Want more wrestling news, rumors, and results? Be sure to visit PWInsider.com and PWInsiderXtra.com.
The show opens with a Johnny Gargano promo, and he talks about how all the Japanese stables want American representatives and then puts himself over as DGUSA's hottest free agent. He says he's going to sit back and enjoy the show before deciding which faction he wants to join.
The opening match saw Masaaki Mochizuki take on Akira Tozawa in a match that is notable for featuring both the oldest and youngest wrestlers on the Dragon Gate roster. Mochizuki is kind of like the Fit Finlay of the Dragon Gate roster, he's a grizzled older veteran who is stiff as hell and always has great matches. Fortunately, he does not have a midget accompanying him to the ring. He does, however, have a lot of really nasty kicks which he uses to beat up poor Tozawa. Tozawa gets some token offense in, including a really nice bridging German Suplex, but in the end Mochizuki litteraly just gives him a high kick to the head to knock him out and pin him.
We go backstage to Lenny Leonard and Chikarson as they run down the top matches on tonight's event, and then we're off to the second match as Gran Akuma of Kamikaze USA faces Tyson Dux. As I pointed out in my Open The Northern Gate review, Dux is local to the Toronto area and has been in the business a lot longer than you'd guess just looking at him. He's in great shape and is a terrific wrestler, and I really think he'd do well for himself if he got a shot in either DGUSA or ROH as a regular. Akuma, on the other hand, I see definite potential in as a badass, but he just doesn't have that killer instinct I think he needs to really put himself over the top. He comes out looking like a badass karate dude, but all his strikes look really soft, and a lot of times he goes beyond being methodical and gets to the point of moving as slow as molasses. I would really like to see him just come out and viciously destroy somebody one day, I think that would do more for him than being Kamikaze USA's henchman, quite frankly. In any event, Akuma and Dux have a rollup exchange and Akuma uses a handful of tights on a schoolboy to get the win.
Next up is a No DQ Match pitting Jimmy Jacobs against Jon Moxley, the next step in what started out as a Jacobs-Brian Kendrick feud with Moxley joining up with Kendrick after the title tournament, but once Jacobs bounced Kendrick from the company, Moxley was left on his own and wanted to get revenge on Jacobs for his friend while also getting the chance to enjoy beating up Jacobs for himself. They did lay a beating on each other here, but didn't get too out of control since they were building to more brutal matches down the line (including the awesome I Quit Match at the iPPV last month), but this match told a great story where Moxley took advantage of the No DQ stipulation as any good heel would: by having his goons Gran Akuma and Akira Tozawa run in and beat Jacobs down, allowing him to get an easy win. BxB Hulk ran out and made the save and again offered Jacobs a World-1 shirt in hopes that he would join the group, but Jacobs blew him off and walked out again. Another good storyline element: Jacobs had spent years relying on various people: BJ Whitmer, Brent Albright, Age Of The Fall, but now he wants to prove that he's good enough to do it on his own and will refuse any help offered to him.
The next bout saw Mike Quackenbush & Jigsaw of CHIKARA Sekigun face off with Naruki Doi & PAC, representing World-1. Total Lucha match and I think we all know by now how I feel about those kinds of matches. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the athletics and they do pull off some cool moves, but it's impossible to build heat when someone can just come in at any time without needing to tag, and you have guys putting themselves into contrived spots to take moves, or the referee randomely stopping counting because someone's slow hitting some fancy move to break a fall. Doi and PAC go over after Doi hits the Doi Fives and the Wacky Guitar sliding kick on Jigsaw for the win. After the match, Mike Quackenbush calls out YAMATO and challenges him to settle the feud once and for all, but while he's busy paying attention to YAMATO, Akira Tozawa and Gran Akuma come in out of the crowd and attack the CHIKARA guys and hold both of them so YAMATO can kick them in the Johnson. I liked the setup for the blowoff match at the First Anniversary Show, but hated the rest.
Before our next match, we head out to the parking garage where he's calling Moxley out and telling him to fight him without his Kamikaze USA goons, because he doesn't need anybody backing him up.
We head back into the building, where Lenny Leonard tells the fans that they held a seminar earlier tonight, and two guys made such an impression that DGUSA wanted to give them an opportunity and let them open up the second half. Those two men are Rip Impact and Johnny Wave, and they're going to get their big opportunity RIGHT NO....oh wait, no they won't. Brodie Lee comes running out before the match and destroys both of them, then grabs a microphone and informs Dragon Gate USA that he's only going to say this once: he's the biggest, baddest guy in the locker room and he'll take on anyone. Nobody comes out of the locker room, so I guess Brodie's going to have to wait until another day. Great stuff, and don't feel too bad for the tryout guys, I know at least Rip Impact got more matches on Bonus Cards later on, so it's not like he just came out, got killed, and was done.
We go to Mike Quackenbush and Jigsaw back in the men's room (which I guess would be the ideal place to examine the damage YAMATO caused after their match), and they're understandably upset at what went down yet again. Quack says now they know the rules, and it's time to end this.
Time for some of that awesome Dragon Gate tag team action, as YAMATO & Shingo (Kamikaze USA) take on CIMA & Dragon Kid (Warriors). I gotta be honest, I can sit here watching Dragon Gate tag matches all day because it's really on a level all of its own. In this case, there's an added element of underlying heat since Shingo turned on Dragon Kid to join YAMATO and form Kamikaze USA, and after another fast paced, hard hitting tag match, it came down to those two guys for the last several minutes. Shingo hit his version of the Here It Is Driver and Dragon Kid kicked out but was visibly hurt, and Shingo kept up the attack with more stiff shots and finally finished Dragon Kid with a wrist clutch version of the Death Valley Driver off the top rope that made for a great visual and a dramatic finish. Now Kamikaze USA has all the momentum going into their match with CHIKARA Sekigun at the Annversary Show.
Backstage, Johnny Gargano is bouncing off the walls with excitement over the match we just saw, but says there's still the main event before he can make his decision about which group he'll offer his services to.
Speaking of said main event, it's up now as BxB Hulk defends the Open The Freedom Gate Title against his World-1 partner Masato Yoshino. BxB Hulk's dance performance during his entrance is a big part of his character, but I also think it's great because it gives me plenty of time to finish typing up what happened in the last segment. Hulk's Hulkette for tonight's performance appears to be Jade Chung, though I can't say for sure because I haven't seen her in years and I'm woefully behind in my PWG DVDs. This title shot has been a long time coming for Yoshino, who opened up with two straight losses to Dragon Kid on the first two DGUSA events, but has come back and been undefeated since, scoring several impressive wins up to and including the night before when he finally won the feud with Dragon Kid by beating him in a two out of three falls match. The only thing left to cap off Yoshino's year now is the OTFG Title, and he's going to have to go through his partner to do it. Really solid match where instead of going all out right from the beginning, they slowly built to a crescendo at the end where they started breaking out all the big stuff. At the end it was Hulk dominating his partner but Yoshino kept catching him with quick rollups and other impact moves, but couldn't put Hulk away, and finally Hulk got the win after hitting an EVO off the top rope. Almost the moment the bell rang, Jon Moxley came out and informed Hulk that he was in Kamikaze USA's crosshairs and they were gunning for his title, but Hulk wasn't going to know when or where it was coming. On cue, Shingo and YAMATO jumped in the ring and attacked Hulk and Yoshino, which led to Jimmy Jacobs running out, but instead of helping Hulk he went right after Moxley and the two of them brawled to the back. The other members of Kamikaze USA and Warriors came out and it turned into a huge brawl with CIMA and Dragon Kid left standing in the end. CIMA got a microphone and thanked the fans in Canada for coming to the show, and promised that Dragon Gate USA would return to Toronto in the future.
Good show overall, though I thought that Open The Northern Gate was the better overall event this show had some great stuff too in the final two matches. I also really liked how Kamikaze USA were literally making their presence felt all over the show, clearly setting themselves up as the top heel faction in the company and locking themselves into multiple top storylines with CHIKARA Sekigun, Jimmy Jacobs, and BxB Hulk and the Open The Freedom Gate Title.
But now it's time to move on to the ever-popular Bonus Disc!
We start out with the obligatory PPV promo package and also highlight video of the show, and I like what they do at the end of the PPV promo video where they say "we're going to stop telling you how awesome Dragon Gate USA is and just show you" and then play a video of a Yoshino-Dragon Kid match from Untouchable. However, after watching the highlight video, it occured to me that they probably shouldn't show slow motion replays of guys doing crazy flippy moves that barely graze the opponent. Not naming names since PAC is a nice guy and I don't want to single him out, but it looks really fake.
We move on to one of my favorite DGUSA matches (and one I wish would eventually appear on the main show with at least midcarders) is the FRAY! match, which is basically eight guys entering Royal Rumble style and being eliminated by pinfall or submission until there's one man left standing. While these matches can be a bit spotty at times, they're a lot of fun to watch and, historically, winners of FRAY! matches have a pretty good shot at getting on a main DGUSA show in the future. Tonight's contestants include Kyle O'Reilly, Anthony Fiasco, Xtremo, Brodie Lee, Cheech & Cloudy, Brent B, and Phil Atlas, and the thing that really stood out to me is that DGUSA needs to start going easy on the guardrails. I love watching the dives, but twice during this match someone hit the same segment of guardrail and knocked it over into the fans in the front row, and the second time it seemed to land on some lady's leg and hurt her. I saw a lot of the same stuff at the show in Rahway last month, where the guardrail on one entire side of the ring buckled badly and nearly collapsed onto the fans altogether. I'm sure there's plenty of fans who sit front row hoping for stuff like that to happen, but there's also probably a lot of people who don't want to get hurt by attending a wrestling show. The dives are fine, but maybe it's time to tell some of the guys to dial it down a bit before someone gets hurt. It came down to Brodie Lee, Fiasco, and Cheech & Cloudy, and Brodie went through all of them one by one to win the match. Brodie was so impressive in this one that he actually ended up doing that run in later in the evening during the PPV, and is now a member of Warriors and, I would surmise, in line for a pretty healthy push in 2011.
Bonus match #2 comes from FIP's Fallout 2006 event, as Matt Sydal (aka Evan Bourne in WWE) takes on SHINGO of DP Associates. The story here was that Sydal wanted a shot at Bryan Danielson's FIP Title, but manager Dave Prazak said no way, and that if Sydal wanted a title shot he'd have to go through SHINGO. Solid match, and a bit different as FIP tends to have an in-ring style that's closer to an old school NWA territory than the all out, leave it all in the ring style you would see in ROH or Dragon Gate. SHINGO had several members of DP Associates interfering on his behalf liberally through the match, but eventually Cyber Kong's interference backfired and Sydal reversed a clothesline attempt into an inside cradle for the win.
We move on to Susumu Yokosuka taking on Austin Aries from WrestleJAM on 7/12/06 in Tokyo, and the release of this DVD actually worked out pretty well in terms of timing as Austin Aries was making his DGUSA and EVOLVE debuts right around the time of its release. Not sure if Gabe and Sal knew he was on his way out of ROH when they put this set together, but if they did, it's genius strategy and if they didn't, it's incredible luck! Yokosuka was the Open The Dream Gate Champion at the time, while Aries was one half of the ROH World Tag Team Champions and was the "old" Austin Aries, not A Double. Awesome match with a hot finish where Aries hit the brainbuster and 450 splash, but Yokosuka kicked out and then started killing Aries with a series of power moves before turning him inside out with three stiff clotheslines in a row to pick up the win.
We wrap it up with the finals of the Summer Adventure Tag League III tournament, taking place on 8/26/2009 in Tokyo. We saw two prior matches in the tournament on the Open The Northern Gate bonus disc, and for those unfamiliar with it, the tournament (and most tournaments in Japan) are run a little differently than what we get here. Instead of a bracketed, single elimination model where a guy is eliminated when he loses, this is a round robin tournament where everyone wrestles everyone and you get points for winning, and nothing for losing. Once everybody's wrestled everybody and the first round is over, the four teams with the highest point totals move on to the semifinals, and then the winners advance to the finals and wrestle each other for the championship. This is obviously not something that can be done in one night, and indeed these tournaments often span several weeks or months before we have a winner. Gabe Sapolsky tried doing something like it with the Field Of Honor in 2003, and while I thought it led to some good matches, a lot of people didn't have the patience to watch it play out since it literally stretched over the course of something like six months. It's too bad, because I think that it would have been more exciting if ROH ran more shows in 2003 so it could have moved a little quicker, but I guess it's a moot point now.
Anyway, our finalists are SHINGO & YAMATO facing off with Masaaki Mochizuki & Katsuhiko Nakajima, with the guarantee of new champions this year since the previous two winners, Naruki Doi & Masato Yoshino, had both been eliminated. On the Open The Northern Gate DVD review I did last week, there were so many awesome Dragon Gate tag matches between the main show and the bonus disc that I ran out of ways to describe how awesome they are, and this match beat all of those. In fact, I thought this was the best match on this entire DVD set. This match was just insane, there was no down time, no restholds, nothing, just nonstop action that kept building in intensity, and by the end they were just destroying each other with kicks and lariats. It was a really fun match to watch because Mochizuki and Nakajima have some of the best kicks in the business, and YAMATO & SHINGO aren't exectly known for being timid about laying in stiff shots themselves. Tons of near falls at the end but YAMATO finally caught Mochizuki in a choke and SHINGO blocked Nakajima from breaking it up by catching him in a triangle choke, and Mochizuki passed out, giving the tournament win to YAMATO & SHINGO. A Japanese girl came over and handed them a check for 2 million Yen (which probably exchanges to more US Dollars than it used to), and then Mochizuki grabbed a microphone after the match and said something I couldn't understand a word of, but it must have been real nice because everybody applauded. Then SHINGO & YAMATO said stuff and it must not have been as nice because they got into a scuffle with Nakajima, and almost started a fight with the six or seven guys who came out to break it up. They said more stuff that made the crowd laugh, and then Nakajima said something and left with Mochizuki. I have no idea what happened after the match there, but I can tell you that the match itself was awesome and easily the best thing on this DVD set.
* * *
With this show, the stage was set for the First Anniversary Show in Philadelphia: Masaaki Mochizuki had come in and steamrolled over everyone in his path and was now in line for a shot at BxB Hulk for the Open The Freedom Gate Title, and the Kamikaze USA-CHIKARA Sekigun war had come to a head and they were ready for one big tag match to blow off the feud. Masato Yoshino lost his shot at Hulk's title, but within weeks would defeat YAMATO in Japan to win the big one, the Open The Dream Gate Title, which had the double effect of making himself the top guy in the company and thrusting himself right into the thick of the Kamikaze USA-CHIKARA Sekigun feud. Of the two Canadian events, I liked the Open The Northern Gate show better in terms of the in-ring action, but this one did more with the storytelling and setting us up for the First Anniversary Show which, by a major stroke of luck and timing, would feature the newly-available free agent Bryan Danielson. Still, there was a lot of great action on here as all the matches on the bonus disc except Sydal-SHINGO were awesome, and the main show had two amazing main events and some great stuff on the undercard from Moxley & Jacobs as well as Mochizuki. Solid thumbs up for Uprising.
If you enjoy PWInsider.com you can check out the AD-FREE PWInsider Elite section, which features exclusive audio updates, news, our critically acclaimed podcasts, interviews and more by clicking here!
Bang On Casino
