Johnny Ace, The Patriot, The Eagle, & The Lacrosse vs Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, & Satoru Asako) & Kentaro Shiga
Eight Man Survival Tag Team Match
01/22/1996
Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium #2, Osaka, Japan
Watch: YouTube
(reviewed 05/13/2024) Once again we have another survival tag match, which by this point has been relegated to untaped house shows in the smaller of Osaka’s two state-run venues. What a downfall for this stip. This one isn’t great but I always appreciate house show fancam footage and need something to fill this first quarter of 1996 so fuck it, here’s a review.
Early on we get The Eagle and The Lacrosse running through the opposing midcarders, starting with young Kentaro Shiga and suck ass Satoru Asako. The Eagle, aka George Hines, is Bobby Fulton’s little brother and the occasional third wheel of that Fantastics team. The kind of guy who worked as a light heavyweight in America but as a smaller muscleman here in Japan, he’s probably best known for his work in AJPW after the NOAH split forced a bunch of foreigners into the spotlight. Jim Steele, having debuted in AJPW under that name but taken on this Lacrosse moniker for reasons I can’t fathom when he started teaming with the more nationalistic gaikokujin like Del Wilkes, is a much bigger heavyweight who I sorta like. Some of that’s for being the enjoyable also-ran in a number of great AJPW vs NJPW tags in the early 2000s and some of that’s for taking on the name Wolf Hawkfield here in a few years for a promotional tie-in for the Virtua Fighter series. Can’t not love that. When is some wrestler gonna have the guts to start calling themselves Khushnood Butt? Either way they do just fine. Unfortunately Asako and Shiga don’t wrestle like little guys against them, at least not in ways I’d like to see with a pair of mask-clad, musclebound Americans. The skinny Shiga’s the better of the two both in general and in this match specifically, a natural babyface who will have his moments once Burning forms in a few years, but ol’ Double S-A is throwing his pitiful weight round in unconvincing ways that kill this crowd deader than they already were. He’s sticking and moving moreso than just overpowering these larger opponents but either way I don’t buy that he wouldn’t just get wrecked against these guys like he does with all his televised matches. You ain’t Hulk Hogan when the camera’s off buddy, cut it out.
Things improve once the big names start making their way to the ring. The Eagle, selling his ribs from an errant diving headbutt from The Lacrosse right before they eliminated Asako, earns some surprising chants from this Osaka crowd before his partner’s sent packing. It makes for an interesting dynamic as he continues to be fairly sympathetic as Patriot turns up the heel heat, muscling Kobashi and Misawa around in ways we haven’t seen in a while with Stan Hansen being deemphasized and Steve Williams still banned from the country. Unfortunately they don’t do much with that as everyone’s rushing to get to the final pairing that makes up nearly half the match’s runtime. Johnny Ace matches the Patriot’s energy and, aside from some dull heel-in-peril headlocks, it results in a pleasing little house show main event. The two share a straightforward simplicity that works so well on smaller AJPW shows while their awkwardness and relative lack of intensity hold them back in bigger matches. Sometimes you need guys who hit snug shoulderblocks and fire up the crowd without any pretense that they’re top level wrestlers. Patriot will start approaching that level before long but I don’t mind so much, in large part because he works so well with Kobashi. Neither are the sharpest tool in the shed but Patriot’s no-nonsense territory training ensure his dumb guy efforts are always pointed in the right direction, which in this case means never backing down from Kobashi’s fire and cutting him off with mean power offense. I’ll take that over indulging the dude’s cry selling any day. An avalanche Ace Crusher on Kobashi earns the Americans the win, which I guess sets up Ace’s eventual title challenge over the summer once Misawa regains the tag titles with a new partner.
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