UWF 24/07/1989 - FIGHTING SQUARE HAKATA (13/31)

UWF Fighting Square Hakata
Hakata Star Lanes, Fukuoka
24th July, 1989
att. 4000

Clutching a dozen or so random bootleg selections purchased from the wrestling VHS shop in the Colliseum on Church St. in Manchester (now: Light Aparthotel), I opted to watch the one that I hadn't heard anything about. It was this show that I am about to review the first hour of - I know it exists in full because on that rainy day at the turn of the century I sat through the whole thing, rapt. 

Proust watching Ronda Rousey armbar people

Seeing Fighting Square Hakata in approximately 2001 wouldn't change my life and seeing it now doesn't have some kind of Proustian effect, but it did offer a taste of something I've subtly hoped for in wrestling ever since: not shoot-style as such but a glimpse of the real, unmediated as possible, slicing through the artifice. 

UWF 25/10/1989 - FIGHTING ART (18/31)

UWF Fighting Art
Sports Centre, Nakajima
25th October 1989
att. 5600

To go 'inside the curtain' (which is the meaning of the top division in sumo known as Makuuchi (幕内), referring to the roped-off area these champion athletes would wait in prior to performance, I believe 'curtain' is 'maku' as the third tier is 'makushita', meaning 'beneath the curtain'. Watch sumo, it is excellent) momentarily this is the show that I had feared watching the most ahead of time for reasons that will become, hopefully, apparent during the writing of this entry.

And to go even further inside that curtain like, perhaps, ha ha (does knowing cultural studies lecturer positional adjustment) the recent season of Twin Peaks (imo serious ten out of ten bestoftelly thanks) this entry reverts to the initial style of watching the show and sort-of remembering it which is sometimes stylistically more satisfying but perhaps less involved and perhaps emotionally and factually false. We shall see, won't we? (EDIT: I wrote this intro way before I watched it and eventually I managed to get to a point where I could live-type the edition, rendering this paragraph mostly redundant except aesthetically which is to say not redundant at all)

UWF 04/05/1989 - MAY HISTORY 1ST (10/31)

UWF May History 1st
Osaka Stadium, Osaka
4th May 1989
att. 23000

Whatever you think of Akira Maeda's history of surly non-cooperation or weird booking or the unusual fake-fighting-but-more-real-than-other-fake-fighting style his company/ies offer(s) up you have to admit that 23000 people in a baseball stadium to watch a wrestling company still not 1 year old is incredible. Please, admit it, using the comments below.

Now to lift the lid on the writerly process a little. Most weeks I sort of watch the shows in sections and write about them mostly from memory and a few scribbled notes, inserting historical and biographical data to keep things contextual. This one is going to be different as, for a change, I am going to type along with the show in-running on a separate screen. No idea how this is going to turn out. I could find myself halfway down a side road when someone breaks out something incredible. To worry about that later.

UWF 10/01/1989 - DYNAMISM (07/31)

UWF Dynamism

Budokan, Tokyo
10th January 1989
att. 14130

NINETEEN EIGHTY-NINE!
The number! Another summer (get down)
Sound of the funky drummer
Maeda hittin' your heart cause I know you no sold!
(link)

To the sound of TA-KA-DA! TA-KA-DA! we emerge into one of the sickest opening montages ever attempted by a pro-wrestling company:

UWF 10/11/1988 - FIGHTING NETWORK 2ND (05/31)

UWF Fighting Network 2nd
Tsuyuhasi Sports Centre, Nagoya
10th November 1988
att. 5000

UWF UWF UWF UWF UWF comes the logo spinning out of blackness YES but resplendent with a BLUENESS the blueness of the sky that UWF has launched cleanly into with a vision of a wrestling so pure that both wrestling and sport itself after this date is changed FOREVER.

pls. add motion blur in post

No parade takes place today and entrances are clipped. But in this spartan aesthetic we find succour in a long black and white back and forth between our main eventers and top two names Nobuhiko Takada (who looks dour and pensive in his comments, as if to say 'if I lose this one then I am Yamazaki'd for the rest of my days') and Akira Maeda (who looks Apollonian, distanced, kingly, expecting to decimate as Maeda does).