Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa & Kenta Kobashi) (c) vs “Dr. Death” Steve Williams & Johnny Ace
AJPW World Tag Team Championship
07/22/1994
Shizuoka Spring Water Marine Building, Shizuoka, Japan
(reviewed 05/05/2024) These King’s Road guys make tag team matches seem so much harder than they really are. Can’t hardly believe how much they fuck it up. This thing thankfully gets us back on the right track but not without some early awkwardness, especially with a Misawa/Doc standoff spot so underwhelming the audience forgets to react to it for a full five seconds. Kobashi and Ace come by those spots more naturally but the two of them gruffly grousing at one another through Kobashi’s corner chops feels uncharacteristic and more importantly unearned. A short tour through the other permutations of this match takes us to the familiar double control segment, something that I found to be an annoying crutch earlier in the decade but which now proves to be a blessed bit of structure in AJPW’s intentionally amorphous post-Jumbo era. Misawa getting worked over proves to be fairly dry (What, with that expressive little sparkplug? No way.) but Kobashi’s extended isolation is the most exciting such control segment in a while, kept fresh with plenty of fakeouts and short-lived comebacks that make it feel like momentum is swinging back and forth when it’s really headed in one direction with a few furtive thrusts. The relative lack of firepower from Ace’s offense and a lack of energy from everyone keeps this from hitting the next level but structurally it’s a lot more sound than other tag title matches we’ve seen. Miracle Violence Connection is the much more famous team but I’ll take Doc tagging with Johnny Ace any day. Misawa pulls out the diving neckbreaker drop he used on Giant Baba to retain the tag titles a second time.
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