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[1992-04-17-AJPW-Championship Carnival] Stan Hansen vs Mitsuharu Misawa


Loss

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  • 1 month later...
  • 4 weeks later...

Well I enjoyed the match. Misawa working over Hansen's lariat arm is great. Stan sold that great. The finish was awesome. Hansen goes for a lariat with his good arm, Misawa blocks it, Then Hansen goes fuck it and throws a lariat with his bad arm and gets the 3 count. He gambled everything on that last lariat and won.

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  • 3 weeks later...

This was more subdued than their title match the previous month, but I still found a lot to like. Misawa showed more focus by directing all of his offense at the lariat arm (I liked the takedown variations that came from outside his normal repertoire.) And Hansen delivered his usual standout selling. I always enjoy watching him improvise offense from unusual angles when his primary weapon is damaged. Shoe nailed the feeling of the finishing move. It came off as Stan going all in on his last card and winning the pot. I could see the argument that these guys wrestled too often in a condensed period and didn't progress enough from match-to-match. But taken on its own, this featured a lot of well-done stuff and effectively dramatized the almost-there nature of Misawa's assault on the mountain. If it's a disappointment, that says a lot about how great these guys were.

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  • 11 months later...

The first Carnival Final at Budokan was Kawada-Doc in 1994.

 

Progression of adding Budokan shows in series:

 

1985-91:

* Mar

* Jun

* Aug/Sep

* Dec (Tag League Final Night)

 

The exception was Oct 1987 getting a Budokan for the second Jumbo-Tenryu "feud" match.

 

Then they expanded:

 

October: 1992 (Misawa vs Kawada)

Jul: 1993 (Misawa vs Kawada)

Apr/Carnival Final: 1994 (Kawada vs Doc)

Jan: never added

 

There was a reasonable expectation that Misawa would be in the Final in 1994 when the tickets sold out (usually instantly in that period). The Ace almost always had been in the Final, with the exception of 1992 (Misawa instead of Jumbo) and 1979 & 1980 (Jumbo rather than Baba).

 

Anyway, it does give an idea for the place of Misawa-Kawada in big picture: it was the match used to open up two of the three new major shows, then headline their first Dome show (long after the freshness date on the feud passed).

 

John

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  • 4 weeks later...

1st half was a bit scrappy and took a while to click. It did have the brutal hard hitting in its favour. Man I can never get over how stiff puroresu used to be. Misawa worked quite a defensive match by trying to neutralise the left arm. That was a foolish strategy as Hansen was willing to injure it to win such an important contest. Improved the longer it went and came together nicely at the end. A worthy final.

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  • 6 months later...

While Hansen never quite clicked with Misawa the way he did with Kobashi or Kawada, I still thought this was a good match that told an excellent story. Misawa's focus on the lariat arm throughout the match was great and they never strayed far from this theme. Hansen back with elbows, chops and back suplex. Power bomb only gets 2. Misawa breaks out his frog splash, facelock and elbow but at this stage its not enough to overcome Hansen. While he doesn't get to kick out, Misawa escapes one lariat with a foot on the rope before a second one secures the fall. I liked this a lot.

 

***3/4

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  • 3 months later...

I might be the highest person on this match yet. Part of this came from watching the '92 season and getting REALLY emotionally invested in a possible Misawa victory--this is as close as he'd gotten yet to knocking Hansen off, closer even than the Triple Crown match earlier in the year. He went in with the right gameplan, did almost all the right things...but didn't quite take Hansen's arm out enough. Maybe this didn't have the big bombs and near-falls of a typical big AJPW main event but I really, really liked that this was a focused, limb-based struggle that was really the greatest possible WCW television main event. Jim Ross would have been in his glory calling this ("Misawa, who was a special teams standout for Saitama A&M...")

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  • 3 weeks later...

I dug this a ton. It's really clear here that Misawa is the heir apparent, and that he's got it in him to beat Hansen. I really liked the arm work from Misawa. All Japan never really pushed submission finishes in big matches, so it was cool to see him trying to beat Hansen with a Fujiwara armbar. Stan's selling here was phenomenal, there's no way that Brody would have put Misawa over this way.

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  • 2 years later...

I really liked this one. Each man gave his best possible performance, as Misawa tried to tear Stan's arm off and damn near succeeded, while Stan fought back against the pain and damage as well as he could, only to realize that in the end, only the weapon that Misawa had tried so hard to take away could save him. Even delivered with a bad arm, the lariat's devastating enough to save Stan's bacon and win him the tournament.

 

One thing Misawa's never really shown until this match that a wrestler needs to be a champion is the killer instinct, the ability to stay with a body part or a game plan until it either succeeds or injures his or her opponent so badly that they can't continue. The arm work on Stan's lariat side showed that he now has it; it's not his fault that Stan went to the one move no one thought he could (or dared) try. As many others before me have said, Misawa's day is coming sooner rather than later and everyone knows it, especially Stan.

 

By the way, that was a nice "HAN-SEN!" chant for Stan during the trophy ceremony. It's probably happened before, but never quite so noticeably, at least to me. Stan in Japan is fast approaching Flair in the Carolinas, in that while the fans may cheer his opponent in a given match, they won't boo Stan for anything short of cold-blooded murder.

 

I know I kind of cheated by watching this match before the Jumbo match, but I'm just not up to a thirty-minute epic at the moment. March and April have sure had some lengthy matches; thank heaven that they've all been enjoyable.

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  • 1 year later...

A very solid match. There was nothing outstanding but that really makes it special. That is to say they wanted to put on a very good match, not an excellent one nor a classic, and they reached that goal. Both men were stiff, Misawa's arm-focused attack was good thinking (considering Misawa was not yet Hansen's equal), and the ending was both clever & inspiring. Big matches should aspire to this type of performance rather than shooting for the stars and crash landing onto highspot/no sell island.

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  • GSR changed the title to [1992-04-17-AJPW-Championship Carnival] Stan Hansen vs Mitsuharu Misawa

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