>>8835456Naks vs Shingo was legit MOTN but it was just balls to the wall non-stop aggression. I legit appreciate that and it is a good take. I also get the point about sloppiness, Naito has been dusted for years and when I stopped watch the Nooj he was struggling to Destinos in any match. Kenoh is 38 years old, tubby and gets gassed out in most matches.
Objectively you have the correct opinion.
However I would like to offer a counterpoint. The emotion and the characterization that both Naito and Kenoh put into that match was top notch. Both of them are past their primes and can't go like they used to. However they supplemented it with their personalities which put it above Shingo/Nakajima. I would even argue that it was the false starts, the stutter-steps, and the pull offs that made the match superior.
Post Inoki NJPW has tried to lean away from Inokism hard in a desperate attempt to separate themselves from the worked shoot nature of the product Inoki wanted to create.
I would argue that it is in those errors that the soul of wrestling can be found.
If Inokism was the attempt to present a work as if it was a shoot than wouldn't the most shoot thing they could do would to be to present work as shoot in spite of it's visible worked flaws? No real fight is clean and smooth. No fight in the history of man has been a slick production without errors or pauses. Even the one hit KO matches in modern MMA end up looking sloppy by nature of simple human anatomy not conforming to some abstract ideal. The nature of an engaging fight comes not from it's perfections but, I would posit, from how the two fighter's capitalize on the flaws of one another. The uniqueness of puro and what truly separates it from all other forms combat sports is their willingness to embrace that most singular of Japanese of concepts, wabi-sabi; the perfection to be found in imperfection. The rejection of the perfect and the embrace of the organic is, in my perception, the true nature of puro.
