Toshiaki Kawada vs. Cactus Jack, HUSTLE-3 (5/8/2004)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from longtime friend of the program and deeply generous Ko-fi contributor @beenthrifty. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.

This, despite being on HUSTLE, was for Kawada’s Triple Crown Title.

Mick Foley and Toshiaki Kawada are two of my favorite wrestlers of all time. For any number of reasons, I do not connect with too many professional wrestlers on an emotional level (not that there are like five or anything, but given the sheer amount of professional wrestlers, you know?), but I did with these two, and it was near immediate in both cases. Outside of Stone Cold, which as a child in 1998 was undeniable, Mick Foley was one of the first wrestlers I ever loved. I was the person that WCW documentaries describe who turned it to Raw is War on January 4th, 1999 when they said that thing. When I first got into Japanese wrestling, while the heroics of a Misawa or Kobashi were impressive, it was the struggle of Kawada that kept me looking back at things and discovering. You get me on the right day (these days, usually around when Bryan Danielson is too kind to a bad wrestler in a big AEW match), and I will say Kawada is the second best wrestler ever in my eyes, and up there was my very favorite of all time. Get me on the right day, perhaps even that same one, and I will say Mick Foley is in the top twenty, if not better than every other Pillar (I can waffle on he and Taue, nothing is ever set in stone).

I say that all to say that I love these guys, beyond just a base level on which I think they’re really great wrestlers.

Despite what many might say, I am a very positive person, and I believe that I see good in a lot of things many others do not (sometimes even wrestling matches), and I am particularly inclined to do this for wrestlers I love watching.

Such a thing was not possible here.

The best thing about this match is that, because HUSTLE booked it and because it happened, there are pictures widely available of Toshiaki Kawada and Mick Foley fighting each other.

When you watch the match — as I avoided doing for over twenty years because of such warnings — that all falls apart.

Both have been a part of some great stylistic clashes that prove the old adage about styles making fights, but I think this is simply too far of a divide to bridge. Foley is like two weeks removed from one of his best and most wild performances ever, if you want to cite that, and has admitted that he was here for the insane money HUSTLE was throwing out (Dusty Rhodes, Mark Coleman, and The Outsiders are also on this show). Kawada throws some of the softer shots of his career all throughout, and leans a lot on these elbows to the back of the neck that are more in line with a U.S. southern heel than Dangerous K, really only unloading with one kick at the very end.

Neither ever feels at all comfortable with each other, nor interested in becoming so. It’s all best summed up by the classic Foley barbed wire bat, which is brought in and teased, but never even all that close to being used in a meaningful way. It’s a match that feels as though it was forced to happen at gunpoint. Two of the best ever do exactly enough to say that, technically, they had a match, which ought to get someone somewhere to let Foley go free and to keep Kawada’s ramen shop free from extortion for the time being.

I didn’t enjoy it much at all, but I’m happy both made it through this ordeal that they were very clearly forced into.

Kawada wins with a Gamengiri followed up by a head kick to a seated Foley.

The greatest strength of this match is that, despite all Foley would go on to do in sporadic appearances over the last six and a half years of his career, it made me a little less sad that Samoa Joe vs. Mick Foley never happened the following year.

Some dreams are best left as dreams.

Holy Demon Army vs. Jun Akiyama/KENTA, NOAH Great Voyage 2009 in Osaka ~Mitsuharu Misawa, Always In Our Hearts~ (10/3/2009)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from one of my favorite old MV Zone guys, ddevil. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

After writing about one of my favorite old MV Zone videos, the “Wild World” finale with these two, when talking about the final Misawa vs. Kawada match, it was a genuine pleasure to hear from one of my all-time favorite wrestling music video creators in ddevil, offering up this match. Genuinely, outside of the fact that I can actually make money talking about professional wrestling, hearing from people whose work I have admired for years and that seemingly being a two way street is one of the coolest things about this entire endeavor.

Fittingly, this is also one of my favorite matches of all time.

Very little of that has to do with the physical content of this as a wrestling match.

That isn’t to say this is bad, because I think just about anyone can watch this and see the greatness in it.

All four are tremendous.

KENTA and Kawada are probably the story here, as the only pairing with true antagonistic feelings between them. KENTA, being the only one in this match with no real sentimental tie to anything happening outside of professional respect for the portrait hanging over the entrance, cannot help but take shots at the only one he hasn’t fought a million times and who he most resembles, stylistically. Kawada, in the other best performance of the match next to KENTA’s ultra spirited showing, looks as offended as possible, and they spend the match running at each other whenever possible, elevating the match above mere emotion and feel-good sentient into being super super interesting on another level. Akiyama and Taue are asked to do less — Taue as the sympathetic old man of the bunch and Akiyama kind of just as this control group, the one of the bunch in his prime and semi-dignified in a match that feels always on the border of losing that — but they are also both fantastic, and give the match all that it asks of them and then some.

The match is also as well put together as you might imagine from four all-time talents. The early sparks, dueling control work, hot tags, the escalation of both the offense and the anger between KENTA and Kawada, all of that. Even on a micro level, things the younger KENTA avoids before later falling victim to when Our Heroes really commit themselves to it.

It is not a match that succeeds entirely because of these things, but it is clearly a match put together with some level of intelligence.

What works about this match is, fucking OF COURSE, everything else.

In the first week of October 2009, I moved from Chicagoland to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not at all by choice, however much I love it now. I had moved out of my mom’s a few months earlier to live with a cousin in Chicago proper, then a windowless basement apartment of my own after that, but when that wasn’t working out anymore, I found out my mother had moved back, and my uncle had a small apartment ready for me. I took an Amtrak over, got there later in the night and found what I believed to be the door to my apartment locked with no key waiting as I had been told of, and spent the night sleeping in the second floor landing of a staircase before I moved in the next day, using a duffel bag full of clothes as a pillow.

This was not the first wrestling I watched in that new home — it was a bullshit Smackdown eight main event that night, the go home to Hell in a Cell 2009 that I think was Cena/Undertaker/DX vs. Orton/Punk/Cody/Ted Jr. — but it was the first really great and/or affecting match I watched in my new home, and I guess, at least with a match like this, that is the sort of thing one remembers.

At least it is when a match so clearly revolves around the mental state of one of your all-time favorites.

For whatever reason, when I first laid eyes on Toshiaki Kawada in the summer of 2006, hunting down the All Japan classics and finding 6/9/95 first, there was something about Dangerous K that drew me in. The meanness and brutality are exciting, but what got me was the way he looked at people and carried himself, and how even in moments where he was objectively being cruel and unfair, you could always see his side of it all. Many wrestlers have gone crazier with them, but few have gotten as much out of facial expressions and eye movements and body language like Kawada has. I personally believe that Kawada is the greatest facial seller in pro wrestling history. This is maybe not the absolute best example of that, in the way that his 1993-6 work, when he was at the peak of his powers as the greatest wrestler alive, was, but it works in the same way.

Truly, I have never seen a wrestler wrestle with the feeling of a weight on them like I do here with Toshiaki Kawada.

Spending the last twenty years, minimum, measuring himself against his childhood friend, to both great emotional turmoil and complex suffering and even occasionally real victory, Kawada suddenly finds himself without any of that. There’s a weight to every single thing he does in this match, from the spirited cut-offs to his explosive moments against KENTA. He always feels like the most put-upon wrestler of all time, especially in the moments where they cut to the Misawa portrait, with Kawada now literally wrestling in the shadow that he did escape, but also never quite let out of his sight. With few exceptions, such as Mark Briscoe following the passing of his brother or Eddie Kingston’s famous “the best man at my wedding” promo, grief has never poured through the screen in quite the same way, in large part because it is treated entirely as a purely professional thing. I immediately recognize it. Not so much in the same way I did at the time, seeing Kawada holding his face tighter than usual, but in a way I understand more nearly fifteen years later, and having suffered some loss and having to work through it.

Almost impossibly, on the fourth or fifth time I watch this, the first in at least a decade, I somehow leave this match thinking more of Toshiaki Kawada than ever before. It is not one of the greatest performances of all time, as this match is not quite so ambitious, but it is one of the more affecting matches of all time.

It doesn’t make the match better mechanically.

Taue pins KENTA with the Ore Ga Taue to win, and the match is a kind of classic NOAH young vs. old sort of thing, one of the enduring formulas for a reason.

In some small part, I like it more like this. Kawada gains nothing from a win, and more simply from the moment itself, going through it with Taue, in sight of Akiyama in the match to be stopped yet again and Kenta Kobashi on commentary. Kawada, even as tampered down and buttoned up as this match seems to be at times, cannot entirely hide from what is obviously there, and in as much as what was real enhanced the work of one of the greatest stories in the history of professional wrestling, what is here now makes the aftermath into one of the more unforgettable matches ever.

Like the feud that this is an epilogue for, some of the most powerful and affecting pro wrestling possible.

***3/4

Mitsuharu Misawa vs Toshiaki Kawada, NOAH Destiny (7/18/2005)

Commissions continue, this one from frequent contributor YB. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/thing or $10/hour for anything an hour or more, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

(I badly wish the old ddevil “Wild World” MV was still online, like his “What If The Storm Ends?” and “Tonight, Tonight” classics, to give a very easy explainer and to show it to newer fans, but alas, it is not. Up there with the 2015 Bayley “Lights Will Guide You” MV as some of our greatest cultural artifacts that, if you have either of them, I would love to see again.)

A thing about me maybe worth knowing is that, as a result of NOAH involvement in my gateway to a larger world in ROH, I got into Japanese wrestling in 2006 and 2007.

That might not immediately mean anything, but the Japanese wrestling internet back then was truly wild. Not like WWE vs. TNA internet or anything, but the NOAH vs. NJPW wars, I think, would blow the minds of a lot of fans who have come to the scene since. People getting called the r slur for only appreciating matches full of head drops and dangerous apron spots. People being called f slurs and other homophobic insults for either liking grappling or maybe just supporting the 2006-7 Tanahashi push, genuinely a wild time.

I say all of that to say that, when this happened, and for a few years after, most people acted like this was some tragedy.

Now, certainly, this is not Misawa and Kawada in 1993 or 1994 or (my favorite) in 1995 or 1997 or 1998. They — mostly Misawa but also undeniably Kawada too — have lost a step, at best. Misawa has lost more than a few, and since his final and arguably best Triple Crown title run, Kawada is also in the early stages (although still capable years later) of decline. They have also lost the narrative heft that helped them so much from 1992 through 1999.

And yet, I have never quite been able to do anything but like this.

To be clear, yeah, I get it.

It is probably the worst match they have together.

Robbed of the long-term narrative of Kawada’s quest to get this done or, in the last two years of Peak AJPW, to prove he could do it more than once, it is sort of just a wrestling match, at the time when both needed narrative assistance most of all.

All the same, it is so petty.

Kawada and Misawa (mostly Kawada) have a lovely sort of old man petty kind of a match. I would compare it to the last Hero/Kingston match, except that the did so much more with the same idea. All the same, it is a lot like that match, in a lesser way (no blame to Kawada here, who at all points brought the hate that Misawa seemed incapable of). Misawa, to what extent he can, always at least seems troubled, either by having to really get after it for the first time in years, or simply being against this mother fucker again. Toshiaki Kawada, who to me, is the third greatest wrestler of all time at worst (Tenryu, Bryan), does all he can at this point to elevate it beyond the purely physical. Hateful reactions, elbows loud and visually impressive enough to match the Misawa ones, which are really all he can still offer, those other facial expressions where he runs the gamut from annoyed to prideful to every other feeling along the way between being dead on his feet to defiant no sellig.

Misawa wins — as he was always going to — with a motherfucker of a running elbow.

The point is far less the result, and a little less the body, and far more so the feeling. Although they cannot follow Kobashi vs. Sasaki, or even KENTA vs. Kanemaru or MiSu/Marufuji vs. Akiyama/Hashi, but the spirit moves on. It is hateful and mean and at least a little but uncooperative, in all the best way.

Kawada and Misawa have one last match, and it goes as they almost all do. Kawada makes it great, and then Misawa wins, because someone somewhere wrote down that that was what was supposed to happen.

Should you want the real finale, the Holy Demon Army vs. Akiyama/KENTA is out there (both in terms of viewers who want to reckon with how Kawada beautifully and tragically handles a world without his lifelong comparison point, but also those who simply want to see the greatest match at the end of this all), not only waiting for you, but waiting for you to pay me to write about.

All the same, I’ve always liked this match in spite of every Yeah But that exists, and hopefully, I’m happy to see more people join me here.

***

Holy Demon Army vs. Jinsei Shinzaki/Hayabusa, AJPW Real World Tag League 1997 Day Seven (11/23/1997)

This was a commissioned review from frequent contributor Kai. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out. 

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.

***1/4

Kensuke Sasaki vs Toshiaki Kawada, NJPW DO JUDGE!! (10/9/2000)

Another commission here, again from Ko-fi contributor Kai, as we go in snake order. You can be like them and pay me to watch and review any sorts of matches or whatever else you’d like. Head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon if you think you’d be interested in that, and make sure I haven’t already written about it ahead of time. The current market price is $5 per review and if you have a more complex notion than simply multiplying a number by five, feel free to hop into the DMs and we can work something out. 

You know what this is.

As a moment, it is a hell of a thing.

Main event of the Tokyo Dome, New Japan against All Japan for the first time in a billion years, all of that. Quite the famous match. As part of defending the honor of All Japan as one of the last ones left, Kawada marches into enemy territory to face dominating IWGP Heavyweight Champion Kensuke Sasaki, near the end of a nearly perfect 2000 in between winning the title to start the year at the Tokyo Dome and winning the G1 Climax as champion, a feat not matched since. A wunderkind in the midst of a perfect year against another promotion’s older and hardened superstar who is having an especially troublesome year between the All Japan to NOAH exodus, trying to stand up for AJPW when nobody else has all year. The former of the two either revered as a lizard-brain wrestling icon or despised as a booker’s pet golden boy and the latter of the two the absolute favorite of that last group. Nobody hates Kawada, but big Kawada fans are dying for (a) something to go right for him and AJPW & (b) for someone to finally stop a guy like Kensuke Sasaki. Translated into real sports, it’s the 2011 NBA finals (not just youth on one side, but raw power and objective numbers, and a history of failure on the other), something that comes together too perfectly to ever feel planned, a match up that feels like some kind of moral judgment from on high as much as it does any kind of athletic competition.

As a match, it is something real special too.

I had this down in my memory as a kind of gigantic dick measuring contest, one of the biggest in wrestling history. It absolutely is. Kensuke Sasaki wrestles one way and Kawada is more than willing to meet him on that familiar terrain. They hit each other exceptionally hard, build up to a few spectacular exchange, and the match comes down not to any of their larger pieces of offense — Kawada’s powerbomb or Sasaki’s Northern Lights Bombs or the throws — but to those impossible hard shots.

There’s also a lot more than that here.

Kawada never just has matches like that.

Sasaki manages the early shows of power and force. The big knockdowns, the first closed fist of the match, the big showy gestures. He’s the stronger of the two in early strike exchanges. In classic Kawada fashion though, the same as we’ve seen against every larger opponent, it’s a Kawada match that is about surviving, enduring until he finds an opening, and then hurling himself through it in the most admirable and stubborn way possible. Kawada returns fire with the closed fist in an absolute screamer of a revenge spot, and slowly but surely begins getting more and more and more of those strike exchanges. Kawada isn’t the most strategic wrestler in the world, it’s part of his charm, but there’s something that feels coordinated about the way he keeps drawing Sasaki into these big strike exchanges, and the way in which they take more out of Kensuke than they do Kawada.

The IWGP Champion isn’t a stranger to slugfests by any means, he’s unseated Hashimoto and Tenryu for his title reigns, but they’ve rarely held up a sustained pace at this style in the way that Kawada forces him to in this match. Kawada never smiles, he never lets on that it’s this plot, but the way things work out more and more and more for him the longer the match goes, it all feels like one of wresting’s greatest ever displays of the old rope a dope.

To that end, another great thing this match does is the way it kind of fuses the two main event styles together. It’s under twenty minutes and effectively runs the length of a traditional New Japan main event rather than the half-hour range of All Japan main events for the last ten years plus. It’s also a match that has that kind of New Japan spirit, that Hashimoto feeling, in the sense that everything matters and that they’re always working towards the end. However, it’s all done at this blistering All Japan pace. It’s not just a fusion, it’s the greatest possible fusion. No bullshit, no obviously wasted time, but with this massive sense of importance and this super genuine feeling behind it too.

Brilliantly, this match is also constructed to work perfectly for fans on both sides. Sasaki is bigger and stronger, and as the match goes on, he proves his toughness. A New Japan fan could claim he got caught with a lucky one at the end, and that it was a one in a million fluke. And they might be right. An All Japan or simply a Kawada fan would say — as I am — that this wasn’t just some all-time display of force and strength, but a story about power against guts and about brute strength against heart and technique. Sasaki has every advantage at the start, but gradually loses more and more, not just because of stamina and being drawn out of his comfort zone, but also because he lacks the most important qualities, the ones that Kawada has an abundance of. Guts and will and heart.

Sasaki blocks Kawada’s Gamenguri once with a Lariat to the foot, but when he tries a final Lariat of his own, Kawada lands the Gamenguri in spite of that foot, and just barely gets on top to win. Sasaki’s arguably healthier after the match, Kawada can’t get up on his own and has to take the boot off of the hurt foot and ankle. Sasaki will get him in the rematch, but here in the one that counts the most, the result goes not just to the man who was smart enough to know how to get the win, but the man who was willing to suffer enough and to give up enough to be in that position.

The ultimate Toshiaki Kawada match. There are larger wins, title victories in the same venue, but I’m not sure any of them sums up Kawada as completely as this does. Not simply a major victory on a gigantic show, but one against a near complete ideological and career opposite whose career singles match Kawada has in the process, one garnered through the most Kawada-esque means possible, and one in defense of something that probably wasn’t worth quite what he went through to get it.

All Japan’s crowning moment of the century, very arguably Toshiaki Kawada’s signature singles victory, and one of the most ideologically, spiritually, and morally correct wrestling matches in history.

****

Jumbo Tsuruta/Mighty Inoue/Isao Takagi vs. Revolution (Genichiro Tenryu/Toshiaki Kawada/Samson Fuyuki), AJPW New Years Giant Series 1990 Day Eighteen (1/26/1990)

This was another commission by KinchStalker. You can pay me to watch any sort of wrestling and then write a few hundred words about it over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The going rate is $5 a match, but feel free to buy a few at a time or just leave a tip if you really liked something I did. Always appreciated. 

A fancam that’s gotten a certain reputation recently as more people have seen it.

Of course, it’s not new to me, as the sort of total psycho who watched everything in the RealHero AJPW archive that ever aired on TV or made tape in any fashion, at least from 1980 through June 2000, as part of another project on that old message board, which is still the best format for any sort of a long form individual promotion based review, no matter how much I love this blog and the increased reach that it has.

However, it’s still a real great match, as one of the last glimpses of Tenryu’s all-time great Revolution stable goes up against Jumbo’s army.

First things first, as with every Revolution vs. Jumbo & “Friends” match, it is REMARKABLY surly, trading periods of control with a frantic pace and increasing hostility. Not always the most mechanically perfect thing, but always uplifted by that certain spirit and tone. Jumbo and Tenryu are as chippy as always with each other, but Tenryu has one of the great unheralded shitkicker teams of all time in Footloose at the ready and they are always as constantly aggrieved and put-upon as he was. Kawada is already just a ball of rage, made even more striking by still occupying the Footloose attire meant to convey a classic 1980s bubbly young babyface team, but that always seemed like a cute little joke when placed on the world’s angriest tag team.

On the other side, Jumbo and Inoue are just as constantly mad. Jumbo and Tenryu don’t get to do quite as much down the stretch, but Fuyuki continually draws the big man’s ire, and as a keen and well-watched eye will know, maybe no other wrestler in history has made Jumbo Tsuruta as pissed off as Toshiaki Kawada has, does, and will continue to do. He’s been plenty mad at other people, but there’s a maximum on this amp, and Kawada always manages to bring Jumbo’s volume up there. The all-time nasty Kitchen Sink yet again, shaking the shit out of him in holds in mid-match, the angriest cut offs of the entire thing, just a beautiful assault. It’s not so much a hint of something in there when Jumbo is confronted by someone younger and/or going for his spot, as that’s been the entire Tenryu feud since mid 1987, but another example of something beautiful.

For his part, Mighty is a delight here in the way that he always is. Overmatched both against the heavyweights and the new generation, but hitting the basics as angrily as possible and hurling his body around like a wrecking ball. Like the even dirtier Masanobu Fuchi, the exact sort of maniac you’d love on a team you root for and despise when he’s up against your interests.

(Isao Takagi ala the future Arashi is but a boy and while he has moments, he is the odd man out here as a guy who just is having a professional match — albeit still quite the good one. Very clearly a rookie with signs in there with five all-world guys who are having a delightful little show around him.)

Jumbo doesn’t have his ideal pick of warriors on his side here (he’d love Yoshiaki Yatsu and Masanobu Fuchi), but he does have the ability to create the exact scenario his team of a rookie and an underdog need to win. He neutralizes Tenryu entirely, yet again, and constantly gets up in Footloose’s shit at the same time. The result is a total loss of control in the last moments, losing track of who’s legal at a given moment, and the only possible situation where Mighty’s flash sunset flip is just barely enough for the win.

Not the greatest match these sides have ever had, but it’s a credit to them that a team with Jumbo Tsuruta on it can still be capable of what feels like an underdog win, even if I personally am never capable of quite rejoicing when Revolution — perhaps the most likeable stable in mainstream Japanese wrestling history — gets one taken off of them, even as the favorites.

If you’re fairly well versed, this isn’t anything you haven’t seen before. That perfect combination of hostility and structural perfection that made these kinds of matches the surest bet in all of wrestling for a real long time. The sort of meat and potatoes six man tag that helped make All Japan one of the best promotions in the world from 1985 through some time in the mid to late 1990s.

If you’re not as well versed and still really floored by this, great news, there’s like a hundred of these, and they’re all a delight.

***

Toshiaki Kawada vs. Keiji Mutoh, AJPW Summer Action Series 2003 Day Six (7/13/2003)

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This was a #1 Contenders Match.

More importantly, it’s yet another match between the ultimate forces of good and of evil as it pertains to professional wrestling.

To explain, for anyone not totally familiar with all of my psychoses — I love Toshiaki Kawada and I despise Keiji Mutoh.

I love Kawada for a lot of reasons. Gun to my head, he’s a guy I’d consider the second or third best wrestler of all time. I like him on a gut level because he’s the all time great tragic figure in wrestling, even moreso than a Bret Hart or an Eddie Kingston or a CM Punk or whoever else might spring to mind. Beyond just living in Misawa’s shadow and being a normal human being in a promotion full of people with gifts bestowed upon them from on high (magic elbow, being strong, being tall), by this point, he’s also become the last bastion of something, a holdout trying to preserve something he loved once. There are few easier wrestlers to support ever than Toshiaki Kawada, particularly in the first half of the 2000s. I love him, he is one of the most endearing wrestlers to me of all time, every decision and reaction he makes feels not only correct but like the most real shit imaginable. The thing old wrestlers always used to say on shoot interviews was that you can’t make the audience think every single thing is real, but that you can have your own work inspire that feeling in them. “This all might not be fake, but this guy is real”, or something to that extent. Believe in this one part of the show, this one wrestler, if nothing else. That’s all the best wrestlers ever, but that’s also Kawada. Everything seems correct — mechanically, emotionally, ideologically, spiritually — and nothing is phony.

On the other side of that, we have Keiji Mutoh, who I absolutely despise watching.

At his root, Keiji Mutoh is someone who is remarkably lazy and always present. A consummate politician, extending his career for decades after his far more skilled contemporaries through superior machinations, despite possessing none of the skill nor charm of any of them. Hating Keiji Mutoh at this point isn’t just about how he wasn’t as good as Hashimoto in the 1990s or as Kawada in the 2000s, it’s not about his bad “one last run” title reigns, thirteen years apart, it’s also about him as this symbol of how unfair and cruel things are (outside of Jun Akiyama, to be fair). Hashimoto died in 2005, still one of the best wrestlers alive. Misawa died in 2009, not really on that level anymore, but still better than Mutoh’s been for a long time. Kawada wrestled his last match in 2010. Taue in 2013. And yet, in 2021, Keiji Mutoh main evented major shows and won major titles. Usually, I’m all for this sort of a story, but Mutoh even removes all of the joy from one of the easier stories to tell in all of wrestling. There is a certain ironic fanbase for Mutoh’s nonsense (I choose to believe it’s irony, as I am an exceedingly positive person and don’t want to think the worst of many of you, although it may simply be horrible taste), and usually I’m all about taking joy in some very bad wrestling that steals a lot of money and makes everything worse. THE FIEND is hilarious to me, all of that, except Mutoh being the subject of that has a way of removing even the minor petty joy that I can take from that.

Mutoh is a wrestler whose every decision feels incorrect, and often times bafflingly wrong. As opposed to Kawada’s unflinching commitment to doing the realist things possible at any moment, his opposition here is one of the great phonies of all time. A refusal to bump at times that rivals any funny story about the Honky Tonk Man working the indies. Loose offense, horrible striking. I’m very much the sort of person who values physicality in wrestling (why aren’t you? it’s simulated combat, why wouldn’t it be physical?), but effort and skill in other areas can overcome that. This is also an area where Mutoh comes up short. Lazy matwork in the early stages that not only rarely leads to anything, but is rarely good in any way. A lot of lying around. It’s the sort of work that really makes one appreciate people who work a similar sort of style, but put far greater effort Watching Keiji Mutoh just lie on top of a guy for a while and occasionally grab an arm or a super limp waist or headlock is one of the more joyless experiences in wrestling, best expressed through altering one of my favorite quotes about a fraud in real sports.

Keiji Mutoh trick y’all, man, like he doing matwork. He just rolling around, doing nothing.

– Russell Westbrook

Mutoh isn’t a great striker, he’s not great on the mat, and it’s not as if he has some gift for construction or mechanics either. There’s no hidden little thing about him. There really isn’t anything he brings to a match. I’ve never understood what people enjoy about him, even in a nostalgic sense in the present day. There’s a certain presence and charisma to be sure, but no more than any other major star of the era. It’s certainly not the sort of thing one sees in this match. Given Kawada’s expressiveness in this match, Mutoh can’t even lay claim to bringing that aspect of wrestling to a match like this, as Kawada has him beat there as well.

He is a burden to carry moreso than he is an artistic partner, and so Kawada once again must do all of the heavy lifting on his own.

The match goes as one expects.

Kawada has his knee worked on and Mutoh cycles through the same two or three things when attacking it, with very little sense of urgency or progression. They flip a switch and do moves to each other and that’s it. The weaknesses of Mutoh’s style all hinder the match, as it’s Kawada working a Mutoh match and not the other way around. The worst thing about it is probably the framing, giving them a face/face match for the first time, instead of their two more famous matches which at least frame Mutoh as what he is, this no-good carpetbagger trying to steal Kawada’s land. Weaknesses still being there, it’s a match without any real strong narrative attached to it, simply existing as plain old Kawada and Mutoh.

Left entirely to their own devices, it is what it is and what it isn’t is a great match.

It’s certainly not a bad one.

Kawada is exactly great enough to get them there. His knee selling is superb once again. His facials are magnificent, portraying both annoyance at Mutoh button-mashing his way through yet again and anger at his own body potentially failing him for the millionth time in the exact same way. His energy and raw aggression in the comeback carries it, and there’s certainly a satisfaction to be found in Kawada coming back and destroying Mutoh.

Unfortunately, it’s too much of a Mutoh match to be a great match.

Toshiaki Kawada does all he can, but his raw legitimacy and correctness runs into a brick wall by having to engage with something as phony as Mutoh. Him selling for Mutoh as an equal feels off, and even a Kawada knee work match falls short when it has to also pay tribute to this level of raw fraudulence. Keiji Mutoh is one of the all time thieves of joy in wrestling history, from beginning to end, and this may be his greatest work. Rendering a Kawada knee work segment dull and meaningless is something that’s seemed impossible for most of the previous fifteen years, but Mutoh does it. He makes it duller than ever, less vicious and violent than the sort of work his generational peers have done in the same position, and with everything that follows, also manages to render it meaningless. Again, Kawada’s knee selling is undeniably good, but he’s never quite able to get past the Mutoh-ism of it all.

Kawada overcomes in the end and wins with a Powerbomb, but in this match, the superhuman victory here belongs to Mutoh for managing to somehow miss on one of wrestling’s few seemingly absolute sure things.

I believe this was a match commissioned with good intentions. I’m not going to get on anyone for wanting me to suffer or picking a very uncomfortable match. These two had good to great matches in both 2001 and 2002, so it would be easy to imagine this one was of that same quality. It wasn’t, however, and in terms of all time shit wizard Keiji Mutoh finally bringing an all-time great down to his level, the third time was the charm.

I love writing about Toshiaki Kawada, but in the future, I would prefer to watch and write about Toshiaki Kawada in combat against good wrestlers instead.

 

Mitsuharu Misawa vs. Toshiaki Kawada, AJPW Super Power Series 1994 Day Sixteen (6/3/1994)

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This was for Misawa’s Triple Crown Title.

I assume you’ve heard of it.

To get it out of the way immediately, obviously this match is overrated.

By no means is this the best singles match of all time. It wasn’t in 1994, it certainly isn’t in 2021, and facts on the ground aren’t likely to change as time’s arrow moves forward. It’s not the best match of 1994 to happen up until this point. Shit, it’s not even the best Kawada match of the year to happen so far. I don’t even like it as the best Misawa vs. Kawada match so far, at least not to any real significant level. It’s the biggest and most grandiose, and I imagine that had an appeal to the sorts of people in the 1990s who made it so we can identify certain matches by date alone, but I find it less interesting than the more human drama that Kawada brings to their first meeting or especially the July 1993 match, in which their friendship is irrevocably destroyed, but in which Kawada still loses. At a certain point, you get interested in more than moves and head drops, and that’s usually where a reverence for this match as The Greatest Match Of All Time starts to fade. It could go with five to ten less minutes. The belabor their points a fair amount. It’s a bigger and more obvious version of what’s already worked so well.

It is, however, also a really great match and this is much more a case of “yeah, it’s really great, but calm down a lot” than it is of anything being really truly deeply wrong with it. It’s an incredible Kawada performance, and what goes right goes perfectly.

As always, there’s a heavy element of context that helps matches like these so much.

This is their third match for the Triple Crown. In the first, Kawada unloaded at the start in a rush to beat Misawa, which had a way of putting all his lifelong insecurities about their friendship on display in front of the world. Misawa waited for him to empty his arsenal, and then won without too much struggle. In their rematch in July ’93, Kawada was more cautious and went after the arm, only to abandon it once he thought he had the edge and try to drop bombs, again lacking the right approach and the confidence to see his plans all the way through. There’s also a famous and often touted historical parallel between this and the Jumbo/Tenryu match five years earlier with a nearly identical story going into it of former partners and the struggle for Tenryu to finally overcome Tsuruta. The result of both is that this is a match with a certain feeling to it that elevates things.

Until the last few minutes, it feels not only like a match that Toshiaki Kawada can win, but that he is supposed to win.

For most of this match, Kawada wrestles his smartest and best match ever, even moreso than his recent Carnival victory that got him here. Misawa clearly tries to draw him out and gets aggressive first, but Kawada never really falls for it. Misawa’s efforts lead to Kawada elbowing him out of the air outside and Misawa’s famous ear blood trickle. Kawada doesn’t lack for hostility at any point here, but there’s a calm to him that’s new. He doesn’t jump into his biggest stuff as soon as he gets the chance, it’s just simple and confident work on the head and neck. A great display of the effects it has on Misawa and Kawada’s growth comes when Misawa targets Kawada’s notoriously bad left knee for the first time in one of their singles matches. He’s done it in tags when he needed an edge when he had a lesser partner, but finally doing it here after the first half Kawada had feels desperate in a way that Misawa hasn’t been since he ascended to this position.

Misawa’s knee work is fairly ordinary and never turns this into a Knee Match, but the greatest leg seller of all time refuses to let it not matter. He’s hobbled for the rest of the match. Not in a crippling or debilitating sort of a way, but in the exact way that finally gives Misawa openings. Kawada’s been so great and consistent in his smothering attack that on top of allowing Kawada to do the one mechanical thing that he’s better at than anyone in the world or in wrestling history, it’s also a choice that emphasizes how superior Kawada’s effort has been up until this point. It’s the perfect transition into the back half of the match.

Sadly, that’s the least interesting part of the match. When the match briefly becomes about pure bombs, it’s just not quite as interesting as everything else. That’s not to say it doesn’t also rule, but relative to Kawada’s character drama or Misawa showing both vulnerability and pettiness for the first time against Kawada, it’s just not as much fun. You can get gross suplexes and awesome strikes in a lot of matches, so while great, it’s the lesser piece of this match. It’s an “I’ve seen this before” whereas Kawada GETTING IT and Misawa having to get dirtier and meaner is all brand new.

Thankfully, it’s more of a transition to one of the great ending runs these two ever had.

Kawada finds himself in the same position as his mentor Genichiro Tenryu five years earlier at a point. Not having given up the Powerbomb too early for once, but still not winning with it. Kawada even comes close to repeating Tenryu’s exact winning sequence from that match, but still resulting in a Misawa kickout. It’s one of the great ideological statements of the decade, saying that these things will not repeat themselves and that sentiment alone will not do it. Beyond that, it’s also another show of Kawada’s progression because unlike in the past when these big moves and symbolic gestures went horribly astray, he never once seems to lose his head.

If anything, Kawada only seems encouraged.

Heartbreakingly, it is never enough.

From that springs the best part of this match, and the end run that elevates it to another level. The best part of the match isn’t any of the action or even the early character work. Near the very end, it’s this staredown near the very end as Misawa gets up outside. For the first time between the two of them, Misawa looks genuinely troubled and pushed to a certain point, and the camera captures Kawada perfectly at the same moment in which he realizes this, looking like the tensest man in the entire world.

They charge back in, and for the first time, it’s Misawa as the aggressor when he hauls off and punches Kawada in the face.

Kawada is completely thrown off by it, and combined with the slight limp and hindrance caused by the bad leg, Misawa is finally able to unload. Following his nastiest and angriest series of elbows ever, Misawa uncorks the all-time God Damner for the first time in years, using the Tiger Driver ’91 to hang onto the title and deny Kawada his history.

Kawada wrestled a perfect match against the Misawa who beat him in the past. However, he clearly didn’t expect things like Misawa needing to go to the leg, or especially the closed fist right at the end, and it’s his undoing. Kawada wrestles an aggressive match, but it’s Misawa who gets dirty at the end, changing the questions at the exact moment that Kawada has all the correct answers. It’s an especially brutal sort of a loss, in which there’s nothing to even focus on and change in a mechanical or strategic sense, really. Kawada just wasn’t expecting Misawa to pull THAT out. The mistake isn’t the timing of anything, a lack of confidence, a failed attack. It’s thinking too highly of Mitsuharu Misawa. Kawada believes in the moment and wants the big classical title win, only for a desperate Misawa to simply ball his fist up and deny him in the cruelest way yet.

Even more than 7/29/1993, it feels like the moment in which a hatred really crystallizes in Kawada. It’s a beautiful sort of thing, and another example of how great this feud really was. If you’re the sort of psychopath who roots for Misawa, there’s just enough leeway available to allow you to make an argument. Really, it’s only a punch. However, if you live your life in the right and support the greatest babyface of the 1990s, it’s exactly the sort of departure from the norms that feels like a real cheap son of a bitch tactic. If not the greatest match of all time, the match in which I think this becomes maybe the greatest feud of all time.

A great match and an all-timer, if not even I’m not sure it’s the best Triple Crown match of the year.

****

Mitsuharu Misawa/Jun Akiyama vs. Holy Demon Army, AJPW Real World Tag League 1996 Final (12/6/1996)

This was the finals of the 1996 Real World Tag League.

I can’t speak to how this felt a quarter century ago, as I write this on that anniversary. However, it’s been fifteen or sixteen years since I first saw it. The ultimate testimony to this match isn’t that it’s as good now as it was when it happened, or as it was the first time I saw it. Those things may be true, but the real truth is that all these years later, it’s even better than I remember it whenever I watch it, and always in such different ways too.

It’s one of those matches, the All Japan Pantheon, matches known in many respects by date alone. Arguably, it’s the last one. Some might say 1/20/97 but I’m not sure that lands with quite the same punch as this or a 6/9/95, 6/3/94, 12/3/93, etc.

Beyond just name value, there are very few matches in All Japan history or wrestling history period that land with the same kind of punch that this does.

Mechanically, it’s stellar. Execution, construction, all of those sorts of things. Everyone’s pasting each other, there are at least three or four or five bumps off of suplexes in this that are absolute god damned screamers. All-time disgusting landings on a neck, a shoulder, or in a few cases, right on the top of the bean. It’s also pretty immaculately assembled. Everything feels like it happens at the right time, there’s a slow escalation to the finish, but without even a shred of wasted time. They begin the match hot and hold that pace, energy, and sort of furious feeling for the next half hour plus with very little surcease.

In a story sense, it’s one of the best ever told.

After Misawa and Akiyama have gone 3-0 against this team in 1996, in three different situations, there’s not really any fear here. Doubly so as Misawa’s already stopped the Army from winning the RWTL in two of the previous three years. They try for a rush job in the same way that the HDA did in July, only to get a little farther with it. The big thing in the first half of this match is what the meeting a week prior set out to establish, which is that Jun Akiyama is even better now. Far from only succeeding in May because of Kawada’s slump or needing Misawa’s help, Akiyama handles Kawada and Taue here at different points entirely on his own. While perhaps not quite the wrestler Kenta Kobashi is, Akiyama feels like a much better compliment to Misawa because he’s a smarter and less hotheaded wrestler, and they feel at many points in the foundational moments of this match like a better team, entirely capable of denying the Holy Demon Army the RWTL for a fourth year in a row, and beating them definitively in their fourth meeting.

What this match also does especially well in a story sense is the payoff.

“But Simon, Kawada already beat Misawa in June 1995! This is an inferior remake!”, one might say, exposing themselves in front of the entire world without revealing themselves. The payoffs in this match are not only better, but they are more plentiful and far more interesting. 6/9/95 already gave you Kawada’s first win over Misawa (a mistake, wasted on a match that already had so much against it from Kobashi’s glory boy cry selling to being 43 minutes long), but there’s so much to this beyond just that.

After Taue bailing Kawada out for so much of the year during the big Kawada Slump and being the stronger of the two, it’s now Taue who isn’t in the best place. He’s the one largely getting beaten around in the first half of the match, and it’s his stuff that’s always countered now. He’s still unable to hit the Nodowa Otoshi off the apron to Misawa like he wants, and pays for it each time he tries. Taue tries to dig back to the face work on Misawa that brought him close in 1995 (as Misawa is making none of the mistakes that let Taue win the title), only to fall short in that regard too.

Following a year of Taue being his keeper, Kawada now has the opportunity to return the favor, and it feels as good as any victory when he’s able to do that for Taue.

It’s also a match with so many of these great minor payoffs, just related to little moves or sequences. Akiyama is finally able to block Taue’s throw into the top rope in the exact way that Misawa learned to, before then stealing the move and hurting Taue with it. Akiyama managing to fight off the double team on his own at one point, not even needing Misawa this time. The double Tiger Driver spot from a week earlier not working on Kawada this time, and in general, the way that Kawada carries himself in the back half of this, like someone who has simply made up his mind to not lose. Game Six Kawada, whether that means glowering at the camera after shoving the monster in green off of him or a lights out shooting performance when it matters most to complete a heroic comeback. It’s the sort of performance that every great sports parallel feels applicable towards. An all time performance on every level, equal parts violent and endearing as the greatest loser of a generation finally gets his feel good win.

The big single move payoff comes when after trying for it and failing in every other match in the series, Taue is finally able to hit Akiyama with the Nodowa Otoshi off of the apron to the floor.

It’s the immediate game changer the match requires, and it’s the thing that FINALLY breaks right for Taue and Kawada. After struggling all match, it’s Taue’s big contribution, as well as the payoff of their struggles to figure something out all year. Instead of removing Misawa so that he can’t save Akiyama or trying to just isolate Akiyama as the legal man to do the opposite, it’s something else. Remove Akiyama so that he can’t save Misawa. Once again, Kawada and Taue are able to get Misawa in a two on one, but it feels so much different now. The sense of impending doom in a similar situation a year and a half earlier isn’t quite here, but it’s replaced by something even better, a sense that it still might not be enough, and that there’s a.) so much still to be done & b.) so much that can still go wrong.

The result is something even more satisfying when nothing goes wrong, Kawada keeps his head on straight in a crisis for once, and they inch closer and closer.

Akiyama manages back in, only to be dumped on his brain in increasingly horrifying ways. Misawa’s comebacks get cut off easier and easier as Kawada and Taue FEEL IT, the wind at their backs, the universe pushing them forward, something special and undefinable in the air. Taue helps out at a point and really might be able to beat Misawa again after a Nodowa Otoshi kickout, but instead opts to bring Kawada back in. It’s a truly beautiful turn from Akira Taue here, leaving it entirely in Kawada’s hands and just standing guard. 1996 would be the Year of Taue with a win here to give him the second of All Japan’s two big tournaments, in addition to a Triple Crown reign and win over Misawa. It’s one of the more selfless and perfect little moments in wrestling history, as Akira Taue puts it entirely into Kawada’s hands. Kawada saved him earlier, and the receipt is Taue tagging him back in at the end when they can both feel it. A tear to the eye.

Toshiaki Kawada feels the hand of history upon his shoulder, and hits a second Powerbomb in a row to beat Misawa again, this time in a far more emphatic and important feeling way and in a bigger match as well.

As heartwarming as any payoff in this match or at the very end of it is the way Taue and Kawada react. Taue is hugging Kawada and Kawada lets him do it, before looking like the most enormous weight in the world has been lifted off of his chest. Kawada looks like he’s been through actual Hell, ready to collapse, and being held up by Taue as the physical and emotional toll begins to reveal itself. It’s not beating Misawa for the first time, but it’s something he communicates as even heavier, being able to do it again in addition to shaking off every problem he’s had internally and externally since his initial failure to repeat that success. Taue and Kawada both speak to the crowd, and they die laughing when Taue speaks and pump their fists uproariously when Kawada says something.

You don’t need to speak the language to feel the moment, and this is one of the better feeling ones in the history of the medium.

Not only just because of the victory, but of what it represents moving forward.

The result of this match isn’t an immediate revenge for Misawa. Baba will make mistakes in 1997 and draw it out until May 1998, but there is something different about AJPW after this match, at least to me.

At the end of this match, the Holy Demon Army largely snaps the Misawa/Akiyama war machine over their knees. It’s a solved equation for them, having not only faced this unit all year and come out on top when it mattered, but faced the worst parts of themselves with the same result. Misawa and Akiyama never quite gel as a team like the teams either man had with Kenta Kobashi before and after. They never touch the World Tag Team Titles again, and following Misawa becoming more and more detached from reality and the idea of helping out the kids throughout 1997, split up a year later after a RWTL finals rematch in which Misawa largely just abandons Akiyama to take the loss. Misawa still has another yearlong plus Triple Crown reign in 1997-98, but there’s more of a desperation in his wrestling in those matches after this, as if he’s finally in jeopardy and aware of his tenuous grip on his position after this match, and as Kobashi starts to become an adult and a proper main event presence. Misawa will never again regularly team up with anyone near his level or who could ever surpass him. The Holy Demon Army will repeat their RWTL win in 1997, and spend much of the rest of the decade dominating the division and holding the titles, before ceding that ground to the Kobashi/Akiyama superteam at the end of the decade.

You can’t rightly say that 6/9/95 was inconsequential, but time revealed that not all that much actually changed. It’s one area where this match has it beat, because it really does feel like the end of something and a definitive sort of victory. If not for Kawada himself, then certainly for the Holy Demon Army, finally toppling one of these teams and securing their signature victory as the best tag team of the decade.

Is this the greatest professional wrestling match of all time?

I don’t know.

That’s a big question.

Absolutely though, this is the best All Japan match of the decade.

Certainly the best tag team match.

The question is always this or 6/9/95, but as an astute Reader may have caught onto, I don’t think it’s a question at all. I think it’s insulting to this match to even suggest that. But sure, for the sake of argument, why is it better than 6/9/95?

For starters, it’s ten minutes shorter. So much of that match felt like it was filling space so as to have a Long Match at nearly forty three minutes. A match conducted by four all-time greats, absolutely, but a match that always felt as though an eye was on the clock, and drawing things out as far as possible. While this is no short match, at thirty one minutes and change, that always feels like the natural result of the match wrestled and the story told. In short, a match that happens to be long instead of a Long Match. The rare example of a match over half an hour that genuinely felt as though they needed almost every second of that.

Another part is that, again, while Jun Akiyama may not be better than Kenta Kobashi at this point, he’s better for this story and these kinds of tag team matches. There’s a complete and total absence of this look-at-me leg dragging vanity selling, there’s not a spilled tear to be found on Akiyama’s behalf. It gives him an edge here that Kobashi never had, and allows the matches to feel like more than exercises in how to benefit only one man out of the four. Akiyama sticks to his role, and I find him more interesting here as a young killer trying to supplant Taue and Kawada than I find Kobashi as — theoretically — a sympathetic young guy. You’re not going to get me to feel sorry for Kobashi at this point and I’m never going to root for Misawa to get past Kawada for the nth time.

That’s the main reason I like this so much better, I suppose.

Primarily, the reason this is better than its chief competition is that it more freely allows me to react the way that I naturally always would.

While Kawada and Taue are still the aggressors, it’s a much more even thing. The history is also more on their side here, as instead of parity, it’s a total domination by Misawa and Akiyama up until this point. There’s real odds to overcome, a significant mountain to climb, and a pair of more grounded and realistic performances that inspire me to want to see them achieve those things. In addition to that, this also lacks the Kobashi leg excuse, forcing Kawada and Taue to have a much harder fight to the same goal. That’s both in the match itself, but also in the last year plus of the story leading up to it, with every little failure, setback, and stutter step. Naturally, it has the effect of making it all the more satisfying, not only seeing the Army finally beat this Misawa/Akiyama team, but also doing it to win the Real World Tag League for the first time, and it being the culmination of Taue and Kawada’s individual stories in an out of the team. Following the all-time great slump story and the performances in it by Kawada, it’s his masterpiece as a theoretical babyface. While the 1995 match suggested a tragedy that never quite landed with me, this match instead projects a sense of triumph that’s unmatched throughout most of wrestling history before and after this match.

For all the head drops and gross shots and huge moves, what works most about this match and the best matches from this time period is everything else. Characters and little facial sells. Everything in between those moments, the build up and the after effects. The ways in which little moments feel like major victories because of all the work put in to get there. Everyone’s copied, stolen, photocopied, and mimicked everything about this match and matches like this, but it’s the raw gut feeling of the thing that really makes this so special and enduring in the end.

Few results have ever felt as good as this one does, and that’s the secret.

A transcendent piece of work, the defining wrestling match of a time and place, and one of the great payoffs in wrestling history. Save perhaps one (1) match so inexorably linked with my own live experience, this is as good as wrestling gets.

*****

Holy Demon Army vs. Mitsuharu Misawa/Jun Akiyama, AJPW Real World Tag League 1996 Day Eleven (11/29/1996)

This was part of the 1996 Real World Tag League tournament.

It’s not the famous one, but it is once again really really great.

Unlike May or July, Kawada and Taue now face off against this team as the best version of themselves.

That primarily means Kawada is back at his best, but that extends to that it no longer affects Taue like it did in July. Misawa and Akiyama try to go after just Taue early on, but keeping Kawada at bay isn’t quite as easy as it was in July and in May before that. For their part, the HDA approaches the match in a more productive way instead of getting bogged down in some petulant rage when a thing doesn’t go well. They also choose to focus less on that anger against Akiyama, as they instead spend the match trying to bomb out Misawa. It stands to reason that if a Misawa hot tag is always what turns things and if he’s always so capable of breaking up double teams, it’s sort of a waste to go after the other guy. Misawa teams lose when Misawa can’t make a difference. Get Misawa beat up and he won’t be so able to do that, and force some distance. Misawa and Akiyama win when Misawa can help Akiyama and set him up. It’s how Doc and Ace got the titles off of them in September, it’s how the Army beat Misawa and Kobashi whenever they beat them. It’s still a really hard fight, as the past has shown, but it makes a lot of sense.

Kawada and Taue are better and more insistent in the attack on Misawa than they’ve been in over a year too. As soon as they get the distance, it starts with the Doomsday Nodowa Otoshi to the floor, a Powerbomb on the floor minutes later from Kawada, and an attack that’s clearly working. They’re able to totally keep Akiyama out of the match for the first time ever, and it very much feels for the first two-thirds of this like this is a match that the Holy Demon Army win.

Unfortunately the one thing they don’t seem to account for is that Misawa also bothered doing some homework.

He debuts new backflip counters to the classic Backdrop Driver/Nodowa Otoshi double team, gets out before they can do real damage, and they turn it back around. It’s not the drumming that it felt like in July and Kawada doesn’t totally blow it for the team like he did in May, but there’s a big enough momentum shift that you can really feel it when watching for once.

Beyond just Misawa improving, Akiyama makes a big stride in this match too. Akiyama now is able to completely hold Taue at bay. After the year Taue’s had, it feels like a bigger victory than holding Kawada at bay in July or even beating Kawada in May. The classic strategy works once again then, although it’s on Kawada this time. He fights everything, he’s defiant in fun and meaningless ways because he can’t not be, but Taue is cut off from the match entirely. It’s a handicap match in the last several minutes, creating a really sort of casually cruel thing where Kawada has to now find out what it was like for Taue when Kawada was going through his shit in the spring and summer.

Kawada survives the Tiger Suplex, before Misawa gets real matter of fact about this and hits two (2) Tiger Drivers in a row to give them the win.

Even with everything going right, they can’t do it. It feels particularly mean spirited, even if Misawa and Akiyama did absolutely nothing wrong. A very casual dismantling in the back half, after a year of the Holy Demon Army struggling, adjusting, and getting back to where they were. After spending half or more of the match doing seemingly everything right, only for it not to matter at all. Kawada shook off the slump and came here more motivated than ever, only for Misawa to finally put himself in against him and painfully knock Kawada back down to Earth one more time. As much as the HDA have grown and re-unified, Misawa and Akiyama have now started to gel as an actual team instead of just getting by on the strength of Misawa as a solo force, and the mistakes other wrestlers were making against Jun Akiyama.

It’s as if a Warriors Third was conducted by a James Harden team instead, the same dominance out of nowhere but removed of any joy or fun.

A genuine heartbreaker. Kawada and Taue came into this off of a major non-title win, spent the first half seeming unstoppable, only for it to all fall apart. This time, without any real reason for doing so. For the last year, they’d been able to point to some reason for a loss, a why of it all that they can go and fix. Without any of that this time, it feels like they just might never beat this team.

***1/2