“Dr. Death” Steve Williams, Terry Gordy, & Richard Slinger vs Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa, Toshiaki Kawada, & Kenta Kobashi)
taped 05/16/1992, aired 05/17/1992
Korakuen Hall, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 04/16/2024) FINALLY WE MEET DIRTY DICK SLINGER YEAH WOOOOOOO. He’s Terry Gordy’s nephew and, in a pretty unprecedented move even among foreign guys who trained in a dojo like this, spends almost his entire career here in Japan. If Cagematch is to be believed he had exactly three matches outside this AJPW/NOAH orbit. That’s nuts! He’s a solid wrestler and a welcome addition to this gaikokujin crew, having finally worked his way up to main event loss post level after debuting in ‘89. Nothing he does will blow you away but he moves well, has plenty of fire, and does little things like fruitlessly swipe at an opponent while he’s standing on the apron so you know I love him. Plus there’s that name, I mean c’mon. Best of all he brings a sympathetic bent to these foreign heel superteams, a newly crucial element considering how often guys like Doc and Gordy get worked over in bizarre time-killing sequences. In the same way that Yoshinari Ogawa breathed new life into the Tsuruta-gun stable, Slinger gives these Super Generation Army guys a new toy to play with and another way to arrive at old conventions; Toshiaki Kawada taking a little too much time to beat the kid up allows him to get isolated by the gaikokujin team. Looking forward to the rest of the Dick Slinger action we get in this series, as little as there is. Also looking forward to more Steve Williams vs Mitsuharu Misawa, as their brief interactions are the highlight of this otherwise unremarkable tour-opener. Doc has the same electric energy that Stan Hansen has without the propensity to let Misawa bowl him over without a fight (at least thus far) and it makes for a much more unpredictable matchup. We’ll definitely see a lot of them together in the coming years.
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