Dragon Gate: The Little Engine That Could, Part II

This is Part two of the second in a four-promotion series of introductions to Japanese promotions For part one on Dragon Gate, click here.

What was CIMA’s big mistake? Simple: CIMA decided to adopt the WWE-style of main event wrestling for his ODG title defenses.

If that doesn’t sound like a bad idea to you, and you’re picturing epics with the likes of Steve Austin & The Rock, Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker, Kurt Angle when he was still sane, etc., let me explain why it was a terrible decision.

When you watch Dragon Gate, you watch it because it’s different. That differentness involves wrestling matches at a fast pace; performing breathtaking maneuvers; crazy submissions that look like something you’d never, ever want any part of.  This is why you watch DG.  So when you tune into the Main Event, and see CIMA, one of the forerunners for the very style that makes DG so unique, so special, and he’s wasting 15 minutes slowly building a match – and not even doing it well! – you cringe, and wonder why you’re even bothering watching.

Through six title defenses, including matches the likes of Shingo Takagi, Naruki Doi, and Masato Yoshino (all of whom I will touch on later; Shingo and Doi are very exciting, and Yoshino is literally the fastest-working wrestler in the World), CIMA managed to map out and execute the type of matches that I could only equate to popping a massive balloon.

At the time, Doi was an up-and-coming wrestler who was getting close to being “there”…weak match.  The match with Shingo was okay, fine even.  But it should have been an MOTYC.  Shingo is like the DG version of KENTA, combining speed, power, and sheer rage in this incredible package that makes me wanna fly several thousand miles and go pay money to see him live.  Yoshino is as I said, the fastest-working wrestler in the World.  He is the epitome of “Instant offence,” and yet CIMA managed to only have a very average match with him, stifling his speed and emotionally taking the viewers out of the match.

Because of this style, there became a very solid wave of backlash against CIMA, with many fans saying that it was time for someone new to carry the company. This is not a best-case scenario for the main draw of the company.  At this point, for better or worse, life happened, as it often tends to do.

CIMA had suffered a serious back injury (and having seen pictures of what his spine looked like, um, wow, ewww, scary stuff).  After gutting his way through matches for as long as he could, he finally relinquished the ODG title.  He didn’t wrestle from May 6^th, 2008 until December 28^th, 2008 in a tag match where he teamed up with Liger ironically enough (they too have a good relationship away from the ring).  This injury opened the door for some new blood, and it didn’t get any newer than Shingo Takagi and BxB Hulk.

You know about Shingo, so let’s Hulk up a little, shall we?  Hulk came up in the Magnum TOKYO crew, and as such his entrance is done in the same style…and I love it!  Girls dancing, lights flashing, Hulk doing his best “Alex Wright” impression a la Magnum.  Just great frigging stuff.

Before CIMA relinquished the ODG, Shingo & Hulk battled to a 60 minute draw for the #1 contendership.  Having seen the 39-plus minutes shown on Dragon Gate’s Infinity program, what was seen was a helluva match if you are into the DG style (speed, massive overkill with finishers being kicked out of, and the like).  This led to a rematch, this time for the vacant ODG Title at a huge DG PPV event at Kobe World Hall, where DG runs many of its biggest events.

This time, it took Shingo just under 37 minutes to put Hulk away, which came as no surprise since Shingo had a little more experience and was seen as being more ready for the role.  Which isn’t to discount Hulk, who can do some spectacular things in the ring – things that would make Evan Bourne blush.

Shingo’s reign was somewhat uneven.  CIMA was still a draw despite the backlash (remember, he only wrestled the WWE style in his singles title matches, so the rest of the time he was his usual self), so his being out didn’t help anything.  Shingo carried on the WWE-style Main Events, which was no shock because CIMA is a player in management.  It also didn’t help that Shingo’s first defense was a total hot-shotting of what could be a money match down the road, with the completely insane and gassed-to-hell Cyber Kong, DG’s version of a super heavyweight monster.  Kong simply hasn’t been around long enough, and had virtually zero singles match victories (again, in Japan, not a lot of singles matches happen), and the match got very little play.

Next up was another pointless match, this time vs TAKA Michinoku.  What’s wrong with TAKA you ask?  Well true, he has the WWE legitimacy that Japanese companies love because their fans eat it up.  But 2008 TAKA?  Not 1997 TAKA by any stretch.  He doesn’t kill himself in the ring.  He wrestles a poor-man’s Eddy Guerrero heel style, that is much more grating than great.

The lead-up to it was so frustrating to watch that I could barely get through the six-mans that TAKA was in.  His pathetic heel tactics only took away his legitimacy in my eyes, and knowing that there was no way DG would put the title on him, I found the title match & the whole situation to be rather pointless.  So it was nice when TAKA wrestled decently in the ODG match, though nothing that would make you compare it to the TAKA/Sasuke matches in the WWF in 1997.

Next up, thankfully, was a revelation of a bout.  Shingo would be facing Susumu Yokosuka (the aforementioned Yokosuka who CIMA was beating on earlier in the article) in the Main Event of DG’s big November show.

Yokosuka, a former ODG Champion, had been a fixture of the tag scene in DG for a couple of years now, so I wasn’t familiar with his abilities as a singles wrestler (it’s so easy to hide weaknesses in a tag team, just ask Stevie Ray).

Well, it turns out that in a singles match, Yokosuka is a more entertaining version of Dean Malenko.  The WWE-style Main Event actually worked here, because Yokosuka made things logical, made the work make sense.  Ironically enough, they also seemed to pick up the pace a little faster here than in past ODG matches.  By the end of things, even though I am a huge Shingo fan, I was hoping that Yokosuka would take the title (which he didn’t).  The match had no problem earning a spot in my Top-20 for 2008.

In the Main Event of the December PPV, Shingo dropped the ODG Title, in a very good match, to Naruki Doi. Doi has been the ODG Champion ever since, and his reign seems to be better-received than Shingo’s was.  Doi even, somehow, miraculously pulled out a quality, legitimately good title match out of Akebono (remember the sumo sh*t vs Big Show at WrestleMania a few years back? Ya, that guy).  For that alone, Doi should get play as the Tokyo Sports MVP award (Top Wrestler in Japan).

CIMA has successfully recovered from his back injury, and along with Doi and Shingo, has been near or at the top of the DG scene, including a recent ODG match with Doi (I haven’t seen it yet, but have high hopes).

For the most part, the future looks bright for DG.  So long as they keep doing what they’re doing, their fans have continued to be into the product – the flash, the pretty boys with the abs, the unique style that attracts people who don’t follow the major heavyweight promotions.  However, other promotions in Japan do not give Dragon Gate the respect that a company that draws what DG does would normally get.

In 2008, Pro Wrestling NOAH, who has worked several times with DG (including my 2008 MOTY, an absolutely epic KENTA vs Naruki Doi match that I am hoping against hope will be re-matched now that Doi is ODG Champion), blamed Dragon Gate for the poor draw that the joint DG/RoH show did last summer (the DG/RoH show drew 600, whereas the NOAH/RoH show drew 1000), which caused the dissolving of a three year relationship between Dragon Gate & Ring of Honor (for the record, Gabe Sapolsky went to bat for DG & tried to keep them in the loop; one of the many reasons RoH Owner Cary Silkin fired him, and Sapolsky is now booking for a  new company…).

Another example of disrespect was a big summit in the wake of NOAH boss and legend Mitsuharu Misawa’s passing in June.

Former New Japan mainstay Hiroshi Hase, now a member of Parliament with the LDP (the longtime ruling political party in Japan), invited the major players of Puroresu to a summit where they would discuss ways to make sure that what happened to Misawa would never again happen.

Among those invited were NOAH’s Ryu Nakata, New Japan President Naoki Sugabayashi, a famous Japanese medical trainer, an unnamed person, and All Japan President and legend Keiji Mutoh.  The only major company in Japan not represented was Dragon Gate.  If they didn’t want to invite any of DG’s behind-the-scenes bosses, I could understand that (NOT GETTING INTO IT!).  But they could have easily invited CIMA, especially considering some of the insane bumps that DG workers take (again, CIMA’s back exam looked unlike anything I had ever seen before).

DG also encountered some incredibly bad publicity in Japan earlier this year.  The DG Dojo has a pet monkey, and through posts made on various wrestlers’ blogs, it came to light that the monkey had been abused.  After much confusion as to who did what, it seemed that RYOMA, a rookie on the DG roster this year, was the leader in the abuse to the monkey.  DG veteran Ken’ichiro Arai first brought the abuse to light, and CIMA took the monkey, who he had originally brought to the Dojo to be a pet, to his parents’ home to recuperate.  This did nothing to help Dragon Gate in the eyes of fans, and with all the confusion, there was some concern that other young wrestlers with more of a veteran status on the roster were also involved, though nothing was proven.  At the very least, it again shone a positive light on Ken Arai and CIMA, who I’ve only ever heard great things about.

All-in-all, so long as nothing like the monkey abuse incident happens again, Dragon Gate’s future seems bright.  Their gates are strong, their Main Event scene is stacked with young vets (CIMA is only 32 in November), top young wrestlers (Doi, Shingo, Yoshino), with more to come in the future (Hulk and the latest DG super-heel, Yamato), things couldn’t look brighter.  Which means that it is the perfect time for Dragon Gate to again think outside-the-box.  To do something that no other Japanese promotion has ever been able to do (and New Japan has tried).

Dragon Gate USA…Anything Is Possible.