Akira Taue & Tamon Honda vs Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama)
taped 06/29/1997, aired 07/06/1997
Korakuen Hall, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 05/21/2024) Akira Taue and Tamon Honda are so much fun, y’all. They feel so entirely different from the rest of the AJPW roster that it can’t not elevate their matches through sheer novelty alone—and they’re good too! Taue thinks outside the box, best exemplified by a pair of lockups: early on he catches Jun Akiyama with a standing roundhouse at such a weird angle and such a close proximity that you’d never expect it before later bringing Mitsuharu Misawa down with a drop toehold that comes out of nowhere. These slight variations on transition moves and cutoffs go a long way when we’ve seen this guy wrestle the same opponents at least a hundred times by now. Honda’s a more straightforward wrestler but I like his bit of learned psychology here, watching his partner fall to Misawa’s elbow out of the missed snake eyes such that he sees it coming the second time and cuts the ace off with a quick headbutt instead. The headbutt-based approach of this “primitive man” (as Akira Fukuzawa called him with his long hair and crude movements) is so charming, bringing a bit of levity to this AJPW main event scene that doesn’t feel out of place when matches get more dramatic. Likewise we get some of the best boots and bumping we’ve seen from Taue in years, that lanky allure I love so much. They can only do so much with the selfish, single-minded Misawa but both men are great with a guy like Akiyama, willing to give and able to take with this capable young main eventer in a way that expertly illustrates where his skills lie but how far he has yet to go. All of the non-Misawa Pillars are solid at establishing a younger opponent in a big match but only Taue approaches the careful touch that Jumbo Tsuruta used to bring these guys up right. One last thing I love about these big lunks is how they’re able to make submissions mean something, years and years after the facelock and stretch plum have stopped mattering. Listen to this Korakuen crowd squeal as Honda’s got the Shawn capture applied on Akiyama, the sort of reaction we haven’t heard from this arena in God knows how long. Big red boys 4ever.
Brock Hates Wrestling 