NJPW News: Tomohiro Ishii wins Wrestling Observer Newsletter's Best Brawler Award for 2017
What’s the story?
Tomohiro Ishii, the small-yet-vicious ‘Stone Pitbull’ of New Japan Pro Wrestling, was voted the Wrestling Observer Newsletter’s Best Brawler of 2017.
In case you didn’t know…
The award for the Best Brawler goes to that wrestler that does the best job of selling a ‘brawl’ as realistic, exciting and intense. Brawls are known for being simple yet wild, with two (or more) wrestlers simply trying to beat each other up with strikes (and sometimes with weapons).
In a sense, a wrestling brawl is the closest thing to a ‘real fight’ that you’d see in wrestling, and some wrestlers are very good at brawling while not always being the most technical of wrestlers.
The award is named after Bruiser Brody, who was one of the most influential brawlers in wrestling history. Apart from Brody, many other legendary brawlers have won this award. These include: Stan Hansen, Terry Funk, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, Samoa Joe and Kevin Steen.
But the man who won is the most was Mick Foley, who won it a whopping ten times between 1991 and 2000 under his various personas.
The heart of the matter
Tomohiro Ishii’s explosion in popularity started in around late 2012/early 2013, when he started to have these insane brawls and exciting matches with a wide variety of opponents.
Since then, he has consistently been arguably the best brawler in the world, putting on spectacular brawls that’ve featured insanely stiff strikes and in some cases genuine concerns for his and his opponent’s health.
Ishii and two of his fellow NJPW colleagues took the top three spots in the 2017 round of votes, with Ishii himself taking the top spot with well over twice the amount the second place winner, Katsuyori ‘stiffest-head-butt-in-wrestling history’ Shibata, and close behind him was NJPW’s Minoru Suzuki.
Alas, only a handful of WWE superstars even managed to get nominated, but none of them managed to get close to these top three brawlers.
What’s next?
Tomohiro Ishii is currently involved in the 2018 New Japan Cup tournament, which allows the winner to choose a singles title to challenge for. If Ishii were to win this tournament, he could either challenge current IWGP Heavyweight Champion Kazuchika Okada, IWGP Intercontinental Champion Minoru Suzuki or NEVER Openweight Champion Hirooki Goto.
Author’s take
If you’ve ever seen Ishii brawl, you’d know why he won this award. His offence is stiff yet precise, he looks like an absolute monster despite being only 5’7, and he wrestles as if he’s made of iron in the sense that he can absorb an inhuman amount of punishment.
Many people believe that Ishii has earned a main-event run of some kind, or at least a shot at a world title, given how outstanding of a worker.
Although his style is clearly too stiff and dangerous for WWE, he’s still definitely someone other wrestlers should study given how awesome he has become over the past few years.