The huge dude covered from head to toe in muscles on muscles just won. He had just beaten the young Japanese guy who now lay on the floor before him.
The poor kid had a nice, agreeable-looking face and came out earlier that night to the DragonBall Z theme, which was enough to get the audience to cheer for him. The big man – simply, ominously named The Bodyguard, and couldn’t have been more than 5’8” but definitely more than made up for it by being as jacked as a Renaissance statue – turned him inside out with a big-time running lariat for the three count.
The Bodyguard wasn’t quite happy with just that, though. He went to pummel the young guy, named Kuroshio, in a ground-and-pound sequence that the latter just literally took lying down. This went on for a few moments until former WWE wrestler Tajiri, who had wrestled the first match of the evening, came in to make the save. Tajiri rolled into the ring and promptly spit his world-famous green mist to the absolute explosion of the crowd in the Ynares Sports Arena.
Soon after that, Akira, Tajiri’s opponent earlier in the night, ran right in to even the odds and make it a two-on-two brawl. All we needed, joked the savvy fans in the audience (which were… pretty much 90% of the crowd), was the presence of former SmackDown General Manager Teddy Long to make the inevitable tag team match official – which it did, by the way, because wrestling logic!
The brawl spilled to the outside, over to our territory of ringside, and there were no guardrails whatsoever protecting the fans from the wrestlers, and vice versa. Tajiri and Akira waged war right beside us, and Akira knocked Tajiri right into my friend Stan, who caught him from falling.
“Dude, you just took a bump!” I told him after the wrestlers had moved away and he’d dusted himself off a little bit.
“I did?” he asked. “Oh, yeah! Awesome!” High five.
Okay, I have to admit that what just happened to Stan wasn’t exactly a bump, but in the chaos, I thought that Stan had been pushed to the floor. It might have very well been, though – the fight was taken right to us, and that’s a very big deal! For a quick moment, he was part of the theatrics as an extra, complicit in the play that was unfolding at our space of the show; the play that almost everyone in the arena tonight knows is nothing but an elaborate farce.
There’s magic in every pro wrestling show, you see. It’s a magic show in more ways than one. There’s illusion, there’s misdirection, and most importantly, there’s the actual magic that happens, but you won’t be able to witness it if you just sit there and voluntarily not buy into the whole thing. For the rest of us who implicitly conform to wrestling’s social contract, however, this kind of thing was nirvana.
It was euphoria, from top to bottom – especially for a country that hasn’t seen a live show in two years.
***
There were no expectations in the short drive from the Shangri-La Plaza to the Ynares Sports Arena. There was music, there was conversation about music and radio and its inane voice-acted commercials, but there were no expectations about the wrestling show Stan (who is my best friend in all things wrestling) and I were on our way to see. On the agenda that evening was Joshi+Jam Manila, a strangely Engrish-named live wrestling event presented by the Japanese promotion REINA Joshi Puroresu.
Okay, okay, we set one expectation: that we would be having fun at the show, because hey, it was live pro wrestling. The action, once again, would be up close. We hadn’t been to a show in two years, and yes, that’s way too long.
It was a blanket expectation because we didn’t know what else would be going on that night. The first time I heard about the show was through a friend asking Filipino-American TNA wrestler Manik (better known to everyone else as TJ Perkins) if he’d heard about the show in Manila, which was going to be for the benefit of those affected by Typhoon Yolanda. Stan first heard about it through a co-worker whose company was in the running to be a co-presenter. Other than that, there was very little word about it going around, even on the week of the show itself.
That’s obviously terrible marketing. Admittedly, it wasn’t the most mainstream of events, but I’m sure they could’ve drawn in some more casual fans by promoting Tajiri and at least trying to promote Filipina-Japanese triple champ Syuri, for whom the show was a homecoming of sorts. Judging from the reactions from people I knew were casual wrestling fans earlier in their lives, Tajiri would’ve drawn a few more heads to the show. It didn’t hurt that Joshi+Jam was more than accessible by being very cheap than what we were used to paying for live wrestling.
If there was one thing we knew, it’s that it was going to feature more women’s wrestling than your usual wrestling show would – joshi is Japanese for female wrestling. But beyond headliners Tajiri and tough-as-nails American-Korean wrestler Mia Yim, we didn’t know the majority of the wrestlers who came over (most of them were from Japan, and not only is puroresu just not mainstream outside Japan, but even your scribe today can’t keep tabs of all the wrestling that goes on in the world). It’s slightly embarrassing that we didn’t even really know who Syuri was until we saw her on all the promotional material for the event, to think that this was her tour.
That wouldn’t be the only embarrassment of the night, though. We rolled into the parking lot of the Arena – a modest but once-glorious establishment from where PBA games used to be broadcast – to catch a line that only extended some mere meters from the door. Definitely not a round-the-block wait that could see a riot break out at a drop of a hat.
That was okay with us, we suppose, as we could then reason this whole thing out as an intimate event for a good number of actual wrestling fans, their plus-ones, Syuri’s family in the Philippines, and media people who most likely could not care less about what was going on, but had to be there anyway.
The less-than-stellar gate numbers, however, would go on to make the whole set-up at the Arena seem like an exercise in overkill. Take your average high school basketball gym, give it a little more room on all sides for a lot of bleachers, and set up a wrestling ring (a flimsy one, at that) right in the middle. Now, add in the roughly hundred or so people who showed up after having bought tickets of differing seat levels, and consider that the gym will never be packed tonight, so everyone gets to sit at ringside, leaving the bleachers empty and the entire stadium looking absolutely barren. It all looked kind of sad, to be honest.
As a Filipino wrestling fan, I felt ashamed – a little illogically, I’ll have to admit – for the entire country. In my mind, nobody should cross a sea to draw that kind of house; I felt a little sorry for the wrestlers that that’s all there was. On the other hand, who was I to guess what they were thinking? For all I knew, they didn’t mind that the attendance was so… well, unexpectedly low.
But that’s all right – in professional wrestling, the smallest crowds are usually the loudest.
And my God, was the volume turned up. Every move, from the biggest of throws down to the littlest of punches, seemed to be accounted for. Even moves and sequences that were visibly sloppy still received notable pops. The crowd easily went into the sacred chants of “Holy shit!” and “This is awesome!” with little reservation - the first time the audience bust out into a “This is awesome,” I turned to Stan and asked, “Already?”
What more, then, the impressive grapples and fancy strikes and high-flying maneuvers that were unleashed right in front of us? By the time Tajiri hit his world-famous Buzzsaw Kick to a kneeling Akira, these Hapon who’d taken the time to come over had us all right in the palm of their hands.
***
The thing is, stoking a red-hot atmosphere that night didn’t take much, despite all its shortcomings. It didn’t take a five-star mat classic or a crazy hardcore match full of wild spots to win this small Filipino crowd over. All it took was actual pro wrestling; all happening right in front of us, when we were used to watching it almost exclusively through a cold, blue screen.
And I can’t blame them. If you understand what we Filipino wrestling fans have to go through just to get our fixes – all the waking up early to waste Monday mornings that should be productive just to catch an unreliable stream of a PPV, trying to (futilely) avoid spoilers on the internet if you can’t watch those same shows live, religiously downloading torrents of shows, scouring torrent sites for indy wrestling shows, surviving the tape-delay broadcasts on local television – you can’t blame us for being this hyped up either.
The WWFX guys who came over back in 2012 knew this. They were midcard talents (upper midcard at best in the case of John Morrison) who were treated like main eventers all because they had the advantage of being recognizable thanks to the WWE, and they were smart enough to tap the Philippines as their first stop. The crowd two years ago was pretty much the same as the crowd in 2014.
In his write-up about the show for the Philippine Star, Stan said that Joshi+Jam was a step forward for wrestling in the Philippines. It’s true, but as a fanbase, we’ll also need to proceed with caution.
My only hope is that wrestling promotions who might start seeing this country as a promising market to make a quick buck (assuming, of course, that they’ve got enough drawing power) don’t abuse the love Filipino fans readily give. Yes, we don’t see enough wrestling shows up close, but that doesn’t mean they can come over and put on a mediocre show.
Eventually, we’re gonna need to get the most bang for our buck. String a loyal audience on long enough and they’ll start to see right through you.
***
The main event saw the triple champion and hometown hero Syuri, who enters and exits her matches carrying three (three!) championship belts a la Pacquiao, scoring a clean pinfall victory against Mia Yim. Syuri retains all three titles in the win.
It was a good move to put Syuri’s championships on the line - title defenses automatically inject more drama into a match because the stakes are already raised, even if it can easily be predicted that the champion will retain. (Titles rarely change hands in house shows, which Joshi+Jam was.)
Mia played an excellent heel, and all throughout her performance it seemed like she was the only one who truly understood what it meant to be a villain. The other bad guys who came out earlier tried to act evil, but they all eventually ended up pandering to the Filipino crowd that loved everything. Mia stayed true and did none of those even when the crowd tried to love her (and she was indeed lovable, arguably being the most attractive female on the card).
She tried her best to put the champion away, even resorting to a piledriver – a move no mere mortal is able to withstand – but that didn’t work. Syuri managed to come back from that and win decisively, establishing the fact that she was indeed extraordinary.
It was a fitting end, when you think about it. It was a good finish. It wasn’t excessively booked; there were hardly any rapid, back-to-back exchanges for spots to close the match. It was a simple story of overcoming the odds from a competent challenger, and it was awesome.
And after all that, we did feel awesome. We were so pumped up after the show and after getting to say hi to all the wrestlers backstage that we decided to try and record our thoughts into a maiden podcast (which may be too late now, but that’s a story for another day). We just couldn’t go home quietly.
I could say all the bad things I want about this show, but in the end, it was and always is great to get caught up in the instant magic of wrestling, to feel that one-of-a-kind electricity of a wrestling crowd. It’s always worth it to let the inner child loose in the fun world created by everyone’s excitement.
It’s a world that won’t be there come morning, not until the next time these people come around. We might as well, then, leave it all in the ring that night.
Images courtesy of Stan Sy.
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You can follow Ro on Twitter at @roiswar, or you can ask him anything on his Ask.fm page. (Hint: please ask him about wrestling.)