Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa, Toshiaki Kawada, & Kenta Kobashi) vs Tsuruta-gun (Jumbo Tsuruta, Akira Taue, & Masanobu Fuchi)
taped 05/22/1992, aired 05/24/1992
Nakajima Sports Center, Sapporo, Japan
(reviewed 04/16/2024) Final time we see this particular six-man tag configuration. At the end of the tour Jumbo Tsuruta will suffer a supposed “ankle injury” that sidelines him for almost three months; once he returns Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, Yoshinari Ogawa, and/or a debuting Jun Akiyama will worm their way into various permutations instead, leaving this as the last instance of the matchup which has defined AJPW for the last few years. It’s the end of what has been a legendary but rather up-and-down run, though thankfully this is more the former than the latter.
While not lacking in action as a result, this feels more like a crowd-pleaser house show main event than any of the dramatic six-mans of previous years. They’re milking the Sapporo crowd for all they’re worth in this famous venue which will set the stage for the Four Pillars era the following May, just without the injury angles and relentless speed we’ve seen in the past. One gets the idea that they’re trying to make up for the Fan Appreciation Day main event. Akira Taue missed that match when an (actual) ankle injury knocked him out of the Champion Carnival and he slots right into his familiar role here with his first big match back. Appreciative as Sapporo may be, this isn’t exactly a friendly outing between these two teams: an early “arm bomber” on the floor from the big red boy leaves Mitsuharu Misawa reeling, as does a sleeper hold not long afterward. Tsuruta-gun aren’t fucking around. They spend the first part of the match heeling it up with double teams and bits of cheating so straightforward you wonder why they haven’t been doing them this whole time, especially when they get such strong reactions.
Misawa kicks out Taue’s knee to turn things around (Ankle bone is connected to the knee bone, right? Think that’s how the song goes.) with Toshiaki Kawada getting a chance to drop his nemesis on the timekeeper’s table with the big whoopsie for once. Super Generation Army are notably aggressive in going after Taue, almost surprisingly so; once again it works better when they’re punishing this hated heel instead of his less-experienced self. (Sapporo helps too; surely these nice northern people wouldn’t condone such behavior if it was actually bad.) Likewise it’s once again Kawada’s eagerness to abuse his opponents that allows him to be isolated in return, with Jumbo paying him back for all those cheap shots and blindside attacks over the years with a northern lariat of his own.
That isolation doesn’t last too long as these guys keep things moving, tagging in and out through short swings of momentum that generally find the fan favorites on top. One such swing includes the earliest Kenta Kobashi machine gun chops I can recall seeing, which get over huge. (This being a Misawa-centric series means my perspective can very easily be off with some of these events that I’ve either never seen or haven’t watched back in 15+ years and won’t be reviewing. If I got the timeline wrong here be sure to alert the authorities.) Still it’s Kawada who’s the real highlight, taking it to Jumbo in the last major match the two will share together along with his mauling of mortal enemy Taue. Kawada taps Taue out with the stretch plum to win the match as all three members of SGA have holds applied to their cross-generational rivals, captured here in an issue of Weekly Pro Wrestling magazine.
A fitting image for the last great six-man tag of this feud. While Taue will continue on with the name for a while, Tsuruta-gun as we know it has been vanquished. The time of the Super Generation Army has arrived.
HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO SHAWN MICHAELS VS THE UNDERTAKER FROM WM25: I wouldn’t exactly call HBK/Taker a crowd-pleaser. Sure, the Houston crowd on hand are real into it, but the match is more pointedly dramatic than the sort of lighthearted affair that phrase suggests. As a result it’s hard to compare these two matches, one which is merely trying to send a remote Hokkaido crowd home happy with one of the two main events they’ll see all year while the other is trying to redefine drama as we know it. Very different goals in mind. I guess I’ll offer two points of comparison. The first is that, after months of me complaining about how long these SGA/T-Gun matches have been getting, this last six-man tag runs a full 36 minutes without ever feeling like a slog, something I can’t say for the Streak showdown. The second is that after thoroughly souring on this matchup over the summer of ‘91 and first few months of ‘92, these guys have finally turned things around and won me over again with an entertaining sendoff to their feud. The Mania match has never won me over and, in fact, put the nail in the coffin of whatever appreciation I had for Shawn Michaels early in my wrestling fandom. Hard to argue in its favor.
VERDICT: Slightly better than Shawn Michaels vs The Undertaker from WrestleMania 25
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