The Crush Gals EXPLODE ... and the Fans Along With Them

Wrestling each other in an AJW ring for the last time, Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka encounter a crowd determined to let them know how much they love them.

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For me, it’s about the streamers

For most of my life, I’ve traveled in circles where I’m the odd woman out for loving professional wrestling. I don’t have a complex about it, I just happened to be a poet or an office drone or a person who worked at a record/comic book store with interests outside of records and comic books. Nobody finds my interest in the thing all that surprising or shameful or whatever. Wrestling is slowly moving beyond that kind of public derision, but it’s been at least a decade since anybody cared.

But sometimes someone would ask, and rather than explaining the whole shebang to them in one go, I’d play them a match. My go-tos were Terry Funk vs. Atsushi Onita in an Exploding Cage Match, or whatever AJW match I remembered viewing and enjoying last. They’re so different than what most non-watchers in this country assume wrestling to be. They’re not American, for one, and they exude a sense of danger that succeeds in unsettling a novice viewer from the notion that wrestling is fake, which is really just another word for safe.

Once you strip that away, you can get to the heart of what professional wrestling is really about:

Emotion. 

One of the most cited of film critic Roger Ebert’s later maxisms is the idea that movies are machines that generate empathy. I’ve always liked that line as a romanticized way of looking at narrative storytelling – most movies are machines intended to generate money. The same is true of professional wrestling, I think. Yes, a significant amount of it is tasked with filling time or moving pieces across the board to where they need to be in a few weeks or months, but when it clicks, when wrestling feels like a triumph of art over commerce, it is because you can feel the emotional weight of the endeavor, blow for blow, suplex for suplex, bomb for (sometimes literal) bomb. 

So yeah, matches like this are where I begin, because it’s not me explaining how wrestling works on a crowd via this or that theory about kayfabe or suspension of disbelief, it is two people beating the shit out of each other before a clearly moved, teary-eyed crowd. See the wrestling, hear the cries. Tell me that’s not love.

I am less of an historian than I am a garbage collector, so what I can tell you about The Crush Gals hold over Japanese culture at its peak is this: I own three of their albums and a cute little bubble journal that I will never in 100 years sully with my terrible handwriting. Yes, after all of that muckety muck about loveI am speaking in terms of crass commercialism, but The Crush Gals were more than a popular wrestling tag team. They were media entities, celebrities beyond the ken of most professional wrestlers who enjoyed (and suffered from) the kind of popularity usually reserved for pop stars. Because they were pop stars.

Here, they are professional rivals, two women nearing All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling’s mandatory retirement age while still wrestling for the promotion’s top prize. This is neither Lioness Asuka or Chigusa Nagayo’s retirement match, in AJW or elsewhere, but it is a curio: the last time The Crush Gals will wrestle each other in AJW. It is a big deal, and the fans act accordingly.

I am focusing on the vibe of this match as opposed to its content for a couple of reasons, the first of which being that my most recent viewing took place in my car while I waited four and a half hours for the roadside assistance guy to come out and replace my blown out tire. Paying $100 for the privilege of wasting a whole-ass day because the jack that came with your car failed isn’t fun, and the dimly lit screen of an iPhone in low power mode isn’t ideal either. 

But what Nagayo and Asuka do here is test each other as respected equals – theirs is not some messy melodrama, but the competitive drama of real sports. It’s a lot of fun, particularly things like the early headlock sequence or the instances where the half-crab are employed are a lot of fun, maybe gritty enough to get around Joseph’s well-reasoned gripe with AJW limbwork, and both women spend a lot of their time kicking the hell out of each other. My favorite spot in the match was really a bit of phenomenal camerawork, where Nagayo found herself in a dragon sleeper, making it to the rope finger-by-finger.

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But, sitting in a church parking lot at 9:45pm, I could hear and feel how the crowd responded to all of this. Loudly. Passionately. Like an audience who knows that this is the beginning of goodbye for two wrestlers whose records they bought and talk show appearances they’d watch. They weren’t just watching a good title match, they were watching the end of ubiquity, of two wrestlers they’d poured so much of themselves into over the years.

The crowd took me to where I needed to be last night and this afternoon, which is to say in the glow of something lovely and organic. Because of them, moves aren’t just moves – they’re massive shifts of momentum or desperate acts of control. Neither of the Gals take wild swings – my notes actually posit that Asuka might have the safest piledriver I’ve ever seen, and she hits two out of the match’s generous three – but in doing so they manage to do something you normally only see at comically large scale, like Toronto turning Hulk Hogan babyface against The Rock – they let the crowd create the narrative.

That narrative is one of celebration, equal parts reveling in the spirit of competition and thanking two wrestlers for everything they’ve done. It’s so genuine, man – the love a wrestling crowd is capable of. Nobody in that arena has a reason to fake their interest or voice their discontent. Everybody knows that both competitors still have a lot to give, right down to Asuka clinching the win after some breathless back and forth that both seem fine with after the bell. But this is one woman’s last shot at a championship that defines her profession and another’s last run with it. 

In wrestling, there is respect and there is love. The crowd here is showing the later. In a way, they are the machine that generates empathy. And it starts with the streamers.

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