Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Dangerous Bumps and How to React to Them

Ibushi, seen here after getting the better of Naito, doesn't need concern trolling
Photo Credit: NJPW1972.com
So if you haven't seen by now, and if you read TWB, you've at least seen a link to it, Kota Ibushi took one of the gnarliest bumps ever off an apron German suplex from Tetsuya Naito at New Japan Pro Wrestling Dominion this past weekend. Instead of landing neck/shoulders on the apron, he fell slightly to his right as if he were falling off the apron, but he didn't veer enough to the right, as his head and face smacked the apron on the way down. Apparently it looked worse than it was, as Ibushi told Kevin Kelly that he was fine, but I mean, it could have ended a lot worse. At the very least, it didn't look like it went as it was planned.

Before wading into the DISCOURSE over it, it should be noted that spots like that happen on the reg in New Japan to little or no static. The company, for better or worse, is so steeped in that kind of what people who watch WWE only might call "risky," that things like that happen all the time without a hitch. The problem is when things do go sideways, it can cause a lot of people to get up in arms. Predictably, that's what happened in the wake of the spot.

Basically, it boiled down to people yet again calling for the heads of everyone running New Japan because the wrestling is "unsafe." Yes, you could cite examples of when puroresu's tendencies to go hard have had some not-so-pleasant results. The most notable, Mitsuharu Misawa (who will have been gone ten years tomorrow), didn't come from a "risky" spot, but from a bad landing on a spot most people consider normal, a back suplex. He was the poster child for taking head dropping bumps over his career, and many postulate his neck just suffered from fatigue failure when dropped on a sharp angle in an abnormal circumstance.

Pointing out that his case is an outlier isn't in good class, but Misawa had a lot of other aggravating circumstances going on for him, namely his promotion, Pro Wrestling NOAH, was in dire straits financially, as Japan was at the tail end of a "wrestling recession" at that point. One could point to New Japan drawing big houses under the dying days of Inokiism as contrary to that, but it was very much a one-promotion game for a few years. But regardless, stress is scientifically proven to have adverse effects on the human body. Am I saying the years of sharp-angle bumps are blameless? No, but one has to look at the bigger picture sometimes.

The company that a select few hold up as "safe" is WWE, which has taken measures over the years to mitigate the risk that comes from various risky moves. Namely, only two people are allowed to do the piledriver, and one of them fucked it up so bad this past Friday that he almost killed Goldberg. However, is WWE really "safe?" A dive to the outside is a bump that is high risk, and it's almost like WWE agents mandate that at least one competitor if not all do a dive, no matter how good they are at it, or more importantly, how good the person basing for them on the outside can catch them. Additionally, WWE wrestlers work significantly more dates than New Japan wrestlers do. People revile when Dave Meltzer brings up WWE's injury rate, which is because they have it in their minds that he's a shill for New Japan and All Elite Wrestling. that being said, he's absolutely right about WWE's injury rate. Coupled with the fact that Vince McMahon and Paul Levesque don't offer proactive healthcare, just reactive, and because they make the wrestlers pay for all road expenses (which can severely limit nutrition depending on the position on the card and gender of the expensor), their health is in greater peril. I'm not sure of how New Japan handles those things, but even if they're as bad as WWE, the sheer lack of dates in comparison helps somewhat.

But it all goes back to the severity of the bumps, which may never be a ground that critics will ever give up in the debate. Honestly though, for as dangerous as they look, the New Japan roster mostly knows how to handle them. Honestly, a single flat-back bump, one of the most common in all of wrestling, can have major consequences for the person taking it, so no bump is ever really truly safe. The issue is always the optics. A random spectator doesn't sit back and watch a spinebuster or a guy falling on his back after getting punched and gasp for the misalignment in the skeletal system it might cause (pro wrestlers must be a chiropractor's DREAM client), but anything remotely approaching a head or neck bump, and the sheer look of it will just appear worse because of the cultural importance of those body parts and how much more graphic bumps that happen to them come off.

Professional wrestling will never be anything approaching 100 percent safe. It's one thing to get up in arms about a lack of safety for a wrestler who has minimal experience doing difficult spots, or wrestlers deliberately eschewing the safety of their opponents and partners by shooting, or by wrestlers working in altered states. It's another to go after wrestlers with better-than-average track records. A lot of the noise around this Ibushi/Naito spot approaches concern trolling, especially when it's from people who use criticisms as clubs beating from a position of bad faith. Because let me tell you, defending WWE as being a "safe" company is perhaps the worst faith one could adopt in arguing about wrestling.

Now, I'm not sure Ibushi should wrestle again for a few weeks, even if a doctor clears him. And spots like that when they happen can be scary in the moment and unfortunate. However, the difference between Ibushi not suffering an injury and Hiromu Takahashi breaking his neck taking a "risky" spot from Dragon Lee last year sometimes just comes down to luck. Wrestling is always going to be unkind to the performers, no matter what. But the best ones are artists, and the best thing for them is for their companies to take care of them. Judging from how Hiroshi Tanahashi worked with a fucked arm for awhile a few years back, I'm not sure New Japan is a paradigm here. But please don't pretend WWE is any better in this regard.