Stan Hansen & Gary Albright vs Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa & Kenta Kobashi)
Real World Tag League 1995 Match
11/29/1995
Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium, Osaka, Japan
(reviewed 05/15/2024) Absolute shame that they didn’t air this entire match, as this joined-in-progress footage starts with Stan Hansen selling his shoulder before counter punching Kenta Kobashi out of the sky on a flying legdrop and that’s the sort of energy I need to see in full. I shouldn’t have to explain who Gary Albright is but I’ll do it anyway. A decorated collegiate wrestler who still owns the University of Nebraska (go Huskers) record for most career pins and most total falls in a season, Albright started out in the dying days of the Calgary territory before embarking on a legendary run as one of UWFi’s monster heels. The first of a few UWFi guys to jump ship as (or, in the other two cases, after) the promotion sinks, I really like what he brings to AJPW. His standup game can be a little one-dimensional at times, lots of limp clobbering like we see here, but his approach to matwork is such an improvement on what we’ve seen with AJPW gaikokujin up to this point, doing more than dry headlocks and placing his opponents in positions where they can easily reversal his holds with some initiative. I also love how compact his matches are; with the exception of a few Champion Carnival draws, he never has a singles match as long as twenty minutes and most of his tags enjoy a similarly short runtime. While he sadly doesn’t live to see the latter promotion founded, I’d argue Albright played no small part in this King’s Road style evolving from the rigidity of Giant Baba’s AJPW to the comparatively loose and stylistically varied Pro Wrestling NOAH.
In the here and now Albright’s mostly another big American meant to take the fall for Mitsuharu Misawa and Kenta Kobashi. While Hansen can still put some stank on his strikes, at best he’s evenly-matched against these native stars by this point in his career, with Albright following his deferential lead aside from hitting a few nasty suplexes that Osaka treats with the proper awe. Even with something as dramatic as Kobashi diving in the way of an attempted Western Lariat on his partner, it never feels like Super Generation Army are in much danger of losing. Another guillotine drop weakens Albright enough that Kobashi can put him away with his sleeper hold, being kind enough to sell the damage done to his arm by this dogshit submission. Hope that’s not a sign of things to come. I can deal with Albright losing to a stretch plum but too many of these AJPW guys have bad holds that I now have to fear.
Brock Hates Wrestling 