Kenta Kobashi vs Mitsuharu Misawa
Champion Carnival 1996 Match
03/31/1996
Aichi Prefectural Gymnasium, Nagoya, Japan
(reviewed 05/13/2024) Mitsuharu Misawa finds himself in an unenviable and unfamiliar situation here. A week into the Champion Carnival tournament he is somehow still winless, having gone to an unlikely draw with Johnny Ace before dropping a fall to the returning Steve Williams. Meanwhile Kenta Kobashi is on a hot streak, having defeated Jun Akiyama, The Patriot, and Tamon Honda after an opening night draw with Akira Taue. The ace will to have to assert his dominance over his ascendant tag team partner to have any chance of winning this tournament—one of the most gripping narratives there is in all of pro wrestling—so naturally instead of playing to that desperation these guys sit around in headlocks for a third of the match. Great. This especially feels like a step backward for Kobashi, applying the same strategy he used against Jumbo Tsuruta five years ago as if to prove me right about how he hasn’t progressed at all and is merely a silly little boy playacting with his older brothers. Dude even walks like a toddler, all stiff and uncoordinated as he’s got both hands out, fat fingers splayed, to grab Misawa’s head like it’s a plastic ball he bounced over the fence. Misawa thankfully wrestles somewhat like a man, cracking the kid across the face before taking his milk money, though to Kobashi’s credit he rises to the occasion upon facing the prospect of lunch without a carton of Prairie Farms. Pulling out several of the first “no sell a move to return fire and collapse dramatically afterward” spots, I certainly can’t claim these guys aren’t trying. The problem is there’s no forward motion. In hitting a bunch of moves back and forth, back and forth, they alter the improvisational give and take of professional wrestling from “yes and” to “no but,” preventing any progress from being made one way or another. It’s the same issue as in their last title match in which the slow pace made it feel like no one was working toward anything, only arrived at in the opposite manner. There are some cool moves here and all, they just don’t push me in any direction other than indifference. Even those cool moves are so often compromised; it sucks all the drama out of a particular cutoff or reversal when you immediately see these guys scramble into place for the next spot, too busy stuffing their 36 minute title match into a 24 minute timeslot to make any of this shit ever mean anything. Obvious and inert. Not what I’d call a worthwhile main event.
Brock Hates Wrestling 