Mitsuharu Misawa (c) vs Jun Akiyama
Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship
09/06/1997
Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 05/21/2024) Jun Akiyama’s first shot at the Triple Crown and unfortunately it comes against his longtime tag partner. It’s so frustrating to watch them refuse to acknowledge that Mitsuharu Misawa is not himself anymore, at least insofar as he is much slower these days. The ace can’t keep up with a younger opponent like this, resulting in a disjointed match where Akiyama barrels through him with a bunch of spots that never quite land before Misawa cuts him down with low effort elbows and all his other increasingly underwhelming moves. It’s just sad to see Akiyama roll out to the floor and earn a brief count from referee Kyohei Wada—something that almost never happens anymore, AJPW being so insistent on ending these matches in the ring—after spending all of twenty seconds in Misawa’s facelock, committing so much to a move that hasn’t mean anything since his rookie year. Even worse than his physical state is how Misawa doesn’t react to Akiyama at all. He looks exhausted but not because of anything his young opponent has done to him, parting his hair and wiping sweat from his face as if he were the only one in the ring. That disconnect between the efforts of Akiyama, who unleashes the vast majority of the offense in this match, and the emotional state of the man taking his moves is so jarring. Thinking back to earlier in the decade, it’s night and day compared to how Jumbo Tsuruta went out of his way to sell frustration and surprise as well as the physical effort it took to contain the Super Generation Army. It feels worse in hindsight too. At the time I’d have thought it was just another mediocre Triple Crown match but knowing now how Akiyama was the first and worst victim of Misawa’s failure to put anyone over—being that Toshiaki Kawada and Kenta Kobashi’s legacies were made largely before their matches with the man—it’s just awful. Akiyama does a million moves to him and never once does it feel like it matters. It might as well not be professional wrestling anymore. If the opinions of the dumbest kids you knew in elementary school are anything to go by, this stuff is all about playing pretend. Misawa can’t even do that. All he can do is win.
Brock Hates Wrestling 