William Bologna

Dynamite Kid/Johnny Smith vs. Terry Gordy/Steve Williams (All Japan RWTL 11/15/1990) A note on nomenclature: Sometimes you see “Real World Tag League” called a mistranslation; the correct term is “World's Strongest Tag Determination League.” Sure, maybe. But consider this video from the opening of the 2000 league, where Lord James Blears in his capacity as chairman of the Pacific Wrestling Federation calls it the “Real World Tag Team League” while reading from a very official-looking piece of paper. It doesn’t get any more authoritative than that. This puts the term on firmer ground than “Holy Demon Army” or “Miracle Violence Connection,” which unless I’ve missed something are puroresu smark translationese. Speaking of which, it’s the first night of the "Real World Tag League," and one fan in Korakuen is so excited to see the “Miracle Violence Connection” that he brought his own Confederate flag. Just about everyone else is on Dynamite and Johnny’s side, though. Williams and Gordy are booed heartily whenever they stretch the rules, which really isn’t even all that much. Dynamite once again wrestles like he’s 6’5”, standing toe-to-toe with the giant Americans and trading blows. Johnny fills the time as pleasantly as he always does, and everything is just fine. It’s awkward but in a good way. Except for when Smith comes in to to stop an Oklahoma Stampede that Williams was determined to complete. Johnny hits him in the back, and Doc just ignores him for a while while he gets to the other corner. So they do stuff back and forth until Williams uses the Stampede on Johnny, and man do I hate that move. A powerslam is devastating, but you know what would make it even worse? What if your back was lightly dinked into two turnbuckles first? Try kicking out of that! As with Takayama’s legdrop, it’s just about the least painful-looking thing Steve Williams does. Was he using the Doctor Bomb yet? I never see it in the old stuff. So maybe 1990 isn’t so bad. Let’s see what happens next, when I press my luck by going to 1989 and *gulp* Calgary Stampede Wrestling.

I really liked Akebono. It's not easy to become a wrestler in your mid-30s, and it's not easy to do much of anything when you're 500 pounds. He did it anyway and provided an irreplaceable presence in quite a few good matches. I'm wondering who had the best sumo/puroresu number. My model is Bill James' power/speed number in baseball, which basically tried to find players who had a lot of power and a lot of speed but had to have a good amount of both. I think Akebono wins this. Tenryu had the best puroresu career anyone could have, but he only barely made it to the first division in sumo. Hiroshi Wajima was a yokozuna but only wrestled for a couple years and accomplished nothing. Koji Kitao did make yokozuna, but he's the worst one ever. He wrestled professionally for a long time, but you wouldn't call it a great career. I think he has the best case and still comes up short. Tadao Yasuda's an interesting case. He made it to komosubi, which is a rank higher than Tenryu managed. He did a lot in puroresu, for better or for worse. IWGP champion. Azumafuji Kin'ichi was a yokozuna who won some tag titles with Rikidozan in the 1950s. Interesting! PS I forgot about Rikidozan! Maybe it's he. He got to third from the top in sumo. Depends how you balance it.

Johnny Ace/Johnny Smith vs. Toshiaki Kawada/Akira Taue (AJPW 4/18/1998) The Global Johnny Team reunites! Both these men are hard to Google: Johnny Smith was a legendary jazz guitarist, most famous for writing “Walk Don’t Run.” Johnny Ace was an R&B singer who accidentally killed himself in the 50s. Outside the confines of Pro Wrestling Only, both non-wrestling Johnnys are more famous. We start with Kawada beating the absolute shit out of Smith. It’s nice to be reminded that when he’s on, Kawada’s a goddamn buzzsaw. Johnny’s really getting the business. Smith is taller than Kawada, incidentally. That’s not how I picture them. All Japan Pro Wrestling in 1998 is all about counters. Johnny dropkicks, kips up, gets his clothesline reversed. Kawada sets Smith up for a face kick, everyone knows he’s doing it, and Johnny reverses it. Smith is really good at this, and it’s definitely my kind of thing. Three of the four competitors are just killing it, while Johnny Ace is not having one of his more graceful nights. He does a lot of flailing. Smith gets to shine - he hits a Liger Bomb! - before going down to Kawada’s powerbomb. I love this stuff. This is my favorite wrestling. I wish I didn’t have to go back to 1990.

Johnny Smith vs. Tom Marquez (ECW 9/26/1999) This is the forerunner to one of the first matches I watched for this, Smith inexplicably getting an ECW title shot against Mike Awesome. To quote myself: Smith earned a title match by losing to Sabu three days before this, losing to Jerry Lynn one day before this, and defeating Tom Marquez a minute before this. And now we get to see it! It's a squash and Smith is a heel, so he trash-talks the fans and immediately launches into his armwork routine. He's at least more confident than he was in the series against Taz. Marquez takes a beating and then mounts his comeback by slipping off the top rope. This is absolutely the highlight of the match for the audience, who spend the rest of it trying to be funny (fortunately, the audio quality isn't good enough to make out much). Johnny hits the British Fall (there was no commentary, but I'm sure Joey Styles would have called it a Tiger Bomb) but picks Marquez up after two. No comeuppance, as he hoists his opponent into a Death Valley Driver ("Modified Tiger Bomb!") for the win, whereupon we hear Judge Jeff Jones getting us started on the follow-up. Dynamite Kid told a story (and so did I, but maybe not everyone's read every page of this thread) that a Japanese fan made Smith a jacket that said "Jhonny," and he was too nice a guy not to wear it. Not only is he wearing it tonight, the ringside cameraman gives us a nice zoom in on it. It is a pretty cool jacket.

Dynamite Kid/Johnny Smith vs. Joe Malenko/Dean Malenko (AJPW 9/30/1990) The main problem here is that Dynamite Kid can’t bend. The other three have an entertaining enough workrate tag match. The Malenkos do a whole bunch of nifty stuff amidst all the matwork, but things slow to a crawl when DK comes in. He’s still capable of the violence that was always his best attribute, but this isn’t that kind of match. Goofy finish. Dean gets Dynamite up for a tombstone, but Johnny comes in and dropkicks Kid in the back to land on top of a Malenko and get the three count. Maybe if it were smoother I would have bought it, but as it is it looks like Dean got beat with a bodyslam.

Taiyo Kea/Johnny Smith vs. Genichiro Tenryu/Kim Duk (AJPW 4/14/2001) Huh, it’s Kim Duk. I saw him recently as Tiger Chung Lee on the undercard of some awful 80s WWF show (Lord Alfred Hayes: “Very inscrutable, this oriental”). Tenryu figured that a 53 year old who hadn’t wrestled in five years was just what the new look All Japan needed. Here he is getting a shot and Johnny and Mossman’s tag titles. See, I don’t think Johnny Smith was past his prime in 2001. I think he was in the wrong place. He always did his best work against technicians - Akiyama, Kobashi, Hase. Even Albright for all his bulk is a technique guy. Smith isn’t the guy you want to brawl with slugs, but all the people who could wrestle left, and that’s the house style now. Obviously I wasn’t privy to the negotiations, but Google-translated YouTube comments are insistent that Misawa wanted Smith in NOAH, but he decided to stick around to work with Kawada, who might be his all-time worst opponent. Speaking of brawling with slugs, he starts with Old Man Kim, and . . . well I’ll be damned, they’re trying to wrestle. Johnny even gets off two flying head scissors! That’s not a usual part of the repertoire, so it must have been Kim’s idea. Then the other two tag in and hit each other. That’s the style. The pro wrestling that understands pain. The focus is on Tenryu and Kea. They had faced off in the Carnival final a few days before, and Kea doesn’t get any revenge here. Tenryu holds him down, puts a hand under his chin, and carefully potatoes him several times. He takes it easy on Johnny, but Kea’s basically in a bareknuckle boxing match. Kim Duk looks awful and is capable of nothing - he almost killed Johnny with an attempted double underhook suplex where he barely got him a foot off the ground. But by God by the end of this I had developed real admiration for the old-timer. He was busting his ass out there! He took all the bumps for his team, including a second rope suplex and the match-winning swinging DDT. He can’t wrestle, but consider his position. Tenryu called him and asked him if he wanted a title shot at Budokan. Is he supposed to say no? Weird match. It seemed like they were building to a Tenryu/Kea showdown, but the match ended before they got there.

Stan Hansen/Bobby Duncum, Jr./Johnny Smith vs Gary Albright/Yoshihiro Takayama/Masahito Kakihara (AJPW 8/23/1998) Funny visual to start, two big ol’ cowpokes and their little English friend. They could at least have lent Johnny a hat. On paper this looks like a style clash, but it just worked. The secret to making a six man tag interesting is to put Stan Hansen in it. He’s only got two years left, but he’s still going all out and keeping things unpredictable. Smith and Duncum hit Kakihara with a double vertical suplex, and Hansen runs in out of nowhere and drops an elbow on him. It’s obvious that no one - the crowd, his partners, no one - knew he was going to do that. Duncum isn’t much of anything, but he’s at his best when he’s trying to be like Stan. At one point he charges in like the broncho that would not be broken, knocks the ref out of the way, and charges Takayama only to be sent right back out of the ring. It didn’t work, but the imitation of Stan was appreciated. Everyone was good in this. I enjoy Albright in these workaday tag matches - he has good fundamentals, he works great with Smith, and every so often he flings a grown man across the ring. Kakihara is just the slickest little bastard that ever lived and gets a few opportunities to remind you. Takayama plays to his two strengths: Hitting hard and being hit hard. He words a very hot sequence with Stan to start, and later he and Kakihara kick Hansen in the chest enough times that Stan gets tired of it and starts punching people in the jaw. Where did Takayama’s leg drop come from? It’s not shoot style, and it’s not high on the list of things he does that look like they’d end a match. Regardless, he does it to Duncum and gets the win. This was really good.

The Patriot/Johnny Smith vs Jumbo Tsuruta/Akira Taue (AJPW 5/16/1992) We're going back in time to when Johnny's tights were cooler but his work was worse. I don't know why he ever gave up the Union Jack gear. We join in progress with Smith and Taue grappling. A tag to Tsuruta gets a pop, because the fans in Korakuen know that Jumbo has no intention of wrestling Johnny Smith. Sure enough, whip into the ropes, jumping knee, fist in the air. OH! This is actually the Patriot's debut in All Japan (he'd been in before as The Trooper - he's the rich man's Lacrosse/Wolf Hawkfield/Jim Steele). He gets some big reactions, and I have to think that it's all down to the steroids. His strikes are awful, and he's generally fumbly. Hard to get into position. When he uses his awesome strength to get out of a full nelson and Jumbo has to stand there looking amazed as he flexes, the crowd goes wild while I think about how body guys are a poison to the business. One of my long-term observations about Johnny Smith is that he didn't really start wrestling like Johnny Smith until past the midpoint of the 1990s. His early AJPW career has him employing a non-distinctive moveset. It's all very punch/stomp/bodyslam. According to Japanese Wikipedia, this was a conscious change: In Japan, he initially practiced the American style of wrestling used in Canada, but around 1995, on the advice of Gary Albright, he switched to the European style of wrestling used in England. There are Johnny Smith Wikipedia articles in four languages. You'll never guess. English, Japanese, Arabic, and Egyptian Arabic. So anyway, it's all thanks to Gary Albright that Johnny went from putting everyone to sleep in 1992 to tearing the roof off of Korakuen five years later. It's a good crowd tonight - the finish has Smith and Taue in the ring while the other two wander around on the floor, and they're willing themselves to get excited about it even though it's completely predictable and really bad. Smith and Taue are never on the same page, and everything they do looks at least a little botched. As with that Kobashi singles match from 1998, there is a reason they aired this. It’s the same reason, in fact. Taue hit a dropkick, winced and held his leg, and his opponents spent most of the match working on it. Postmatch, we get the angle in text form (which I translated with my phone): Taue’s leg hurts, and they have a big match coming up at the Budokan. This match was on Jumbo Tsuruta's kid's YouTube page, by the way. I thought that was neat.

Mitsuharu Misawa/Jun Akiyama vs Johnny Smith/Wolf Hawkfield (AJPW 11/15/1997) We have the full match now. I covered it back at the beginning of the thread - this match is the whole reason the thread exists - so we all know what happens. Comparing the draws, they filled the time better against Williams and Albright. Akiyama is Smith's best opponent so they keep it interesting, but any other combination drags. You miss Dr. Death spicing things up. But once Johnny starts giving Akiyama's arm the business, there's no comparison. This Misawa/Akiyama team is awfully good at making you believe you're about to see an upset - they had me convinced that Hayabusa and Jinsei Shinzaki were going to do the impossible later in the same tournament. The finish is just masterful. Misawa frantically elbowing Smith because he's running out of time shows the urgency that was lacking from the end of the Williams/Albright draw. They set everything up for Johnny to look heroic but finally go down to the Tiger Driver - the reaction to his kickout tells you everything. It's also a demonstration of the advantages of booking as rigidly as All Japan did. If upsets happen all the time, who cares? If they never happen, you can get a huge pop off an unpushed wrestler managing merely not to lose. Speaking of pushes, they were doing something with Smith and Hawkfield, but I'm not sure what. Consider: Here, in the team's debut, they pull off consecutive draws against good teams and finish an impressive fifth. In January 1998, they win the All Asia championship. The same month they get that weird showcase match against Kobashi and Ace. They lose, but they look good and get their hands raised and everything. They're in a decent slot at the Tokyo Dome in May, beating Gedo and Jado. They could easily have been shunted off into some six-man like poor Taue. They lose the belts in October, and then nothing. Neither one of them is in the 1998 Tag League - they didn't even fly over. They job to Johnny Ace and Bart Gunn in January 1999 and then spend most of the rest of the year backing them up. In the '99 Tag League they're separated and going in different directions: Smith rides Vader's coattails to third place, while Hawkfield gets Gary Albright, two points, and a slot at the bottom of the table. For maybe six months there, Smith & Hawkfield were, if not a big deal, a bigger deal than either one had ever been before. Then they dropped it, and I wonder what happened. Was it a Baba project that Misawa didn't care for? I don't know if the timing works. Given their subsequent trajectories, perhaps it's just that Smith was good and Hawkfield wasn't. Maybe they did this kind of thing all the time. Dave Meltzer at the time called them, "The early surprise team getting a push that surely won't last," and he was right about that.

Johnny Smith/Wolf Hawkfield vs. Steve Williams/Gary Albright (AJPW Tag League November 16, 1997) We’re going backwards through the 97 tag league. Death precedes birth, the scar precedes the wound, and the wound precedes the blow. It’s too late now, but I wish I’d gone in order, because the reactions in this match make more sense in its context. That context being: The 1997 World's Strongest Tag Determination League kicked off the night before. In his team’s opening match, Johnny Smith shocked the world and Tokyo by kicking out of a Tiger Driver at 29:55 and also getting everyone to boo the absolute shit out of beloved Triple Crown champion Mitsuharu Misawa. It happened in this very building, so you have to figure there are some repeat customers in the crowd. These fans are suddenly awake to the fact that Smith and Hawkfield are not just underdogs but beloved underdogs, and that they are to be cheered as they take on a higher-status team for the second night in a row. And one thing I hadn’t considered is that this team didn’t even exist until November 15, 1997. In fact, Wolf Hawkfield didn’t come into being as a pro wrestler (as opposed to a video game character) until that very night. He was the Lacrosse last month, and he was facing Smith as often as he was beside him. This explains a couple things: Steve Williams gets booed all the way through this match. All 352 head-dropping pounds of Gary Albright are the face in peril for a lot of it, except he’s not really a face because whenever Dr. Death comes in to rescue him, the Korakuen faithful give him the same treatment Misawa got. The play-by-play man can’t stop talking about the draw against Misawa and Akiyama, and in particular about how Misawa got the absolute shit booed out of him. It was a big upset, a loud and unexpected reaction from the fans, and it just happened yesterday. This also goes broadway, which is some interesting booking, and we get all of it, so it’s fun to see how they kill all that extra time. There’s all the matwork you’d expect, which Smith and Albright are pretty damn good at. Williams and Hawkfield come in and launch into a test of strength, and they milk every possible second out of it. Albright tags in and rather than rush into the wrestling, he stops to check on and strategize with his partner. There’s a protracted fight over vertical suplex, and I can’t get enough of it. A vertical suplex is a nothing move, but if you fight over it for a full minute, it means something. Williams does his best work on the apron. Korakuen’s an intimate venue, a place where when you tell the fans to shut up, you know they’re going to hear you. His reactions to getting the raspberry really come across - screw you, fans, I love kicking Johnny Smith! I loved this, and it could have gone an hour and kept me happy. It’s not perfect, though. They spend all that time with Smith and Hawkfield cutting the ring in half and barely preventing tags, endlessly teasing us with the promise of Doc coming in like a house afire, but it never happens. Williams tags himself in after some brawling on the outside, and Chekhov’s gun never fires. The build to the draw is a bit of a letdown as well. The last minute of the Misawa/Akiyama match is stunning; I can’t imagine doing it better. This time, Williams and Hawkfield fumble over a top rope suplex that was never going to pin anyone anyway, but Doc is just too exhausted to cover him in time. So that was a solid hour of Johnny Smith and Wolf Hawkfield for the price of two tickets to Korakuen. What a deal!

Johnny Smith/Wolf Hawkfield vs. Takao Omori/Tamon Honda (AJPW Tag League November 28, 1997) In the spirit of Opening Day, let's use a baseball metaphor and call this is a second division tilt in late summer. You don't see it so much anymore, but back in the day there was a sort of informal ghetto in the baseball world. There were eight teams in each league, and some of them were out of contention in April pretty much every year. Washington. The Phillies. These teams comprised the second division. We have a similar divide in the World's Strongest Tag Determination League every year. Let's be honest: We're all super involved in how Giant Kimala & Jun Izumida are going to do, but there's no danger of them winning it. We have four plausible teams and six also-rans. 1997 was a big year for Johnny & Wolf, though. They opened the tournament by stealing a point against Misawa & Akiyama, and they turn out to be clearly the class of the second division. They finish with 10 points by beating the obvious jobbers, coming through in some tough ones, and managing two draws. The lowest first division team has 14; the best losers have 6. Smith & Hawkfield were positioned somewhere in the middle. The match is . . . you know, it's fine. Not as good as the Headhunters one. Smith's standard limb work looks great, and Omori has a couple of hot moves. There's a transition off a spin kick that's real nifty, but Omori had every opportunity in the world to be a puroresu superstar and wasn't, so there's a ceiling to what you're getting. Honda has body language problems. He's got no physique, but he's deceptively large. It's deceptive because he's always looking at the ground like he's speedrunning Goldeneye. I gather that he figures it out at some point - the NOAH people are very fond of him - but he's a whole lot of nothing in this one. This, I suppose, is why you keep Johnny Smith around. In a "Braves vs. Pirates in August" kind of tag match, he fills the time better than most until his goon partner can land a body press. Another two points for the moral victors of the tag league.

Sakaguchi's kid never got anywhere either. I wonder if this indicates that the business is more meritocratic in Japan, but there are plenty of second generation washouts in the US as well.

Johnny Smith/Wolf Hawkfield vs. The Headhunters (AJPW July 19, 1998) Championships in professional wrestling are basically a tool to get people to care. The Russeauian “It’s all fake, bro!” attitude is tempting and maybe even logical, but it doesn’t hold up. If fake titles didn’t work, they wouldn’t be so common. That said, not all phony accomplishments are equal, and the All Asia Tag Team Championship is pretty far down on the list. No one got into the wrestling business dreaming of being the All Asia tag champ. So how do you get the audience involved when the stakes are marginal? This isn’t something you can do every time, but having great big fat guys squish Johnny Smith really worked here. Johnny Smith wound up being pretty popular with All Japan crowds. He’s been there for nearly a decade at this point, and he’s just so amiable. This matchup in particular spoke to the souls of the crowd in Niigata. Here you have a pure-hearted protagonist giving up hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds, relying on technique to keep the belts for him and his lummox of a partner. There’s an Of Mice and Men dynamic going on with Smith and Hawkfield that adds to the pathos. There’s a real pop when Smith tags in for the first time, and as the Headhunters crush him over and over, you can hear the crowd becoming more and more inflamed. It’s the kind of classic face in peril routine that you see only every once in a while in Japan, and maybe it works better because they’re going against formula. The Niigatans are ready to explode when Smith finally escapes and tags his partner, except that his partner remains Wolf Hawkfield. They remain excited, but you can hear them deflate as the erstwhile virtua fighter unloads on the Headhunters. It’s still a bigger reaction than you’d expect, but man - if it were someone really dynamic, we would have really heard something. Dude’s just not very good. He does, however, win the day as he dodges a big, sweaty moonsault and hits a diving body press to trigger one of the rare All Asia Tag Championship ceremonies you’ll ever see. It’s just like one with the real titles, but smaller. There’s an old guy handing out belts and little trophies, and our heroes pose for the cameras. I don’t know how it happened, but Johnny Smith and Wolf Hawkfield but mostly Johnny Smith got people - including but not limited to me - super involved in the fate of the All Asia Tag Team championship.

Johnny Smith vs. Kenta Kobashi (AJPW July 5, 1998) I have questions. This is five minutes with one big cut. We start with Johnny killing time forgettably, then we switch mid-kick to the finish. Why did this make TV, and why is half the runtime devoted to something you forget right after you see it? I do have a theory. First off, this is the semi-main at Korakuen (good for Johnny, but jeez), so maybe they had to show some of it. Also, Kobashi is the champ here, he's wearing an enormous knee brace, and the boring part is Johnny working on that leg. I can't follow the commentary, but I bet they were doing some kind of, "Will his knee be ready for his next title defense? Can it withstand all this Johnny Magic?" thing. I skimmed through his next defense - against Akiyama a few weeks after this - and there was Kenta lying outside the ring holding his knee and weeping. So I think I'm right. Once we skip the finish, Johnny hits a British Fall (not yet named), and Kobashi responds with yet another goddamn half nelson suplex. Johnny takes a smart bump here - he flips all the way over so he lands on his knees rather than his brain. Cool sequence to finish. Kobashi throws the lariat, but Smith armdrags him. The champ rolls through, tries again, and hits it for the win. Smooth.

Johnny Smith vs. The Cedman (AJPW January 2, 2001) The Cedman is an emblem of All Japan Pro Wrestling right after Misawa and nearly everyone else left. Overnight, a prestigious and infamously staid wrestling promotion ran out of wrestlers and started scrambling. They scoured indies, retirement homes, and gyms where Steve Williams hung out. That last one is where they found the Cedman, apparently a friend of Dr. Death's. His first name is Cedric, in case you were wondering about the ringname. The Cedric Man. He had been to Japan before for Yatsu's SPWF, but you wouldn't have known it if you watched him. Back in August, he had a match against Smith that it was apparently impossible to edit the mistakes out of. We got only a few minutes, but there was a botch in every clip. This time, there's no editing. GAORA is determined to show us every minute of the action as we open the Giant Series in Korakuen. And, I don't know. Either Johnny Smith is an Atlas-like god of carrying, or Cedman got better. He's playing Johnny's game, and he's doing great. They spent most of their time on the mat, grabbing arms and legs and pulling them in various directions. If you told me ol' Ced was going to grapple for ten minutes, I would have feared the worst, but it's really good! Aside from the actual botches, his big problem was hesitance. Very little of that here. He knows what he's going to do. Smith, who tends to get a bit formulaic with the matwork, pulls out some cool stuff. He puts his opponent in a cobra clutch and then stretches him out in the backbreaker position for a while. Moves aren't Cedman's strong suit. They pick things up on their way to the finish, and that's when he starts to look green. He hops up on Johnny's shoulders and ranas him over into a pinning predicament, and it's something that a more experienced worker would either figure out how to do better or not do at all. Johnny's not super crisp in this one either, though, so I'll overlook it. We do see the lessons of experience in the finish. In their previous match, The C. Man landed wrong on the overelaborate setup for the British Fall. This time, they skip that step as Smith hits it after ducking a clothesline. That's how you get better, Cedric.