Mitsuharu Misawa vs Stan Hansen
Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship (vacant)
07/27/1990
Matsudo Sports Park Gymnasium, Matsudo, Japan
(reviewed 03/24/2024) The first of many title matches between these two, so often forgotten because it was a last-minute change. Back in June, three days before the famous match with Mitsuharu Misawa that changed AJPW forever, Jumbo Tsuruta lost the Triple Crown to Terry Gordy. A pair of quick swaps with Stan Hansen led Gordy here, where he was scheduled to defend the titles against Misawa ten days into his second reign, but that never happened because Gordy overdosed on painkillers. Enjoying a night out on the town, Gordy collapsed onto a foosball table at 3:00 AM the day of this title defense and was rushed to a hospital where, in a sad precursor to the 1993 incident that will essentially end his career, he slipped into a brief coma. While Gordy makes a full recovery and is back in the ring less than a month later, it casts a permanent pall on his relationship with Giant Baba and the AJPW office; never again does he challenge for the Triple Crown.
Those ominous events likewise cast a shadow across this first instance of an already awkward matchup. While I believe he was out of the coma by the time the show started, reportedly no one backstage knew whether Gordy was going to survive and that fact is felt by fans and wrestlers alike, making for a rather subdued match relative to everything else we’ve seen from the summer of 1990. It doesn’t help that this is a pretty one-note match. Misawa surprises Hansen with a clothesline at the bell, thereafter using the man’s own bullrope against him as well as a folding chair or two. Misawa’s not a natural brawler but he does alright here, especially because he’s only doing it to transition into attacking the American’s arm, looking to neutralize the Western Lariat. The bits of this match where Misawa’s wrenching at Hansen’s arm every which way are real good, at least for a while. I love the desperate ferocity of a wounded Hansen. He’s constantly throwing chops and boots, swinging fists and whatever he can get his hands on, yanking at Misawa’s hair and tights, doing everything he can to escape this hold the man’s got on his arm. It doesn’t make him feel vulnerable necessarily but it certainly establishes the stakes for this limbwork, making it feel more meaningful than the listless rest holds of lesser gaikokujin. Hansen matches can certainly become predictable and repetitive but I appreciate that he’s more active in his role as a monster heel than, say, Terry Gordy ever was.
When people talk about Hansen, positively or negatively, I think they often overlook his physical charisma. There’s an undeniable charm in the way he catches his breath and mutters to himself after making a cutoff, the way he clutches at his arm after an errant back elbow, this bewildering result of Brock Lesnar’s selling ability somehow transmuted into early 90s John Goodman. It’s easy to think of him as a stock standard cowboy character but he brings a lot of individual personality to that familiar archetype, much of it expressed in his body language, in the way he lumbers around in pursuit of his prey or suddenly goes teetering into the ropes when he’s hit with a move. Everybody loves watching a big boy throw his weight around and few hefty fellas did that better than Stan the Han.
The problem with this match is that Misawa’s armwork goes on way too long and leads nowhere. A good ten minutes of this sixteen minute match are spent in an arm hold of some kind, Misawa repeatedly reestablishing control after they arrive at natural stopping points for this sequence. It’s here that the crowd’s apprehension about Gordy creeps in again, making for long lulls in the action where they’re shockingly silent for this surprise matchup between the top foreigner in Japan and this hot young superstar. Regardless of his reputation I find that Hansen is, if anything, too giving with Misawa. Unlike his matches against the likes of Toshiaki Kawada or Misawa’s own matches against Jumbo that are defined by the younger, often overwhelmed wrestlers struggling to break free, these Hansen/Misawa bouts feature an unleashed Misawa doing whatever he damn well pleases for long stretches of time. It saps all the drama out of the match or worse yet shifts the sympathy toward the charismatic foreigner getting his arm worked over. (Man’s charismatic enough as it is, don’t need to detract from the match in highlighting him.) Misawa abandons said armwork for some impactful highflying when Hansen eventually turns the tide, which likewise doesn’t go much of anywhere—Hansen might cut him off or avoid a dive but it doesn’t feel like that’s what costs Misawa the title in the end. They’re just moves being done until they decide to hit the finish. You might chalk it up to unfamiliarity and the surprise of a last-minute booking change but the rest of their matches aren’t much better and one or two are significantly worse.
Somehow, when all he does for 80% of the match is lay around in a hammerlock, Misawa is too exhausted to make it the locker room after he loses to Hansen’s lariat. Instead he sits in the aisleway, head down and shoulders slumped as dozens of fans—mainly women and children—mill around and murmur their concerns as they exit the arena. A sign of the shifting dynamics among AJPW fans, though not everyone sees it that way. Hidetoshi Ichinose, one of the Weekly Pro Wrestling writers working as a creative consultant for Giant Baba at this time, writes in his 2019 Four Pillars biography that he recalls hearing a photographer for a rival magazine asking why Misawa was so popular anyway as he packed up his gear to go.
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