Length and What You Do With It
Why shorter matches often beat longer ones (but six minutes really isn't enough to showcase your new women's title...)
Front Matter
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I was going to write something else for my first piece of 2023, something nice and airy and abstract to do with how the various forms of wrestling criticism function, and that essay is coming at some point, I assure you. But then Wrestle Kingdom 17 happened.
This was the first NJPW show to feature a match for the IWGP Women’s Championship, a new belt sanctioned by NJPW to be contested by wrestlers from its sister promotion STARDOM on NJPW shows. The bout pitted inaugural champion KAIRI, one of STARDOM’s most successful products and a woman who has held prestigious titles on both sides of the Pacific, against Tam Nakano, who has sneakily built a reputation as one of STARDOM’s most reliable performers in big match situations. All the ingredients were in place for a hard fought contest that would show NJPW fans the quality and credibility of women’s wrestling, in front of a crowd far in excess of that drawn by any all-women’s show in Japan for a good couple of decades. It went less than six minutes.
It gives me no pleasure to take a victory lap at the expense of those who have spent years banging the “NJPW needs a women’s division” drum like a group of obnoxious samba buskers. Mainly because I’m sure most of them are perfectly okay with this outcome. These faux-feminist fools can say all they want that it’s about equality or wanting to give women a platform, but what it really comes down to is this: their main priority is that women’s wrestling be convenient to access for them personally. They would rather it is dropped in their lap in an attenuated sideshow form than to actually put in the effort to seek out the full-fat version from any of Japan’s many women’s wrestling companies. So I’m sure six minutes and second on the card suits them just fine. But if your platonic ideal of a women’s division is PROGRESS circa 2018, then more power to you, but don’t expect me to take you seriously about literally any subject ever.
Apologists for this sorry state of affairs have several counterarguments they might deploy, most of them bad. The presentation was more about the angle afterwards with Mercedes Moné (neé Sasha Banks), goes one, which is true but irrelevant. All of the matches on the show apart from the last two were short, goes another. This would hold water if the women’s title fight weren’t still the shortest by a fair few minutes, and if Karl Anderson, a wrestler whose last good match happened when Mitt Romney was telling us about his binders full of women, hadn’t been given a whole ten to defend a belt with less prestige than the Checkatrade Trophy. But a further sticking point deserves more consideration, because it’s harder to refute, and it runs thus: who is to say that the match would have been better given more time? That is, does shorter necessarily mean worse, and does longer necessarily mean better?
When I was a student, back in the Romney Era, I received a panicked phone call from a friend of mine who was studying the same course. It was ten past two in the afternoon: fifty minutes before an essay deadline of ours. The conversation went something like this:
“Hey, [Friend of Statto], what’s up?”
“Quick question: if I’m under the word count, will I get marked down?”
“How far under are you?”
“I’ve only managed to write 1800 [the limit was 3000]. I’ve been up all night with writer’s block and I just can’t get anything out. The intro and the conclusion are there, it’s just the stuff in between.”
“Well, you won’t get marked down automatically, it’s not like it would be if you were way over the limit, but obviously you won’t have as much time to make your points.”
“I think I’ve fucked it. I think I’m going to fail.”
“Mate, this is an English Literature degree. I cannot conceive of the pile of unmitigated shite you would have to submit in order to fail. Trust me, you’ll be fine.”
Long story short, my friend handed in his miniature essay as it was and scored 66, a comfortable 2:1. Put another win in the Great Life Advice column for your boy.
It was a shame, though, I thought at the time. If he managed 66 having only used 60% of the space allotted, think how good his grade could have been if he hadn’t been beset by writer’s block and had managed to make full use of that blank white paper. Yet, thinking about it, does this follow? He could have utilised those extra 1200 words to say some really intelligent things that would have secured him a 1st, but maybe he had writer’s block because he’d used all his good ideas about Arthur Conan Doyle or John Buchan or whatever it was we had to write about. Perhaps anything extra would have ended up being a load of complete rubbish full of factual and conceptual howlers that fatally undermined his core argument and sent his score plummeting. He’s a very smart guy, so I’m sure he wouldn’t have done that, but the point is that there’s a universe where that happened. Longer probably meant better in this scenario, but not necessarily.
Wrestling doesn’t have a max word count, and matches don’t take place on paper. (If they did, Bret Hart vs. Tiger Mask II would have been the greatest of all time rather than a plodding ordeal.) Insofar as there is a limit on length, it is set by the booker. Wrestlers can argue the case that the story they want to tell requires such and such a duration, but if the promoter tells you you’ve got eight minutes, then eight minutes is what you’ve got, and you can bet your ass the referee will be hissing at you to go straight to the finish if you run over. And that’s how it should be. The person in charge has to consider multiple factors such as adhering to the venue’s curfew, what they consider their workers are capable of, and most importantly not burning out the crowd. (This is why peak era PWG shows, where the performers all seem to have free rein to go as long as they see fit, are so unbearably exhausting to watch in full.) The classic two-half structure, adhered to by WWE house shows and most indie cards I’ve attended, is a time-honoured way of mitigating this burnout. The first match of the night tends to be short, fairly basic, less intense and with a good amount of crowd interaction to get the fans into it, with each successive contest gradually upping the ante, until the interval. After this, the crowd need warming up again, so we go through the cycle a second time, escalating until the main event. Generally also the longest match on the show, the closing bout will, in theory, be the biggest and best thing on the card, sending the fans home happy and awed.
As anybody who was in attendance for RevPro’s Will Ospreay vs. David Starr main event back in 2019 will be able to tell you, it doesn’t always work out that way.
Wrestling is form of art and a form of entertainment, and in any kind of art and entertainment, the form has to match the content and the content has to match the form, if something of quality is to be brought into the world. It’s an approach I apply to the fiction I write. Take the modern classic The Rise and Fall of Rikidōzan, which you can buy for your Kindle for only £2.49. People who have read it will no doubt be surprised and amused to learn that I originally conceived it as a short story, or a novella at the very most. Boy watches wrestling on the TV, boy goes to see wrestling live, boy meets Rikidōzan, Rikidōzan is a dick to him, boy realises you should never meet your heroes, bish bash bosh. But the more research I did and the more I looked into my main man’s fascinating life, the equally fascinating lives of his famous opponents (Lou Thesz, Freddie Blassie, The Destroyer, Masahiko Kimura), and wrestling’s status as a mainstream cultural phenomenon at the time, the more I realised I needed to use all this as the means of weaving a much more complex narrative: one that incorporated war, reconstruction, identity, nationalism, politics, belonging, abuse, organised crime and much else, telling a story through wrestling that was nothing less than the story of post-WW2 Japan itself.
The novel ended up taking me four years and 275,000 words to complete. Thanks, brain. But its Amazon reviews have a five-star average, which is almost as high as Kenny Omega’s median match rating from the Wrestling Observer, so clearly I made the right call.
Conversely, the book I’m writing currently is a comedic fantasy novel about a heavy metal band from a provincial Lincolnshire town who accidentally start Ragnarök. Nobody wants to read a 275,000-word comedic fantasy novel, and I certainly don’t want to write one, so it’s going to be shorter. The narrative is leaner in an almost picaresque fashion, focusing on a limited number of vivid set pieces leavened with character interactions, music jokes, and judiciously deployed material from the Norse myths. That’s what I consider to be the appropriate mode for what I want do, so that’s how I’m going to write it. Form mirrors content, content mirrors form.
However, if I was a bad novelist then it wouldn’t matter how long the books were and how I approached the material. They’d always be bad. (But I’m not a bad novelist. Promise.) And I can guarantee that if you didn’t like my books but had for some malign reason been forced to read one, you’d rather it was 150 pages than 800 pages. Similarly, bad wrestlers will turn out something merely unimpressive and forgettable if allotted five minutes, but if you give those same individuals thirty-five minutes they’re likely to produce the nightmarishly terrible on a legendary scale. Their cardio won’t be able to keep up and nor will their imagination.
Even rookies trained to a high standard, who are broadly competent and even spectacular at times, can struggle with length. A match that springs to mind is the time limit draw between Himeka (two and a bit years into her career) and Saya Kamitani (roughly one year into her career) from STARDOM’s 5 Star Grand Prix back in 2020. It’s certainly not bad, and there are some very enjoyable struggle spots, but it was very clear that the pair didn’t have enough ideas to fill the time they’d been given, and there were sizeable stretches where nothing much happened, or they went back to a well from which they’d already drawn deeply. This was the year STARDOM raised the time limit on 5 Star Grand Prix matches from fifteen minutes to twenty minutes, to some criticism from those who enjoyed the shorter limits and who already had concerns (which STARDOM’s recent years have only exacerbated) that the company’s house style was beginning to elide length with quality. I’m sure most who sat through Himeka vs. Kamitani concluded that it would have been better if they’d lost five.
And better performers than those two were at that point in their careers have found themselves unable to turn a long match into a good match. Think of god knows how many thirty- to forty-minute NJPW main event epics that have come and gone in the last five years and left nothing in their wake but a Lethe congealed from aimless matwork and interminable Gay Gordons counter-cum-dance finishing sequences. Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Marty Scurll from RevPro High Stakes 2017 went over forty and is the worst match I’ve ever seen live. Sometimes crowds will be with the performers for the whole journey, but often they’ll burn out, or zone out, long before the final bell. Even AJPW, whose King’s Road style was based on increasingly long and intense title fights, found themselves having to chuck in a few short main events here and there towards the back end of the 90s, because fans had stopped reacting to near falls in the first twenty minutes, having been conditioned to know that the match wasn’t going to end at such an early stage. This led to some delightfully lopsided cards, such as the show in 1997 which featured a semi-main of Kenta Kobashi vs. Hiroshi Hase that lasted thirty-three minutes, followed by Gary Albright and Steve Williams defending the tag belts against Mitsuharu Misawa and Jun Akiyama in under nine. That match could easily have gone much longer and probably been great, but booker Giant Baba considered it a necessary sacrifice to train the crowd to expect - and be content with - shorter title bouts.
On the other hand, just as the history of wrestling is dotted with truly lousy long matches, it’s also replete with amazing miniatures. Countless sub-ten-minute shoot style classics, of which I recommend Tatsuo Nakano vs. Masakatsu Funaki from 1989, Yoji Anjo vs. Victor Zangiev from 1994, and any number of Yuki Ishikawa/Daisuke Ikeda clashes, to name just a few. KENTA vs. Ricky Marvin from NOAH’s Junior Heavyweight League 2009, which always comes up when people are listing their favourite short matches, is less than two minutes and packs more into that time then you’d think possible. Most arrestingly, the two insanely memorable contests between Goldberg and Brock Lesnar - the demolition job of Survivor Series 2016 and the visceral bombfest at Wrestlemania 33 a few months later - between them took less than half as long to reach their conclusion as Goldberg vs. Lesnar from Wrestlemania 20, which is famously dogshit. Short can mean insubstantial, but it can also mean a thrilling blast of punchy, economical action that leaves your body crackling with adrenaline, an espresso shot for the soul. I once asked a friend of mine who’s a hardcore UFC fan whether he tends to feel short-changed if a title fight only lasts a few minutes, and he said no, because he’d rather see a brutal knockout or submission than a contest which goes five rounds and peters out into endless gassed clinches, as fights that last the distance tend to, especially in the higher weight classes. If wrestling is a sport - and it is! - the same logic should apply.
With all this in mind, can we really say that six minutes wasn’t an appropriate length for KAIRI vs. Tam Nakano at Wrestle Kingdom 17? Yes, of course we bloody can. Remember what I said: form and content. A six-minute title fight might have been appropriate in other circumstances, for example if KAIRI and Tam Nakano had been fighting in a shoot style promotion where the fans had been conditioned to anticipate a possible early finish. But 2023 NJPW isn’t RINGS (although I really wish it was). It’s a promotion which equates match length with quality, and with importance. Kenny Omega vs. Will Ospreay and Kazuchika Okada vs. Jay White were the important matches on the card, and that’s why they went over half an hour. The junior title match was next most important, so it got a quarter of an hour. All the other men’s matches were less important than that, so they each got around ten minutes. And at the bottom were the women.
That’s the crux, in the end, and it’s what everyone with any sense predicted would happen once the IWGP Women’s Championship was announced. If you make a big deal of creating a women’s title so that your shows can have a female presence, then you have the match go significantly shorter than any of the men’s matches on the card, you’re communicating to your audience, just like legions of lazy indie promoters who have habitually done the same in recent years, that they shouldn’t take this women’s wrestling stuff as seriously as the men. It’s not as if the two STARDOM athletes didn’t fill those six minutes well, far from it, but what matters here is perception. The main takeaway was that the NJPW powerbrokers were happy for STARDOM talent to appear on the Wrestle Kingdom pre-show (as in 2020, 2021 and 2022), but not in a featured title fight worthy of the name. Which is a shame, but it’s hardly a surprise. But it should demonstrate two main points. Firstly, if you want women’s wrestling to be treated with respect and gravitas, go and watch women’s wrestling promotions, not male-dominated companies where the women’s matches are seemingly presented under sufferance. Secondly, if the NJPW main event style isn’t doing it for you, that’s not an issue with long matches, or with you, that’s an issue with NJPW. Go out and explore what’s out there: technical Broadways with care and thought in abundance, frenetic slugging contests that hinge on who can land the first big bomb. Don’t be like the people who wait for the wrestling for which they supposedly advocate to come to them, and then profess themselves content with six minutes of it. Bounded in a nutshell when they could be kings of infinite space.