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This was part of the 1997 Real World Tag League tournament.
It is not a match with especially huge tournament ramifications. It’s day seven of a fourteen show (plus the finals) tournament, and so while Holy Demon Army only have six points and the FMW team two, it is clearly not a match that the tournament is going to hinge on. It is too soon to count the HDA out, and exactly long enough to know that the FMW boys do not have a prayer of winning this thing, brought in as one of many guest star fixes used by All Japan to briefly make things more interesting, as they would continue to do until the schism in 2000 to patch over creative malaise.
What this relies on is how cool it is to see this match up, and luckily, it is really god damned cool to see this match up.
First of all, and arguably most importantly of all, this is a match that is wrestled big. These are four wrestlers who are very good, at least in this moment, at not wasting movement, moving with energy and feeling, and who react and deliver everything with such emphasis. Hayabusa goes on a run in the first minute of this match that has a real kind of fuck you undercurrent to it. Shinzaki and Kawada are always making faces at each other. Taue is maybe the odd man out here, as he carries on throughout the match in the way Akira Taue always does, rarely bothered by something like a mid-tour semi main event tag, but as the sort of wrestler who has always displayed such a stellar economy of movement, he’s so great in a match like this at simply continuing that feeling, and adding the bombs where he can.
The thing that really works about this is that they combine this feeling of grandeur with a classic kind of interpromotional tension, albeit not in the most obvious way.
As with any match with even the potential for great tension, for one reason or another, Toshiaki Kawada takes that and cranks the dial as far as it will go, creating a much tenser and far more interesting atmosphere than you might get otherwise, and a more interesting one than we otherwise saw from Hayabusa and Shinzaki on this tour, taking what could be yet another of their many dream matches against AJPW stars and making it into something that feels genuinely hostile.
Largely, that’s mostly on Kawada himself. It’s easy to just look at the mean way he delivers his offense, which is once again a delight. Few wrestlers ever have been so great at displaying a level of unbridled contempt with just one move or strike like Kawada, but it is more than just that. The way he immediately communicates Hayabusa’s elbows to start the match as this great insult, or the way he reacts to Shinzaki ALMOST getting him on the rope walk spot is so great. No other wrestler ever has been able to combine so many different emotional reactions into a few seconds like Kawada does, communicating annoyance, frustration, a general anger, and then that classic rage turned inwards, all in a few seconds. I don’t know if this is a top fifty Kawada performance ever, but it is the exact sort of performance that illustrates why Kawada is one of a few locks near the top of any list I might ever compile of the greatest wrestlers ever.
The feeling in this match is not just Kawada’s doing though.
As previously mentioned, Hayabusa is right there with him whenever he gets to throw out the fireworks in this match. Based on how few people in wrestling history have ever done it, adding that kind of intensity and hostility to a more aerial attack is not the easiest thing to do, and this is one of my favorite examples of it. Every Hayabusa dive or leaping attack or move off the top has a little extra on it. Maybe just as much as the meanness of the HDA or specifically Kawada’s facial expressions, the way in which Hayabusa does his offense is real vital to the feeling this is able to put out.
Beyond just feelings and general hostilities in the air, it’s also a match that makes a ton of sense and works on a regular ass wrestling level, mechanically and narratively.
Smaller guys hurl their bodies at the bigger ones until they’re worn out enough to feel beatable. Bullying works until it doesn’t. In the end, it comes down to the ability of the smaller wrestlers to capitalize on the small window they’re able to create. Kawada and Taue are always there for saves when it counts though, and it just doesn’t happen. Hayabusa and Shinzaki never really feel lesser for it, but it comes down to a kind of undeniable physical reality of it. It isn’t an impossibility, but Kawada and Taue are too good individually and too good as a team for that window to stay open for more than a half a second, and that’s that.
Not one of the best matches of all time or anything, but something just as respectable, a dream match that completely lives up to that status, while delivering in ways that are far far more interesting than pure fantasy.
HANDWERK 