NJPW "Spirito Guerriero" Milan 4th June show

[Guest Eric the Eagle]

NJPW's gone on a three day tour of Italy...

 

1.Gedo & Jado beat Koji Kanemoto & Erik Isaksen *

2. Togi Makabe beat Osamu Nishimura

3. Hiroshi Tanahashi beat Toru Yano

4. Manabu Nakanishi, Yuji Nagata & Masahiro Chono beat Yutaka Yoshie, Takashi Iizuka & Shinsuke Nakamura

5. Tiger Mask & Ultimo Dragon beat Black Tiger & Jushin Liger

6. IWGP title: Hiroyoshi Tenzan© beat Scott Norton

 

Don't know much about the matches, unfortunately, and I'm too unfamiliar with Puro to recognize more than about half the names, so someone'll have to fill in on whether this looks like a good card or not. My first impression was that it sounded interesting, though perhaps for different reasons than others...

 

 

* This is where the bragging rights come in. Isaksen is one of the top guys (former champion) in the fed I wrestle for, the Norwegian Wrestling Federation (NWF), and the head trainer for the fed's school. To be able to say that one of our guys has wrestled on a New Japan show... That's... that's damn cool.

[Guest The Masked Avenger]

Indeed!

 

-TMA

[Jingus 0]

The main event looks kinda crappy, but the rest of the card is solid enough. Tiger Mask & Ultimo vs. Black Tiger & Liger should've been really good. And congrats to your friend.

 

I had no idea there was pro wrestling in Norway. What's the scene like up there? I mean, how big are the crowds, what general style of wrestling is most common, what's the Norwegian society's general perception of it (like is it looked down on as being a joke like it is here in America), stuff like that.

[Guest Eric the Eagle]

We are (not surprisingly) the only fed in Norway. There's 15 active wrestlers, with two more making their debut next show, and another two currently inactive, and one retired but still present as a commisioner of sorts (I know it's done to death, but it's totally new in Norway. Usually, they'll have trained for a year or so before we'll let anyone into the ring in front of a paying audience.

 

We've actually got quite a mixed bag of styles, but predominantly, I'd say British with heavy Japanese influence. We only work about one show a month, so we can afford to be stiff, and we are. No ridiculous headdrops, though. We've been in business since late 2001, and we're now slowly building up to what might turn out to be the first true stipulation match, either No DQ or simply Must be a winner.

 

We haven't had Wrestling on Norwegian TV since a joint Scandinavian channel sent WCW's Disneyland tapings back in '95 (very recently a small channel sent RAW and SmackDown! as an experiment, but quit after what basically amounts to inside sabotage), so we've had the oppurtunity to more or less educate most of our audience from the ground up. All the media we've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive, at least opposed to what we could have expected, though we're definitely far from well-known. We're based around Oslo, and do three or four "big" shows a year, drawing 2-300 people on average (record to see us exclusively is some 550, and biggest crowd all in all was some 800 people), and drawing 60 or 70 on average to our smaller shows (record of 110, which was pretty much jam packed, low at 35).

 

We usually get a foreign wrestler or two for our big shows, with James Mason and Robbie Brookside (who's come over three times) as the biggest names we've had. Two of our guys have been on English tours, and IWS (Italian Wrestling Superstars) has three of us as regular appearances. Isaksen, incidentally, has also recently been the Eurostars' champion and is currently the IWS Intercontinental champion.

 

Just for fun, here's a clip from one of our shows, featuring Isaksen taking the Norwegian championship (One of the things I'll always be proud of is the fact that we've never tried to claim a WOrld or even European title. It would be too stupid) from Bjørn Sem.

 

http://www.nwfwrestling.no/video/isaksen%2...0netversion.mpg

 

Our homepage is www.wrestling.no, by the way. Unfortunately it's only in Norwegian at the moment, but you can quite easily find videos and pictures; just select the 'multimedia' option(the option itself, not the menu that appears when you place the cursor on it).

[Jingus 0]

Sounds like you guys really know what you're doing, more power to you. I could only dream of being able to "educate" a virgin audience like that, here in America it gets pretty tough because you can't really do anything they haven't seen before.

[Guest Eric the Eagle]

Thanks a lot. I do have an idea of how lucky we are. Of course, there is a portion of our audience who buys tapes and knows their wrestling. They, however, are mostly just so happy to see actual wrestling live that they don't care.

 

Some of our guys have wrestled in Finland, where they do have WWE on TV, and apparently, their audience is much worse than ours. They only pop for spots. Also, for some reason, they've already started the occasional no DQ with thumbtacks and stuff.

 

The wrestlers, that is. Not the audience.

 

 

That being said, the Norwegian audience is something else. They basically cheer the guys who entertain them, regardless of face/heel dynamics. There's very few matches without a split crowd, which I personally find great. There's no less than three named supporter groups (the Telemark battalion, the Black Corner and the Schoolgirl Mafia), each with their favorites.

 

Heck, there's three guys I once met at a fast food joint while wearing the fed's t-shirt. They've come to nearly every show since.

[pgi86 0]

Man reading about that is really great.I live in Bulgaria and it pains me to know that the wrestling scene in Europe is pretty aweful.But thanx to the net I`ve been hearing about all those indy promotions from France,Italy,Germany,Holland,Russia and now you.Little by little things are definately getting better.I mean,there is no reason why wrestling shouldn`t have great local promotions in Europe.Now,the only thing left is for one such promotion here in Bulgaria (though,I somehow doubt it would work here as the audience is really demanding and has absolutely no wrestling knowledge at all).Good luck with the fed man.I really mean it.Let`s show the world that the wrestling in Europe can kick ass too!

[Guest The Masked Avenger]

Thanks. We are pretty serious about our fed, and encouragment is always appreaciated. We're indeed quite lucky in being able to educated our audience more or less from scratch, and I think it's starting to pay off. They recognize the moves we want them to view as finishers, usually pop on the right places etc. Now we just need to spread the good word around, and get bigger crowds;-)

 

-TMA