Big Van Walter (c) vs Yoshihito Sasaki
wXw Unified World Wrestling Championship
taped 10/03/2011, aired 10/22/2011
Nightstyle, Mülheim, Germany
(reviewed 09/09/2018) Borderline great and all the way dumb. This match is chock full of shit that I hate (Burning Hammer, limb/body work that goes nowhere after two minutes, superplex no sells, etc.) but as with a previous meeting between these two, there’s a certain enmity here that smooths out most of those bumps. After being quite a big fan of it a few years ago I’ve mostly grown to loathe this particular chop trading-heavy brand of dumb wrestling but you never know what a heaping helping of hate will do to a match. In general there’s also a level of energy here that I’ve found lacking in recent examples of this type of match in NJPW or BJW or elsewhere. Still, there are things that weigh heavy on me here. This match is exceedingly one note and while that singular note might often be pretty spectacular, it also gets dull by the end and I’m certain that contributed to some of the more muted reactions to late match kickouts. In addition to that Sasaki shows up Walter massively with a level of fire and poise that the younger man simply can’t match. It helps to remember that Walter’s barely into his mid twenties yet and has rarely ever had to keep up this sort of pace, but it still stands out in a big way. But hey, he took maybe a half dozen gross clotheslines from one of the heaviest hitters around and managed to fire off a few good ones of his own, so I imagine most going out of their way to watch this one will wind up happy.
HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO SHAWN VS TAKER FROM WM25: One of my big sticking points in this project thus far is how hard the biggest spots from Shawn/Taker do hit, namely the two nasty dives and the chokeslam that follows them. While this match certainly made me gasp more than Shawn/Taker ever did, it fails to really build towards it finish in the way that the histrionic kickouts of the Mania match did. Here we just have a series of bombs that go off one after the other until eventually one becomes the final explosion. That’s perfectly fine on its own sometimes (we often just call those ‘fireworks’) but it’s not exactly compelling. Then again the story of Shawn/Taker isn’t all that compelling either. This is a close call for me but in the end I think what it comes down to is the wasted space in this wXw title match. While they’re fairly brief, there are sequences in this match where Sasaki targets Walter’s leg and the champ goes after the challenger’s back in ways that aren’t at all meaningful in the long term. Moreso than just being pointless filler, I resent how these ideas were tossed aside when they could have brought an interesting wrinkle to what is already an enjoyable smashmouth formula. Specifically introducing the beginnings of a clever idea to your story only to throw it away for no real reason is worse to me than constructing a hamfisted, half-baked story that at least starts as it means to go on.
VERDICT: Barely worse than Shawn Michaels vs The Undertaker from WrestleMania 25
Brock Hates Wrestling 