Ace’s High

I’ll admit to you up front that Hiroshi Tanahashi has never really been my guy. My partner Tracy and I started watching pro wrestling in 2018, beginning with that year’s G1, which made a strange introduction to New Japan’s roster: eternal champion Kazuchika Okada was playing with balloons, Bullet Club insisted on constantly losing by DQ, every Juice Robinson match featured a suspiciously precise estimate of his injured left hand’s current recovery percentage, and Tanahashi started off ice cold but ultimately won (we weren’t savvy enough at the time to know it often goes that way), besting a number of other characters we found significantly more compelling. I found his in-ring style dull, the mimed guitar solos tedious, and the audience’s love for him difficult to access.

A little bit less than seven years later, I still can’t quite connect with Tanahashi in the way that so many other fans do, but I think that I do understand the appeal. It all fell into place for me when I made the connection to Las Vegas residency mainstays like Rod Stewart, Barry Manilow, and Wayne Newton—singers whose work never did much for me, but who made their fans (mostly but not only women of their own approximate generations) feel both deeply beloved and enormously happy. With his beautiful smile, generous displays of emotion, cheerful willingness to pose for cheesecake photo shoots, and undeniable friendliest-soccer-mom-on-God’s-green-Earth presence, Hiroshi Tanahashi has a once-in-a-century talent for making wrestling fans of all ages and genders feel as deliriously good as the great Vegas crooners make their fans feel.

My changing relationship with Tanahashi as a performer over the last several years has been one of the keys to developing my own theory of pro wrestling fandom: for me, being a fan is the discipline of learning to love as many different kinds of people as possible, both inside and outside the ring. Tanahashi is no one’s idea of difficult to love, but the process of learning to appreciate his greatness provided early practice in the art of fandom. I have taught myself to embrace more difficult stars using the skills that I learned with him.

© New Japan Pro Wrestling

When it was announced that Windy City Riot 2025 would be Tanahashi’s final match in the U.S., and that his opponent would be Konosuke Takeshita—a performer whose appeal I immediately, effortlessly understood the first time I saw him—Tracy and I agreed that we had to be there. This would be our first and last time seeing Tanahashi in person. It was not by any means a one-match show, but most people in attendance likely bought tickets for similar reasons. While the card did look a little dull on paper, in practice we found it to be a solid and sometimes quite lovely evening of wrestling, with most of the matches doing a bit more than they needed to for a warm, receptive crowd.

Heavy traffic kept us from catching most of the opener between Zane Jay and CJ Tino, after which a victorious Jay announced that he would be relinquishing the STRONG Survivor title and focusing on training to debut in Japan. This was followed by a brisk match between TJP and Tom Lawlor, with the latter looking stunning in fringed jorts and blue suspenders. Their contest, which began with an emphasis on mat wrestling before TJP took control, was good fun to watch, although they didn’t always seem to be on quite the same page. Every time I see Lawlor, I’m reminded how much I wish New Japan had given him more of a push after his reign on NJPW Strong.

© New Japan Pro Wrestling

Next, AZM and Mina Shirakawa wrestled for the slot of STRONG women’s number one contender. This fast-paced match played to each wrestler’s strengths and thrilled the crowd, which likely only exacerbated the negative reaction when the match ended with a barely telegraphed double count out. The audience booed loud and long enough that I was briefly convinced it really had been a mistake—AZM and Shirakawa did a convincing job of playing up their frustration with the ref—but it seems fairly clear now that NJPW had always planned on a three-way match with STRONG women’s champion Mercedes Moné at Resurgence.

World Class Wrecking Crew successfully defended the STRONG Openweight Tag Team Championships against the Jet Setters in the next match. I have the same experience every time I see WCWC: I go in expecting to be underwhelmed by their beefy heel routine, then find myself feeling surprisingly affectionate as they quietly overdeliver. They’re another team I’ve had to teach myself to love, but at this point I would call them underrated, and (I promise I don’t mean this as faint praise) more than worthy of their admittedly somewhat superfluous title. Kushida, meanwhile, is the definition of a reliable performer, and Kevin Knight seemed to bring a little extra swagger, perhaps bolstered by recent success in AEW.

© New Japan Pro Wrestling

The best match of the night was probably the next: Tomohiro Ishii defeated Gabe Kidd for the STRONG Openweight Championship in the sudden death overtime of a thirty-minute ironman match. I came to the show feeling a bit trepidatious about this one, as late-career American Ishii matches are generally formulaic to a fault, but Ishii and Kidd made brilliant use of the ironman format to push that formula to its limits. The usual elements were all there—extended chop battles, no-selling moves to a point that borders on too silly, and plenty of lariats—but the crowd’s knowledge that this match had to go thirty minutes gave the wrestlers some latitude to linger in each of these beats, as the excess was built in. Kidd made an excellent partner for Ishii, generously playing up the latter’s strengths and skillfully hiding his weaknesses, and his regression to heelish tendencies that his character has to some extent outgrown gave the crowd permission to root for Ishii in the way that American fans always want to. The fact that Gabe scored the first pin so late in the match, and then made Ishii fight so hard to even the score, raised the temperature in the building beautifully, and while it was risky to feint at ending on a draw after the women’s match, the payoff of both wrestlers rushing to win the match in overtime was more than worth it. Considered in retrospect, it feels like in some ways a nearly parodic heightening and deconstruction of Ishii’s formula, but there’s no denying it worked in the building (and, I presume, for viewers at home).

The following two matches are, as I remember them, a bit of a blur. The best bits of Tetsuya Naito and Titán’s tag with Rocky Romero and El Phantasmo were—unsurprisingly—Naito’s trolling, including an impossibly slow entrance and a slightly meanspirited prank on a fan dressed as Jushin Thunder Liger. As a fan of Zack Sabre Jr., who was probably the first pro wrestler I truly understood and loved, it was exciting to see him beat David Finlay, but I’ve cooled slightly on ZSJ since he began wrestling a more conventional style in the leadup to his time as heavyweight champ, and I felt the same way here. I understand the shift, and I agree it’s the right move at this point in his career, but it’s a bit of a letdown for me. Finlay, meanwhile, continues to do undeniable work; his style is less to my personal taste, but it has consistently accomplished everything it needed to for some time now.

© New Japan Pro Wrestling

As for Hirooki Goto vs. Shota Umino, their placement on the card put them in a difficult position. Umino’s struggles have been a constant topic in and out of kayfabe for a long time now, with plenty of renewed bad will following his broadly disliked Wrestle Kingdom main event with ZSJ. Under the circumstances, it was impossible to believe that he would beat Goto in a barely-built defense in the semi-main event of a show in Chicago, so the crowd was always going to struggle with staying invested, even had they loved both guys. In spite of all that, the reception for Umino’s entrance was warmer than I expected, though the audience would have surely turned hostile had he won. Since shaving his head and giving up much of his gimmick, Umino has wrestled a more straightforward, hard-hitting style, and Goto did well in helping to sell Umino’s strength. The story of the match—a physically powerful upstart is outlasted and outwrestled by an experienced veteran—was simple but effective, and suited both characters well. Goto is another wrestler with whom I’ve always struggled to connect, but this has only made me appreciate his reign more, as I’ve benefitted from watching other fans celebrate him, helping me learn to see him the way that they do. And I was glad to see him give so much to Umino.

For me personally, going directly from a failed Umino challenge to Tanahashi’s final U.S. match felt quite natural. Tracy and I were big fans of Umino when he was a young lion, both because we liked his work and because—let’s be honest—he was so pretty. The first time I felt strong affection for Tanahashi was his March 10, 2019 New Japan Cup match with Umino, wherein Tanahashi managed to persuade me and at least a healthy subset of the live audience that Umino might really pin him. One of my formative wrestling memories is the incredible 2.999-count near fall that Umino scored on Tanahashi in that match. Had I been a more experienced viewer, I might have known better, but on that day I bit hard. I really thought he had it. That moment helped me begin to understand Tanahashi’s generosity as an opponent and a mentor.

That same legendary generosity made it fairly obvious how the evening’s main event would end. Tanahashi knows that Takeshita is a truly special wrestler, and when this match was announced, fans understood what it meant: Tanahashi planned to use this match to pass the torch (or at least a torch) to Takeshita, gifting him an extremely definitive and memorable win. One could argue that Tanahashi has been too generous with his losses in recent years—did he really have to let Chase Owens pin him?—but the good will that he brings to these losses, and especially the ones that he wants you to know are important, is admirable.

© New Japan Pro Wrestling

The match was structured more or less exactly as I would have guessed. Takeshita did an excellent job in supporting Tanahashi through one of his stronger recent performances, while Tanahashi put in extraordinary effort to turn back the clock as far as he could for twenty minutes. While Tanahashi’s decision to focus his offense on Takeshita’s knee did make for occasionally uninspiring movement, this approach provided a necessary explanation of how the older wrestler might plausibly win with a mix of resourcefulness and force of will. Tanahashi gave the audience every opportunity to cheer for him as he scored several hard-won near falls on Takeshita. But I never really doubted who would win.

Another thing I love about wrestling is that it provides opportunities to explore surprisingly complex shades of desire. In a match like this, the crowd knows the young talent should win, both in and out of kayfabe. They want to pretend to support the other outcome—to egg Tanahashi on toward victory—but deep down they want the younger man win more, and would be disappointed if he lost. The crowd’s primary contribution to this match was enthusiastic make-believe, as we shouted together for a victory we didn’t really want.

In the match’s closing stretch, Takeshita channeled these conflicting desires, playing at a series of wild emotional swings as he prepared to end Tanahashi—now furious, now regretful, now convincing himself to continue, now exulting in his sense of power. Through four increasingly violent knees to Tanahashi’s head (interrupted by one blue thunder bomb), he expressed his respect for his senior’s toughness while also making it clear that he was the definitive victor.

© New Japan Pro Wrestling

Takeshita left the ring after a respectful bow (as respectful, anyway, as his character could manage), allowing Tanahashi the time that he needed to find his feet and thank the crowd. I won’t attempt to replicate what he said here; you can watch it online, and it was more about the context than the words. I was disappointed to see so many people in the crowd leave as he spoke, as if they had forgotten this was what they’d come to see. Tracy and I didn’t leave until he had fully disappeared behind the curtain.

Tanahashi may not be my guy, but I felt very fond of him in that moment, with that crowd, and even after much of the crowd had gone home. I’m grateful that I had the chance, and for all the other lessons in love that wrestling has provided me in the course of my brief fandom.

New Japan Pro Wrestling
Windy City Riot

11/04/2025
Wintrust Arena, Chicago, USA.
Company Announced Attendance: 4674
Watch On: New Japan World PPV

STRONG Survivor Match
Zane Jay defeats CJ Tino (8:57)

TJP defeats Tom Lawlor (12:13)

NJPW Strong Women’s Title Number 1 Contender’s Match
AZM vs Mina Shirakawa- Double Count Out (11:43)

NJPW STRONG Openweight Tag Team Titles
The World Class Wrecking Crew (Jorel Nelson and Royce Isaacs retain against the Intergalactic Jet Setters (Kevin Knight and KUSHIDA) (11:05)

NJPW Strong Openweight Title 30 Minute Iron Match
Tomohiro defeats Gabe Kidd 2-1 to win the Title

Los Ingobernables de Japon (Tetsuya Naito and Titan defeat Rocky Romero and El Phantasmo (11:04)

Zack Sabre Jr. defeats David Finlay (15:20)

IWGP World Heavyweight Title
Hirooki Goto defeats Shota Umino to retain the Title (20:00)

Konosuke Takeshita defeats Hiroshi Tanahashi (20:37)