Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama) (c) vs “Dr. Death” Steve Williams & Johnny Ace
AJPW World Tag Team Championship
09/05/1996
Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 05/16/2024) I’m not sure why Johnny Ace ever tried being a workrate guy when clearly it pays better to just beat the shit out of people like his superior partner does. Their disparate in-ring styles hold this back some but not enough to derail Dr. Death’s return to form after a year or two of turmoil behind the scenes. Steve Williams is a man possessed here, hitting a series of huge moves that made me repeatedly scream into an empty apartment and scare my cats. The fact that they’re all on Mitsuharu Misawa makes it even better. First he’s hitting the ace with back elbows and meathook lariats that would uproot small trees before back body dropping the man so that he doesn’t fully rotate and lands on his head instead. Hard to say he doesn’t deserve it. The real highlights, though, are a pair of backdrop drivers each better than any in years: the first sees Steve simply fling Misawa overhead such that he lands on his face as much as anything while the match-capper at the end is this frightening combination of power and precision, folding a grown man in half with the indifferent speed of a hydraulic press. It’s all awesome as hell, this vulgar display of power that immediately stirs you from the soporific stupor of 90s AJPW and reminds you what real wrestling can look like.
Unfortunately the match doesn’t make the best use of these bombs, being a little too slow and uneven to keep that energy going. You might blame some of that on Misawa. Just barely into his mid-30s, the man seems to have aged quite a bit over the last year, a physical change exacerbated by the relative lack of footage during this era and how it has us leaping ahead weeks or even months at a time. He’s looking a lot more puffy and ragged than he has even in recent memory, finally starting to grow out this scraggly beard he’ll carry for most of the rest of his life. It’s not like he slows down much moving forward—if anything he’s about to enter the most physically taxing period of his career—but it’s easy to imagine that he’s started tagging with an even younger partner to help make up for this.
In any other situation this might make a wrestler more sympathetic but that’s not how Mitsuharu Misawa works. Even when he’s dropped across the top rope by Ace’s makeshift Stun Gun/Ace Crusher or sent head over heels with a Doomsday Device, he’s quickly recovering enough to tag out or make the save for an isolated Akiyama. As much as the guy pretends selling is somehow intended to alleviate one’s pain, clearly there’s something else going on there. We just saw how refreshing it could be to have a guy like Kenta Kobashi—the reigning Triple Crown champion, in case you forgot—get worked over for most of a match but this stubborn insistence on Misawa’s status ensures nothing like that ever happens with him. I used to assume that stubbornness came from the conservative Giant Baba’s booking and while that’s undoubtedly a factor, more and more it seems to me that it stems from this much younger man made obstinate beyond his years. Is it ego? Some sense of duty? A more fundamental disconnect from other people? It’s hard to say. In some sense it’s not my business to ask. All I know is here in the realm of wrestling reviews whatever issue this is makes for significantly worse matches. While this is an enjoyable enough bombfest by virtue of Doc’s sheer intensity and one or two eye-opening moves from Ace as well, I can’t shake the thought that there’s a better match hidden away in here behind one man’s refusal to look weak.
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