Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, & Tsuyoshi Kikuchi) vs “Dr. Death” Steve Williams, Joel Deaton, & Tracy Smothers
taped 08/23/1993, aired 08/29/1993
Shizuoka Industrial Hall, Shizuoka, Japan
(reviewed 04/27/2024) Fuck yeah gang, Tracy Smothers is here. After some relatively successful tours of NJPW in recent years, this is one of only two tours he does with AJPW to help fill out cards as their gaikokujin start dropping like flies. Things don’t go so well for him here as he’s sort of meant to slot into fellow southern boy Terry Gordy’s place when he’d be much better suited to the junior heavyweight or All Asia division at this point in his career; indeed when he does face those sorts of opponents instead of these increasingly head drop-y heavyweights, they’re his best matches of the tour. (His redneck kung fu shtick actually gets some good reactions once he’s been around a week or two.) But speaking of head drops, this is all about Steve Williams and Kenta Kobashi, who have a last-minute number one contenders match scheduled for next week. They’re ready to rip each other’s heads off before the bell and when Doc gets half a chance with Kobashi applying a chinlock to Smothers about a minute in, he debuts a move that quickly becomes a staple of the King’s Road style:
This is the true backdrop driver, a term I’ve been using throughout this series to refer to what were originally called backdrop suplexes or backdrop holds before this third, flashier moniker superseded them in Western puro fan parlance. (This is similar to how, with slight distinctions, the Japanese refer to both vertical suplexes and what we’d call brainbusters by that latter name, a relic of Killer Karl Kox’s use of the brainbuster back in the 1960s.) Either way Kobashi and commentator Kenji Wakabayashi sell it real big, giving Doc a dangerous new move as he becomes unquestionably the top foreign heel in AJPW over the next few years. Mitsuharu Misawa and Tsuyoshi Kikuchi try to help their partner after this huge move and both are dispatched pretty quickly, with Misawa isolated by the gaikokujin team. The champ shows some fire in cutting Smothers off before tagging out, leaving the junior heavyweight to deal with these monsters as is his wont. Kikuchi and Doc have some awesome exchanges, brief as they are, in another indication of how electrifying the little man was during the early 90s. Kobashi’s hot tag and subsequent control segment are likewise fun, walking the line between exciting and unbelievable in a way that I’ll try to relish before he goes off the deep end here in a few years. In general though I think this thing goes too long to allow the backdrop driver to set in properly, with Misawa picking up the win over Joel Deaton also undermining the shock of that moment. Still, a neat and noteworthy match in several ways.
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