On watching old men fight while you’re getting older, too
On February 7, 1982, I came into this world in the early hours of the morning. I didn’t sleep much that night. Or the next one. Or any night for three and half years after that. I’ve successfully slept through the night maybe a dozen times since.
On February 7, 1989, my precocious little monster of a brain decided to get a head start of my existential crisis years. The day before, my parents had found me sobbing in our front hall closet, clinging to a jacket that must have represented all of the youthful joy I was about to lose, and repeatedly wailing that I didn’t want to “lose my number” because I loathed the idea of no longer being 6 so much that it physically hurt. I tried to put on a brave face for the actual number loss day, but no matter how hard I tried to embrace turning 7 — and 8 and 9, etc — I could never completely convince myself that there was anything left for me but irreversible decline.
On February 7, 2024, my chronically shitty sleep cycles and increasingly realistic fear that my best years are behind me conspired to make sure that I was wide awake and in the best/worst headspace possible to watch, live from 14 time zones away, a 50 year old professional wrestler step into the ring for the final time.
Not that there were any circumstances in which I wouldn’t be at least a little broken by Yukio Sakaguchi’s retirement. He was nothing short of a goddamned revelation to me when I returned to pro wrestling fandom after a decade-long walkabout involving recreational BJJ and Muay Thai training and professional MMA writing. I’d been worried that my newfound love of “real” fighting — and my significantly stronger knowledge of the mechanics of it — would get in the way of enjoying simulated combat when I started watching again. And then I saw this striking, handsome, lanky stranger break out one of the prettiest flying triangles I’d ever seen. Where I’d feared a dissonance between the choreographed, collaborative style I’d seen as a fan and the opposing combat I’d experienced with my own body, I found a man who has perfectly synthesized what I loved about both.
It would take an entirely separate essay/manifesto or two to explain how good Sakaguchi was at taking what was cool, visually appealing, and emotionally resonate about his past career as an MMA fighter and applying it to his new calling as a professional wrestler and why it appealed to me so much. For the purposes of this one, I’ll leave it at this: I genuinely believe he was the most talented and visionary person to ever make the leap from MMA to pro wrestling and I absolutely loved watching him use his effortlessly fluid grappling and sleek kicks to toy with his opponents. His retirement leaves a void in not just DDT but all of pro wrestling that I’m not sure anyone else can ever perfectly fill.
As much as I respect and admire his decision (a wrestler who has the opportunity to go out in still relatively good health on their own terms and actually takes it is as rare a phenomenon as Sakaguchi was a performer) and as much as I saw it coming (the man who sat backstage after his longtime stablemate and kindred spirit Saki Akai retired and told the press that “I’d love to go back 30 minutes, 1 hour, half a year or even a year back” last November was clearly not long for the ring) I was always going to be sad to see him go. Watching him go with this particular match on a day that was already bringing my feelings on the passage of time into starker focus was a whole other level of melancholic appreciation.
One of the many elements that made Sakaguchi’s feud with HARASHIMA so compelling was that it was, at heart, about possibility. The elite level mat work, striking, and psychology was great and all, but what really made their matchups tick was the knowledge that there was still more to come. Over the years, we would watch them rack up wins and losses against each other, but there was never a definitive victory or conclusion because their ultimate goals against each other remained in progress. HARASHIMA, one of the all time great professional wrestlers, a man whose name would constantly be mentioned in the same breath as Hiroshi Tanahashi if wrestling nerds weren’t so bloody weird about DDT, clearly wanted nothing more than to hang with Sakaguchi as a martial artist. Sakaguchi seemed almost as interested in beating HARASHIMA at his own game. Neither one completely succeeded, and wins usually came via each man returning to his area of expertise, but they remained remarkably good natured throughout. Hell, HARASHIMA once responded to being choked unconscious by absolutely beaming when he came to. Each loss was part of the process, another learning experience that could contribute to a longer term goal. It wasn’t over. Not in a sisyphean sense, but in a “you’ll get him next time” kind of way. There’s a lot of hope and comfort in knowing you still have time to do the things you want to do in life.
As both men hit their late 40s, the inherent promise in their encounters started to take on a new level of meaning. Every exuberant roundhouse kick to the chest both given and taken like a person half their age was a life-affirming rage against the dying of the light. It wasn’t just there’s still time. It was also we’re still here.
As I found myself on the other side of 40, I took a little solace and found a lot of inspiration in watching them still going at it, still near if not 100% in their prime. It’s a little easier to believe that whatever chunk of slowly shortening life you still have ahead of you can still offer moments of joy, success, and general non-shittiness when you can watch two handsome and cool middle-aged men beating the absolute piss out of each other.
But nothing lasts forever. My current life isn’t as bleak as I’d feared it might be when I was still holdin’ onto six as long as I could. It’s definitely not as over as the random online 20-somethings who sometimes appear to inform me that that I’m withered old bitter hag who shut up, leave her remaining writing opportunities to younger, hotter and more relevant people and die already. But I can quite clearly see my potential starting to narrow now. Fewer things are possible for me now than they were even a few years ago. Time is making decisions for me that I wish I’d had more space to figure out on my own. The opening track of The Cure’s Wild Mood Swings is hitting me harder than it used to. And the still very vital older wrestlers that I have arguably been living vicariously through to some extent are starting to have to make decisions about their own futures.
Which is how I found myself deep in my own feelings, having a lot of thoughts about the definitive conclusion to a story that once felt limitless in the wee hours of my 42nd birthday.
I’ll spare you the move-by-move and tear-by-tear breakdown of the match itself, but there are a few pertinent moments that I’d like to highlight.
The match begins the only way that a final statement on Sakaguchi’s unique career could: an extended Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu style grappling sequence. This sly and stylish feeling out process was a hallmark of his style, and a joy to watch whether you could understand what he was doing or simply thought it looked cool. He’d step into the ring in the early moments of a singles or tag bout, let whoever was on the other side try their best against him, weather it with the cool, patient, and maybe slightly bored air of a black belt sparring with an eager white belt, and then turn the tables and put them back in their place as necessary. (I’ll go to my grave believing that some of these were shoots and Sakaguchi really was just rolling with overeager students who wanted to see how well they could fare against the master this time. But I’m approaching everything that happened in this match as intentional storytelling.)
HARASHIMA was always Sakaguchi’s most eager — and slightly out there — challenger in this regard, coming at him like a man whose enthusiasm and weird ideas he probably got from YouTube tutorials slightly outweighed his not insubstantial skill. So it’s a pleasure to see him get one more crack at getting anywhere in his attempts. Especially given how much higher the stakes are for him now.
He starts off by making some moves that I think are fair to classify as rookie mistakes.
But he also displays some solid understanding of fundamentals that he uses to effectively stuff down Sakaguchi’s advances and somewhat less successfully make an attempt of his own. He also does them with a an almost Sakaguchi-esque level of calm methodology that I’m assuming he learned from his many encounters with the source.
He fares a little better with his higher level techniques this time around, too.
And in what might be the most impressive development of all for nerds like me, HARASHIMA shuts down Sakaguchi’s most high level show off move and traps him in a position we’ve seen him trying and refining for a while now.
In terms of technique, demeanour, and general coolness, it’s arguably the best that HARASHIMA has ever fared against Sakaguchi in pure grappling, but it’s a bittersweet victory. As good a note as it is to leave this part of their rivalry on, it’s hard not to wonder where they could have gone if Sakaguchi weren’t retiring. Or if they’d started this part of their game against each other earlier.
But he is and they didn’t, and so a moment of progress that would have been an incredible step toward getting him next time becomes a good enough finale.
From there, they psych themselves up for one last friendly but deadly round of life-affirming roundhouse tit kicking.
It’s all fun and games until Sakaguchi gets knocked down.
Even though he gets back up and returns the favour a few strikes later, this moment introduces a level of vulnerability to the proceedings that we haven’t seen before, knocking the wind out of the usual vibe as brutally as HARASHIMA knocked Sakaguchi off his feet. For the first time, fans are forced to confront the fact that these hard-hitting celebrations were never quite as ageless or limitless as we’d wanted to believe.
As the striking exchange comes to head, Sakaguchi appears to get the upper hand and he steels himself to take advantage of it, but HARASHIMA counters, which perfectly sets up an opportunity for his finishing move, the Somato.
But he hesitates before making the pin, no more ready for this to end than anyone not named Yukio Sakaguchi.
Sakaguchi has no time for this sentimental bullshit, so he kicks out at one.
Just because he wasn’t ready to succumb to such a dithering pin attempt doesn’t mean that he’s not ready to go, though, so he encourages HARASHIMA to try again.
This time he commits to the pin. It’s over.
And that’s it. There are no more moments where they will both get to celebrate that they’re still here and still with it. No next times. What happened in that ring can only ever be what it was, not what it can be in future matchups.
Sakaguchi didn’t get that final win he wanted. HARASHIMA won, but in the most pro wrestling way possible. Neither man got exactly what they wanted, and now they never will. But they both found a conclusion that they could live with. And take pride in.
It isn’t the end of everything. Sakaguchi is leaving the role of friendly but deadly DDT elder in the most capable hands possible. HARASHIMA is still here and still gleeful to fight another day. He can probably use that butterfly sweep against MAO soon enough if he wants to. No longer needing to be at shows, in ring shape, and in the public eye frees Sakaguchi to other things he might want out of life, too.
But for all of those possibilities to open up, others had to end. And he welcomed it with open arms.
May we all have such clarity of purpose and willingness to accept what’s past when it’s our turns.
