Mitsuharu Misawa (c) vs Toshiaki Kawada
Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship
07/24/1995
Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 05/11/2024) In my memory all the post-6/3/94 meetings between these two men only got worse and worse. While I suspect that’s still going to prove true the deeper we get into the decade, that was absolutely not the case here with this relatively forgotten title defense. If anything I think this match unquestionably blows its famous counterpart the year before out of the water.
Again and again throughout this project I’ve been frustrated by Toshiaki Kawada’s relative lack of intensity against this supposed bitter rival. Having watched him rip into people so hard it made me sick to my stomach, this series of matches with Mitsuharu Misawa has always felt painfully tame in comparison, a great wrestler neutered and defanged by this dull golden boy. That is not exactly the case here. Only a few weeks removed from his first pinfall victory over Misawa, Kawada smells blood and is going in for the kill, attacking the champ’s broken orbital bone with a newfound aggression that gives this match some actual direction. It doesn’t result in the most memorable selling performance of Misawa’s career but it’s something tangible to center this match around—something previous versions haven’t had—and it’s more sympathetic than his other injuries over the years. There’s nothing like getting punched in the face, you know? It has an immediacy to it. When Kawada simply kicks Misawa right across the face after a series of his silly neck chops, both the champ and his audience react to it more quickly and much more emphatically than with anything that came before. You probably haven’t broken your eye socket but everybody knows what it’s like to get smacked in the mouth and the insult it adds to this injury.
Best of all they actually stick with it. So often I feel these big AJPW matches are rather hurried in spite of their length, momentum swinging too quickly to let any one moment land with the appropriate weight. Here Misawa isn’t shrugging off everything Kawada throws at him, in large part because Kawada is so relentless in his attack; whenever the ace tries throwing an elbow, Dangerous K’s right there with a gamengiri to bring him down again. It results in a much more interesting match than usual, both in its sound mechanics of control segments and comebacks—rarities in this feud, I’m afraid—as well as with compelling emotional performances. Misawa’s still more distant than I’d theoretically like but he shows some fire by way of his scintillating elbows while knowing not to take control every time he turns the tide, unable to capitalize on all of his cutoffs because he’s not the hero of this story. Kawada builds an early lead by way of this relentlessness but seems almost terrified by the proposition of pulling ahead. He’s much more used to dramatically collapsing in the face of this old rival—as he does when he tries powering through Misawa’s release German suplex—such that when he takes control again, there’s this lost look in his eyes like he’s thinking, “well fuck, now what do I do?”
While the gradual pace of 6/3/94 emphasized Kawada’s relative lack of intensity, his relentlessness in this match better accentuates his anxieties. By never giving the audience—much less the ace—time to breathe, we can see just how desperate he’s becoming to defeat this man one on one, how he’s the one scrambling to hit a backdrop driver as soon as his calm and collected opponent shows any sign of life. This powerfully dichotomous image is one of the only worthwhile uses of Misawa’s signature stoicism and not anything they achieve with all their matches. If their last title match ended with Misawa asserting that it will always be 1991, here we have Kawada reflecting on the Sisyphean struggle he’s fated to undertake. The stone-faced ace is quite literally a rock for him to push up a hill again and again, never to be outdone. Kawada’s last loss was too bitter to lament; only now can we recognize the curse he’s caught up in—and maybe come to appreciate it. That’s how you know a match is truly great, that it retroactively makes the one that came before better.
HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO SHAWN MICHAELS VS THE UNDERTAKER FROM WM25: For all the ink spilled and hay made about The Streak over the years, it feels like WWE rarely ever reflected on the infernal inertia that faced anyone trying to end it. I guess it speaks to the worldview of this most American of wrestling promotions; no metaphysical force can dare withstand one man’s personal ambition, no matter how many previous men have been proven wrong. We never see acknowledgment that anyone’s doomed to fail in WWE because within the McMahonian worldview competitive failure is—above all else—personal failure, the purview of lesser beings wrasslin’ in bingo halls. That’s part of why Shawn Michaels’ weepy performance in that Mania match is so annoying, that it’s this deeply conceited reaction to something so much bigger than he is. (Some Christian he turned out to be, huh?) It lacks any relatable recognition that he himself could quite possibly be [gasp] human, something the Undertaker’s more muted reactions manage to achieve even with him playing this ill-defined supernatural character. Likewise Kawada’s reaction in that gif linked above is painfully relatable, the sort of thing that crossed language barriers and eighth generation copy tape fuzz to make him beloved the world over. His plight will always interest me more than that of a stuck-up South Texas boy baffled that things aren’t going his way for once.
VERDICT: Better than Shawn Michaels vs The Undertaker from WrestleMania 25
Brock Hates Wrestling 