laughed really hard. Shingo—my fuckin’ dude.
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