Mitsuharu Misawa (c) vs “Dr. Death” Steve Williams
Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship
07/28/1994
Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 05/05/2024) Quickly arriving at the conclusion that Steve Williams was far and away Mitsuharu Misawa’s best opponent. Even Jumbo Tsuruta wasn’t as consistently good against the guy as Doc has been since Terry Gordy’s second overdose. As with last time he makes the champ more expressive than he otherwise ever was or will be again. Even something as small as Misawa trading slaps with his opponent, staring him down as he tends to his jaw, and dismissively spitting on the mat as Doc nods in approval feels unbelievably refreshing for this stone-faced ace, as if they swapped him out for a lookalike who actually has blood running through his veins. His opponent is wonderfully expressive too. Doc’s better at desperately stumbling through a flurry of Misawa offense than any gaikokujin we’ve seen, selling the spectacle of a wild animal momentarily caught in a trap by the clever hunter: watch his arms flail as Misawa nabs him in a sleeper and see him grimace gravely on the wrong end of a front chancery. I’d also say he’s better at selling that animalistic sense of menace than Stan Hansen was before him. I buy Doc as a monster heel against this valiant babyface champion so much better than the old gunslinger pulling his punches, being both more aggressive and less sympathetic than Hansen has been at this stage of his career. Part of it’s that Doc is much more of a strength-based wrestler, tossing opponents around like a brute beast in a way these other gaikokujin rarely do, but as much as anything I think it’s his general disposition. The dude just feels dangerous.
Misawa’s selling, on the other hand, is a little obvious—he’s uncharacteristically wincing and walking around with a hand at his back even before Doc’s really done anything to him, telegraphing that he’s losing right from the start—but I guess I should take what I can get from this guy. More than his selling itself I love the way he reacts to Doc’s onslaught, throwing elbows to buy himself some time and desperately clinging to the ropes to avoid the Oklahoma Stampede. Frankly shocking to see the guy so, y’know, invested in what’s happening to him. It’s superior to the stoic performances of his more famous matches to such an obvious degree that I have to wonder whether his fans have ever seen this stuff. Were these tapes just not getting around? Did everybody collectively go, “ah yeah, might as well skip the end of this two year long title reign, that match must not be any good because our guy took the fall”? And it’s not just that presence of mind which sells the danger Doc poses. Misawa really clocks Doc with some elbow strikes, looking to put the big man down in a way we haven’t seen with any Misawa opponent in ages, and as a result I think this is a lot more engaging than the six-star classic of the month before. Still, I’d say it’s the challenger who brings it on the offensive end with snappy slams, back-based rest holds more interesting than the headlocks we usually get, even a wild tope suicida of his own. They should’ve booked Doc to win more often because he’s really feeling it here.
The closing stretch of this match is, dare I say it, the best of its kind throughout 90s AJPW. Some of the big tag matches coming up will give it a run for its money but as far as singles matches go, nothing in this Misawa series will touch it I think. Doc finally hitting the backdrop driver and the champ being almost completely unable to recover is the sort of drama these guys always gesture at and so rarely achieve, warranting this famously screechy commentary for once. (Helps that it’s your friend and mine Kenji Wakabayashi on the call instead of that amateur Akira Fukuzawa, as he knows not to scream for every single move across a thirty minute match.) Both the commentators and the men in the ring make it feel like a huge moment. Misawa’s selling is natural and human, two words I never associate with him, and likewise Doc’s weary frustration that this supermove wasn’t immediately enough to win is so much better than the braindead blubbering you get from every wrestler influenced by this stuff in all the wrong ways.
But mostly I appreciate this as a departure from Misawa’s other work, work in which he’s otherwise going out of his way to show how unaffected he is by everything the world could ever throw at him. No-selling is cool and exciting—that’s obviously why we like it—but it has to be selective in order to work at all. Goldberg didn’t shrug off everything opponents threw at him. Neither did Brock Lesnar or The Undertaker. Even a guy like Sting, whose no-selling earlier this year made for the most universally-beloved match in God knows how long, knew he had to give in order to take. Things have to matter first for it to matter when they don’t. If a wrestler never acts like they’re hurt, why would you care when someone beats them? They’re just gonna get up and walk backstage like nothing ever happened. To butcher a quote from one of the endless John McTiernan classics (clear my man’s name) if it doesn’t bleed, then who gives a fuck about killing it? This is the match that makes Steve Williams a star, that establishes him as a top tier monster heel forever, because, for once, this opponent is selling more than he is. In every other title match up to this point Mitsuharu Misawa has been the monster heel, the unstoppable killing machine, the unfeeling automaton whose only function was to win. Now that he’s lost we might actually learn to like him.
HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO SHAWN MICHAELS VS THE UNDERTAKER FROM WM25: If this is a contest between two matches containing two of my least favorite wrestlers ever, there’s no question that I’m taking the one where said wrestler finally gets his shit together. Everybody lost their minds about the wrong Triple Crown title match of the summer of ‘94.
VERDICT: Better than Shawn Michaels vs The Undertaker from WrestleMania 25
Brock Hates Wrestling 