Triangle of Power (“Dr. Death” Steve Williams & Gary Albright) (c) vs Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama)
AJPW World Tag Team Championship
08/26/1997
Nakajima Sports Center, Sapporo, Japan
(reviewed 05/21/2024) Now that Johnny Ace is off tagging with Kenta Kobashi, Steve Williams is in need of a new partner. Where else would he turn but to a fellow Big 12 legend, the suplex-hucking Cornhusker himself Gary Albright. (I don’t know that Jim Steele, the third vertex of this Triangle of Power, played any college sports but let’s assume he went to Texas Tech. He feels like a Red Raider.) They just took the tag titles off the aforementioned race traitors and while the team doesn’t last long, they make for a more imposing gaikokujin duo than we’ve had in a long time. For example: this match is less than nine minutes long. That’s a pretty ballsy move for a main event in one of the promotion’s last major markets outside the Tokyo metro area but I think they make it work well enough. There’s nothing particularly eye-opening here but I do still find some novelty in Mitsuharu Misawa getting launched around by the much larger Albright, taking side salto suplexes that send him flying across the ring or getting rocked by a pumphandle slam. In a strange inversion of the usual face-saving methods we see in professional wrestling he seems to bump a lot more in matches that he winds up losing, which is refreshing the few times that ever happens each decade. Speaking of which, Jun Akiyama is the glue holding this thing together. Even beyond being a little younger he is so much more lithe and agile than any of Misawa’s previous partners, allowing him to speed through scintillating exchanges with these bomb-throwing foreigners that likewise feel fresh compared to what we’ve seen before. In particular Akiyama’s flying forearm is a great comeback spot, a highflying move that requires less setup than Kenta Kobashi’s moonsaults and feels more impactful than all but Toshiaki Kawada’s stiffest strikes. In the end it isn’t enough to overcome the firepower of this American superteam, Doc hitting the backdrop driver and Albright hitting a gross dragon suplex for the win.
Brock Hates Wrestling 