William Bologna

Johnny Smith/Maunakea Mossman vs Masao Inoue/Tamon Honda (AJPW All Asia Tag Title Tournament 10/9/1999) The throne is empty. Team No Fear held the storied All Asia Tag Team Titles, but, overcome by hubris, they challenged Misawa and Ogawa for the bigger (literally) tag titles. The Untouchables won; No Fear didn't get what they wanted and lost what they had. Then Misawa vacated them a day later. It's inconsequential, but I always found this sequence of events strange and indicative of a slipshod approach to booking. It really seems like they didn't think about these things more than a couple weeks ahead of time. They ran a little bitty round robin tournament to fill the vacancy, and I wish more of it made tape. In addition to the finalists, Daisuke Ikeda/Masahito Kakihara, Jun Izumida/Satoru Asako, and Jinsei Shinzaki/Kentaro Shiga were in it. Seems like that would have been fun. The match features a lot of double teams, assisted by the fact that the referee is just not keeping order in there. Honda flings Smith stomach-first onto Inoue's knee, and Johnny sells the hell out of it. Honda's about to be bodyslammed but Inoue pushes him into a pinning predicament. Mossman can't get Inoue up for a Northern Lights suplex until Johnny pops Inoue in the head. Inoue doesn't seem to be good at much. He's doing a strongman thing, and he looks like Manabu Nakanishi shrunk. Honda, with whom I'm not usually impressed, does some stuff this time. He hits Mossman with a German whose sloppiness only makes it look better. There are a couple other big moves, but he always goes right back to his cruddy headbutts. The finish comes when Mini-Nakanishi gets Mossman in a torture rack. Johnny strolls in and kicks him in the gut. That doesn't work, so he does it again. And then one more time, while the ref just stands there watching. Finally, Honda ejects Smith, the rack is reapplied, and Mossman just can't take anymore of Nakanishito's awesome power. This was better than the sum of its parts. I have no use for three of the guys in this match, but they delivered here, and they had the crowd going. I'm developing a theory about the All Asia belts. It's a midcard title (except when Misawa gives it himself and then decides it's beneath him) - not the best workers, not the most popular guys. But when those little belts are on the line, it seems like the dudes work harder and the crowds pop louder. Remember Smith/Hawkfield vs. the Headhunters? Should have sucked, but it ruled. Remember when Hayabusa and Shinzaki had them? And then this. There aren't as many examples as I'd like, because they just didn't put All Asia title matches on TV very often. They only barely put this one on - we get under 8 minutes of a 26 minute match. So anyway, congratulations to the victors. They hold onto these things all the way until the split, whereupon the titles once again sit vacant, this time for over a year. They really didn't give a damn about these belts!

Johnny Smith/Masanobu Fuchi/Tamon Honda vs Gedo/Koji Nakagawa/Yukihiro Kanemura (AJPW 5/2/99) How do you make a Tokyo Dome show special? The main event tonight is Misawa vs. Kawada. Sure, neat, but we've seen it more than once at Budokan. One thing All Japan liked to do in this situation is bring in dirtbag indy guys for Johnny Smith to beat. Last year he and Hawkfield went over Gedo and Jado (nifty match). Now Gedo's back, and he brought some friends: Team No Respect is in the building. Yukihiro/Kintaro/W*ING Kanemura is the Kodo Fuyuki of wrestling: A real sleazy greaseball who changes his first name every so often. Nakagawa's the guy who dressed like Bret Hart. He never made an impression on me. Johnny Smith Heat Check: He remains popular. He gets a big pop just for tagging in, and the play-by-play man immediately starts going on about Johnny Magic. A digression on Johnny Magic: I mentioned before that, according to Smith's Japanese Wikipedia entry, Gary Albright convinced Smith to start doing more English stuff in his matches. This takes the form of an oft-repeated sequence of nifty arm work that he does anytime you see him starting in 1997. These moves - most often and most beautifully done to Jun Akiyama - make up what they're calling "Johnny Magic." And it could well be this that propels Johnny to . . . well, higher than he'd been. The fans are into it and remain into it. However, Johnny doesn't know how to sell himself. Johnny Magic is an English phenomenon. Japanese sources emphasize his training with Ted Betley, Lancashire wrestling etc. He needed to lean into it. Put the Union Jack back on your ass, Johnny! Come down to a Buzzcocks song. Do, I guess I'm saying, what Zack Sabre Jr. is doing. I thought of this because of a lengthy closeup of a star falling off of his non-descript trunks. Anyway, the story here is that the FMW guys are not a threat unless they cheat. Every transition is shady: A kick in the balls, gang-up in the corner, rake of the eyes. Gedo and Jado did the same thing last year. When the playing field is level, the home team runs over them. Really makes them look like nothing. Kanemura is great in this, despite having "Foot Loos" printed on his butt. He's there to get destroyed, and does he ever. He's flipping over on his head on Fuchi's backdrops, doing 360s on lariats . . . really earning his pay. Fuchi also shines. He gets real sadistic with his matwork, and he always shows more personality than I expect. He might have been an all-timer if he'd gotten on the gas. After one last flurry of cheating, Honda puts away Gedo. Fun stuff. It might have been better if the visitors had been shown a little more respect, but they kind of brought it on themselves with that faction name.

Johnny Smith/Bobby Duncum Jr./Rex King vs. Steve Williams/Gary Albright/The Lacrosse (sic) (AJPW 10/21/1997) Rex King (Latin for "King King") is Well from Well Dunn. The Lacrosse is Wolf Hawkfield. We're less than a month from him taking off his mask, role-playing as a video game character, and teaming up with Johnny. Four of these guys are dead. This thread is more than anything else an examination of the career of Johnny Smith. It's late 1997. Johnny is the senior member of his team, and Budokan loves him. He gets a big pop when he's announced (plus a couple streamers), and he gets another when, after weirdly long deliberations, he starts the match for his team against Albright. The fans are more or less silent for his partners. I usually enjoy Smith/Albright interactions, but they're kind of eating it out there. They're not on the same page, and the grappling is fumblesome. Doc seems to agree with me; after a few minutes of this he comes in to boot Johnny in the face. Regarding Johnny's squad here: Duncum never impressed anyone, but he looks great running. He looks out of control, which is an asset when you're doing a wild cowpoke gimmick. King gets to do very little. And the Triangle of Power, a short-lived and justly-forgotten stable that they're trying to get over in this match: The Lacrosse is very Wolf Hawkfield-ish. He takes Smith's arm-working routine better than you'd think. Albright flings King around, and we all enjoy that. I don't know that I want to watch a lot of his singles stuff except when Kawada feels like performing a miracle, but he's a real asset in multi-mans like this. Williams is great in this, providing some personality and heat in an otherwise dry match. He's truly the Stan Hansen of professional wrestlers. But damn, someone needed to tell him to ditch the Oklahoma Stampede. He does it to Duncum, who's so big that Doc barely make it across the ring doing these little tiny ballerina steps. The fans get real loud when Johnny gets his big hope spot - the missile dropkick routine followed by a German suplex to Williams. Dr. Death's favorite transition when working with Smith is to punch him right in his goddamn face - we've seen this before - and he does it twice here. I pop every time. They fooled me pretty good with a false finish. Everyone takes turns running into King, then Lacrosse does his spinny powerbomb and goes for the pin while his partners vaunt themselves and do their Triangle of Power hand thing. The camera is positioned to that you don't see Smith and Duncum come in to break it up until the last second. But then Lacrosse hits his body press and gets the pin so we can all listen to KISS for a little bit. This wasn't bad, even though the outcome was never in doubt - looking at the personnel, there aren't a lot of scenarios where someone on Team Johnny could beat someone from the Powerful Triangle without it being the kind of upset All Japan didn't do too often. The match does make one appreciate Steve Williams. Even past his physical prime, he has presence, and that's more important anyway. This is everyone's last match until the 1997 tag league kicks off. I don't know what they were thinking with the Triangle of Power thing. Lacrosse gets the pin, and all three make a real point of making triangles with their hands, but Lacrosse becomes Wolf Hawkfield and is no longer involved the next time we see him.

Johnny Smith/Dynamite Kid vs. Tsuyoshi Kikuchi/Mitsuo Momota (AJPW 11/19/1990) Dynamite Kid is really popular. Johnny gets booed when he comes in to break up a pin, but DK does the same thing to cheers. When he goes to the top for the match-ending headbutt, everyone in Niigata City Gymnasium is on their feet. It's the typical Kid 'n' Johnny formula: Smith does a bunch of arm-wringers and whatnot, then Dynamite tags in and brutalizes. Kikuchi's a great foil for both, so his presence is always welcome.

Time for a clip show. The longest thing here is maybe five minutes. Johnny Smith/Arc Angel vs. Bruce Hart/Kevin Brosny (Stampede 11/24/1989) Sometimes you wonder why two Hart brothers are hall of famers and a whole bunch of others aren't. Then you see Bruce Hart and you stop wondering. He is fortunately on the apron for most of this while the heels beat up Kevin Brosny. Arc Angel is a great big muscle guy most famous as Firebreaker Chip. From WCW Special Forces! He gets the pin with a Doomsday Device followed by a pretty dopey finisher where he does a vertical suplex setup but then drops the guy on his face. The highlight is when A. Angel runs into Brosny, and the color guy says it's like getting hit by a truck going, "60 miles an hour (or 100 kilometers depending on who you are)." Dynamite Kid/Johnny Smith vs. Butch Masters/Skywalker Nitron (AJPW RWTL 12/1/1990) I could have sworn one of these guys was Kevin Nash, but it's not the case. One of them became an actor (he played Ajax in Troy), and the other one did motivational speaking. Good heat. Whichever tall guy it is gets booed hard, and we get a big pop when Dynamite throws him off the second rope. Which is followed by an even bigger pop for Johnny's missile dropkick. Good guys win after a DK headbutt. I really enjoyed this but only because I thought it was Kevin Nash getting manhandled by two short guys. Terry Funk & Dory Funk Jr. vs. Dynamite Kid & Johnny Smith (AJPW RWTL 11/25/1990) Only a minute, but it’s odd to see even a minute of DK and Johnny beating up a couple NWA worlds heavyweight champions. And, you know, NWA champions back when it meant something. We’re not talking about Mike Rapada and Colt Cabana here. They work on Terry for about 45 seconds, who flops around like a trout. Then he and Smith do some pretty slick rollup stuff and Terry wins. Dynamite Kid/Johnny Smith vs. Giant Baba/Andre the Giant (AJPW RWTL 12/4/1991) The British Bruisers aren't so lucky against these tall guys. You have to get used to watching Baba. When you have haven't seen him in a while, his movements look uncanny, like he’s a Ray Harryhausen effect. It's hard to believe he’d be racking up all those Meltzer stars years after this. He DDTs Johnny, and Andre just stands in front of DK in the corner to guard the pin. Probably a good use of Andre there.

Johnny Smith vs. Davey Boy Smith (Stampede 11/3/1989) It's brother vs. fake brother! Young John Hindley was brought to Calgary as Davey Boy's brother, which is the reason his fake stage name is the most nondescript name you can possibly have. He never left, by the way. I mean, obviously he got on an airplane from time to time, but Johnny Smith got to Calgary and never again felt the call of Albion. We join this match 55 minutes in. My initial response was, "and thank God for that," but further reflection indicates that we probably got the worst portion of this we could have gotten. Consider: The Smiths probably did some real nifty stuff. I bet they did all kind of rollups, and I further bet that it was pretty sharp. There's no reason these two wouldn't have worked well together, but we only get to see them when they're exhausted. We are brought into this match as David Boy prepares to put Johnny in a surfboard. And he takes his time - we get a solid minute of setup while the announcer talks in excruciating detail about it. Then Johnny just falls out of it. Doesn't work at all. I have wonder about the editing here, because I do not feel that we needed to see any of that. As we head to the time limit, somebody gets on the PA and starts counting down. The match-ending crescendo of kickouts is accompanied by this dumb fucking hoser announcing, and I quote, "Two three one!" Not only were these obviously not full seconds, this stupid hick can't make his way from three to one without getting lost. Stampede is so low-rent. I miss Japan.

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.