Mitsuharu Misawa (c) vs Stan Hansen
Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship
10/23/1993
Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 04/27/2024) This ‘93 tetralogy comes to an end with what I feel pretty comfortable calling the worst Triple Crown match ever. I suppose there are title matches from the late 2010s and early 2020s that I actively dislike more (looking at you, Suwama vs Shotaro Ashino!) and I’m sure there are a few stinkers in the 2000s period I’m less familiar with (outside of the infamous Minoru Suzuki vs Kensuke Sasaki that I’d like to revisit soon) but as for Triple Crown matches of note from AJPW’s golden era, this is the dirt worst. Unfortunately they might have an excuse for it: Mitsuharu Misawa supposedly broke his breastbone here.
Naturally I’d want to call bullshit and not without reason. For one, the following spring they do another injury angle to write the Ace of Glass out of the Champion Carnival so it’s not out of the question that they’d make some shit up here. What’s more there’s very little reporting on it compared to other Misawa injuries, all of which took place before he was the champion and top star of one of the more popular promotions in the world, meaning there’d be more reason to print news about this incident if it actually happened. This supposed sternum injury receives nothing more than a passing mention in Hidetoshi Ichinose’s 2019 Four Pillars biography and is brought up all of once in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, alongside a bizarre note that fans booed the finish of the match despite realizing that Misawa was clearly hurt. Sounds fishy to me.
The footage of the match itself is murkier and points us in multiple directions. There’s not really an obvious spot where this injury would have occurred, not that such an indication always exists, especially with a break as tricky as the breastbone. At a certain point the match turns into a lot of weak striking back and forth with Stan Hansen shoving Misawa to the mat, as if to avoid doing actual bumps. Not sure I’ve seen Stan look more spooked than he is here, for what it’s worth. Additionally Misawa does put a hand to his chest more than usual in this match and in general seems to treat it gingerly, especially after he wins. That said his breathing doesn’t appear to be particularly labored and he sure as hell, especially in the second half of the match, isn’t acting like he just broke his sternum. It would be putting it mildly to say the man does all his old moves here; the dude is fucking flying all over the place, flipping and twirling more than he’s done in a few years at this point. If this man just suffered a sternal fracture, would he willingly do a frog splash? Or a missile dropkick, crashing to the mat painfully when he whiffs? Or a plancha that is likewise misfired, falling chest-first to the floor before then taking a powerbomb on the mats? And that’s just one of the eye-opening moves Hansen does to him along with a bevy of chops and elbow drops and kicks to either side of the torso. The dude does a fucking Fame-Ass-er. Would an injured man actually take that, especially from a 300 pound opponent? Misawa is stupid and self-destructive but not even I would call him that dumb.
Moreover, I don’t think it really matters whether he was injured or not because this match was awful before any of that. The first half of this thing is rest hold city; it’s probably more active, on the whole, than some of the worst Miracle Violence Connection matches but it is still dreadfully dull, an interminable ten or twelve minutes of inchoate headlocks, armbars, and leg holds that mean nothing to no one. Budokan is as quiet for it as I’ve ever heard in any main event. It STINKS. Injury or no, I’m not sure any match could have fully recovered from that opening stretch. The fact that what follows is just as half-assed and disjointed, even if they’re no longer sitting around in meaningless submissions, is what makes this match so bad.
That aforementioned powerbomb is the last move of note before they move on to an awful finish that everyone and their mother hates. Hansen charges at the champion in the corner before Misawa leaps over him to execute one of the worst sunset flips I’ve ever seen, with a poorly-timed kickout at three that was meant to see Hansen save face instead coming across like a bad botch. It gets booed pretty heavily, at least for a match of this era when the average fan that AJPW draws isn’t as inclined to say when shit sucks as they were in the good ol’ days of the mid-80s. Can’t say I blame them. If Misawa did actually get hurt here then that’s unfortunate and, in a separate thought, I think they did a pretty poor job making up for that fact. However, I think it’s not out of the realm of possibility—and if anything seems pretty likely—that these two instead fucked up the finish of another boring iteration of an already laughably-overexposed matchup and tried to play it off like it was due to injury when they finally got booed for it. Occam’s Elbow, if you will. After this Misawa doesn’t take any time off nor does he act any differently once the Real World Tag League rolls around in three weeks, having made a miraculous recovery from an injury that takes at least a couple of months to heal. I guess he’s just that good.
Brock Hates Wrestling 