Shinsuke Nakamura Summits Everest for the Second Time

Wrestling Yoshihiro Takayama for the second time, one of wrestling's crazy geniuses shows how far he's come.

When Shinsuke Nakamura first drew me into New Japan Pro Wrestling, I had no idea what “strong style” wrestling was, just that he was the king of it. With time came an understanding that “strong” was less an adverb than a boast, a theory to be proven or disproven by the very best in combat sports. If, to paraphrase my partner, gleeful in the downfall of Nobuhiko Takada, you believe that wrestling is the strongest style of combat, it is thrilling to see that belief challenged, tested, bent, broken, and reassembled. 

It’s a theme that pervades much of New Japan Pro Wrestling’s, whether in Antonio Inoki’s skirmishes with martial artists and boxers, in his clashes against wrestlers whose philosophies of wrestling were colored by their nationality, or the incursions of shoot style wrestlers like Takada, deathmatch wrestlers like Atsushi Onita, or wrestlers who had a falling out with New Japan at one point or another (like Kensuke Sasaki or Katsuyori Shibata), who later had to come back and prove themselves all over again.

I have spent an undue amount of my time as a wrestling critic idly wondering at the concept of “promotional identity” as something largely employed by WWE to make it so that its brand is more valuable than any individual wrestler, but I never wrote much about NJPW during the height of my obsession with it, and frankly consider myself a tad ill-versed to make much of it here except to say that, in dipping back into another Shinsuke Nakamura match for BIG EGG, what I find so captivating about him is his manifestation of himself as the figurehead of a movement, that his every match, promo, and movement isn’t just that of a master artisan or athlete, but of the literal (and, when he’s not the IWGP Heavyweight Champion, figural) king of the king of sports. To watch Shinsuke Nakamura work at the peak of his abilities is to watch a wrestler who isn’t nebbish about wrestling’s place on the spectrum between theater and sport, to see a man whose strikes and submissions are vicious but beautifully embellished. When Jim Ross called his first Nakamura match, he asked how a guy whose influences were Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson could be such an ass-kicker. The answer is in matches like this: you cannot shake his belief in himself. His vision of wrestling is absolute. The only way to disprove it would be to sign him to NXT.

By the time we arrive at Wrestle Kingdom IV, Nakamura has been at the heart of the question of New Japan’s identity for a while. As the youngest IWGP Champion, he’d already beaten his opponent here, Yoshihiro Takayama, to put down a championship resuscitated from Antonio Inoki’s past to act as a rival crown, been made to save face for NJPW in the wake of Brock Lesnar abdicating from the company with the title, been part of a stable with the aim of making Masahiro Chono New Japan’s president, and reunified the NJPW and Inoki Genome Federation versions of the IWGP Championship. Here, he is the leader of the still-young Chaos stable, with the Bomaye knee strike just recently added to his arsenal. He’s a brash asshole, hanging out with my dude Toru Yano and agitating Inoki by threatening to take his original IWGP Championship as his own. He’s not the ace – that’s Hiroshi Tanahashi – but he’s not not the ace, either. He’s an unstoppable force, a cult of personality, a visionary, and a far cry from the super rookie Takayama fought in 2004.

If any of that impressed Takayama, he was slow to show it. Himself a singular figure in the world of professional wrestling and combat sports, in 2009 Takayama became just the second wrestler in history to clinch the top championships of NJPW, AJPW, and NOAH by winning the Triple Crown.This was his first NJPW match since 2006, the main event of the 1/4 show. Shinsuke Nakamura may have entered the Tokyo Dome as champion, but Takayama was, as always, Everest, a challenge Nakamura would have to summit again if he wanted to continue remaking NJPW in his own image. 

NJPW

Six years is a long time between rematches, especially for someone like Nakamura, whose evolution over that span of time this match is designed to showcase. It’s not just that Nakamura is bulkier, or that he’s grown with experience, or even that the Bomaye is more threatening to a larger man like Takayama than the Landslide or the cross armbreaker. It’s that he approaches Takayama with absolutely zero apprehension, throwing himself against Takayama with reckless abandon until what he’s doing begins to stick. He’s the champion, but, charging headlong into Takayama’s overpowering strikes, you get the sense that he’s wrestling like he’s the one with nothing to lose.

The first half of the match sees Nakamura eat shit while Takayama casually doles out violence, accentuating the brutality of his knee strikes in particular by splaying out on the canvas like a body hurled through the windshield of a car. There’s a kitchen sink knee about halfway through that’s particularly gorgeous in its brutality – “rubbery” is one way of describing it, but less in the sense of something bending and snapping back than in the way a stuntman in an old film’s stomach expands, contracts, and ripples upon taking the impact of a cannonball, something just short of witnessing flesh rendered viscera. 

This is far from a perfect match – the crowd is way too quiet, perhaps aware that Nakamura’s in no real danger of losing the title to a freelancing Takayama – but it’s a lot of fun, especially once Nakamura finds an opening with his knee strikes. It’s not as brutal as Takayama matches can be, and the disparity of size between the two means that the conditions aren’t right for the sort of unfettered artistic freeforalls Nakamura’s later Wrestle Kingdom matches, but it does point the way towards that particular aspect of Wrestle Kingdom’s peak as appointment viewing, Nakamura’s pull being such that, rather than continuing to battle Tanahashi over the role of ace, he turned the NJPW Intercontinental Championship into his own universe wherein he continued to push the boundaries of his style and test the limits of his ideology, like if the Codyverse were built around a crazy genius whose signature bump was taking a knee to the fucking face and not a quarterly earnings report granted his wish to become a human pro wrestler. The urgency necessary for this to be an undisputed classic isn’t quite there, but you can almost see the future glimmering in Nakamura’s eyes, as if he’s only just begun to truly burn.

Rating: ****