Tour shows in puroresu and in sumo
When I first started watching puroresu I was a bit confused by tour shows. On the one hand I was under the impression that I should always watch everything in every show. On the other hand, I couldn't keep up with the rate promotions were pumping them out and the wrestlers didn't fight as hard in them.
I started watching sumo in March '24 (maybe I should make a page for that too?) and they have tour shows too! I assumed that puroresu adopted tour shows in the model of sumo and suddenly something clicked. Just how in sumo tours there for the rikishi to train and warm up for the tournaments where they go all-out (and for locals to see their favourite sumo wrestler in action), tour shows in puroresu are a place to try new things, experiment with one's wreslting style, bust out untested moves, warm up, test new tag team pairings, face new opponents and in some cases and stir up the pot with some storyline drama. So tours are good if you want to monitor the day-to-day development of younger wrestlers (or lack thereof if they're at a bottleneck) or get a small taste of what the ongoing landscape is. All the major stuff still happens in major shows, wrestlers want to be seen by as many eyes as possible when doing dramatic shit! They want to get noticed! Tour shows are no good for that.
A good example of what I'm trying to say above is the Ryohei Oiwa vs. Go Shiozaki main event in a May (or June?) Sunny Voyage. Up to that point Oiwa was mostly tagging with Kiyomiya, was in multi-man matches or had singles matches with people in the undercard, so a tour show is a good place to "see what he can do" against the big boys. Oiwa upsets everyone by going to 30-minute draw with Shiozaki in a very heated and competitive match. Shiozaki praises him, but Oiwa is absolutely distraught he didn't win, as if he lost. "Watch out for me!" he says, and while everybody always says that, after a performance like that, these words carry more weight than usual. Sure enough, in the next Star Navigation where All Rebellion make their debut, Oiwa confronts them, rebuffs their belated offer to join and also rebuffs GLG! What a statement! He also said something about NOAH in the ring (I know this because Noah's Ark blog translated him referencing this "As I said in the ring yesterday, my place is NOAH"... Ohhh I sure hope he stays a long time because I think he is awesome!) but I don't speak Japanese so all that went over my head... Oh well... Anyway, if I hadn't watched that Oiwa vs. Shiozaki tour match, this would all have come out of nowhere, but no there was a clear setup and resolution and a major turning point in Oiwa's attitude from here on out. He's not the newly not-a-rookie anymore, but his own man. In a similar way, you can kind of predict how well a rikishi will do in the upcoming tournament by monitoring how well he's doing in the tour training! I love it when things make sense like that.
So what's the best course of action? Watch tour shows? Ignore them? What works for me nowadays is I rarely ever watch entire tour shows, I will pay attention to maybe the opener (I love rookies!), maybe the semi-main and definitely the main or any other match that has a wrestler that I love. The rest I will either skip completely or leave in the background or use it to lull myself to sleep.
