2019 Four Pillars Bio

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 1-9, PART THREE Above: Kenta Kobashi, circa 1977. Chapter Four follows Kenta Kobashi’s path to pro wrestling. He was born and raised in Fukuchiyama. Like Kawada, the then fifth-grader’s interest in wrestling started with the August 25, 1977 Jumbo Tsuruta/Mil Mascaras match, which he watched on television with his older brother. Both brothers dreamed of becoming wrestlers, as they would playfight over a makeshift NWA title they had constructed out of cans. The following year, when his parents divorced, he and his brother moved with their mother to a different school district. While he was considering basketball (as we…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 1-9, PART TWO Chapters 2-3 were 16 and 12 pages, respectively, so I decided to transcribe and cover them together. 4-5 are of similar length, so I will probably combine them as well. ---- Chapter Two starts by talking about the UWF. Initially I was annoyed at what seemed like a drawn-out digression (this is not to disparage the book’s craft – it was not meant to be consumed the way that I, an illiterate, am doing), but when I quickly realized where it was going this became fascinating. This chapter is a snapshot of puro journalism politics in the 1980s, specifically the tensions between Weekly Pro Wrestling and AJPW(+JPW) in …