[1991-01-26-AJPW-New Year Giant Series] Mitsuharu Misawa vs Akira Taue

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Last minute or so, which sees Misawa debut the Tiger Driver '91. This was a last-minute edit, but I plan on checking this match out in full when I go back through the decade and fill in gaps.

[soup23]

Be interesting to see this match in full as I don't recall seeing it. Action at the end looks pretty good but you could tell they didn't really know how to take the TD 91 yet.

[PeteF3]

Crowd goes into a noticeable hush when Taue gets spiked headfirst into the mat. Nasty as fuck. I've watched the entire 1991 TV run for All-Japan but I had no recollection of this match at all, to the point where I had to ask after the fact when the TD '91 occurred. I'm sure the match was by no means bad but that doesn't quite speak for the match as a whole.

[Kevin Ridge]

Cool to see the debut of Tiger Driver 91! I would too like to see match in full to see if the use of this move was necessary since it seemed to be more a big match desperation move by Misawa.

[MJH]

It wasn't "necessary" in the sense of 6/94 vs. Kawada... but guys would frequently debut a new big move in a smaller setting. For instance, I'm pretty sure Kobashi debuted the Orange Crush on Akiyama in a six-man... maybe even on Omori. Doing it that way, you can build it up in the magazines and bring it out in a match where the finish is already obvious (Misawa was always going to win here), whereas, if he'd built it up ahead of a match with Jumbo, for instance, it telegraphs it too much - fans are smart enough to know it's gonna feature in the match, at/near the death, and so everything before it is flattened. John would have a better idea if this was the case here (that it was mentioned ahead of time: "Misawa having a big new move for the new year..."), but that was always my understanding of the theory behind it (and I saw the sense in it).

 

The full match isn't much of anything, really, and it's pretty short too, though I know Ditch has it and it's almost certainly on YouTube as well. The spot was yearbook-worthy: the match itself was not.

[Zoo Enthusiast]

Taue's hair is just as stunning as ever here. About all I've got to add, aside from loving TD '91.

[dawho5]

Taue's offense in the full version is very un-Taue in nature. Unless there was a clip I missed it came in at about 8 minutes.

[garretta]

That was more brutal than 90% of the piledrivers I've seen. Now I know why wrestlers work their necks so much; you take a move like that on an unprotected neck and you're looking at time in the fracture ward. I'm surprised they had Taue walk out relatively unaffected except for a sore neck. A stretcher job, or at least help back to the locker room, wouldn't have been out of place.

[GOTNW]

This was an interesting, although slightly disappointing match. Misawa's aggressive onslaught in the beginning was awesome, totally caught me off guard and for a moment it looked like it could turn into an awesome brawl, but the next thing was Misawa transitioning into a hold and them just having a standard match, which was nowhere near as interesting. There are moments where you see signs of the nastiness that will come of Taue in the following years but you can also see he's still too fascinated with jumping of things and what he can physchically do to really dedicate himself to the snugness. They both have good offence, some sloppy (jumping) middle kicks aside, the rope running transitions are something All Japan handled perfectly and Misawa's misaed Lariat (and following elbow comeback) was a thing of beauty. Still, this didn't really feel worthy of such a big move debut. Others will probably enjoy it a lot more since I presume they're not as focused on structure as "holy shit Taue did a somersault!" and that's valid too. ***

[G. Badger]

Misawa is such a dick here. He slaps Taue during a rope break & when they go to lock up he hits him with a stiff elbow shot. Taue gets his revenge though throwing up some mean boots, dumping a couple Samoan drops & even throwing our little superhero on a row of chairs. Misawa only get pissed and gets his comeback mojo going by countering the DDT with a northern lights suplex (never seen him do that one!) and getting a nearfall with the Tiger Driver. Still it's not enough for Taue! Then Misawa does the unspeakable, whether it was planned or improvised, he performs the first Tiger Driver '91!!! It's still the most dangerous finisher & establishes it's reputation soundly. Taue isn't kicking out or really even moving that much afterwards. Me thinks Jumbo & Taue want payback...bad. Relatively short match but all action. Great match

[Jetlag]

Watched the full match. Misawa kicks the SHIT out of Taue to start, but soon Taue goes on an absolute rampage, launching Misawa about the place and busting out an awesome flip dive. Some good back and forth exchanges which would become the standard for their longer matches later, mostly leading to Misawa catching Taue with a stiff elbow or kick to the face. Taue kicks out of the Tiger Driver, and Misawa finishes him immediately after with the deadly 91 version. Kind of a weird way to debut your deadly super finisher in a 10 minute match but they got the point across.

[cactus]

Super fun sprint that opens with Misawa absolutely laying into Taue. Taue reminds me of the younger guy who complains about his generation to gain points with the older crowd, and Misawa ain't having any of that.  After Taue hits a comeback and kicks out of the vanilla Tiger Driver, Misawa debuts the new Tiger Driver '91 for the win. 

★★★½

[KinchStalker]

I've never talked about this here, but I have elsewhere online. I am convinced that the way Taue took the Tiger Driver '91, which would become the standard for the move, was not the original intention. On April 5, Misawa used the move again on a Carnival match against Kobashi in Takamatsu. As seen in a camcorder recording, Kobashi lands on his shoulder blades.

Excerpt from 2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART FIVE:

On 9/25/2021 at 3:55 AM, KinchStalker said:

There were unwritten rules to these matches that followed Baba’s ideals, and these were a clear manifestation of what we would come to know as oudou/King’s Road, even if that marketing term still hadn’t come about yet. These ranged from the general pacing of these matches – hot start, cooloff in the middle, hot finish – to Baba’s strong preference for variation and escalation rather than repetition in the layout of high spots. If a move only got a 2-count earlier in the match, Baba did not believe that it should be used for the finish, or even really a false finish. Ichinose credits this feedback, relayed to the wrestlers by Wada, with inspiring them to develop broader movesets, specifically citing Misawa’s myriad elbow strike variants as an example.

I believe that the Tiger Driver '91 was originally conceived as a followup to the standard Tiger Driver, where Misawa drove his opponent down rather than flip them into a sitout pin. Nothing more, nothing less. This era of All Japan is marked by sequences of similar but distinct maneuvers that trade on the aesthetic benefits of repetition. Think of Misawa's multiple-suplex finishes in the early big Kawada matches. It is used in the Kobashi match in the same way, as a followup to a Tiger Driver nearfall. Misawa might be a dick here, but him going "fuck your neck, Taue" on a trial series match is out of character and out of step with the broader product. This is not 6/3/94. Perhaps the height difference between Misawa and Tsuruta/Taue led him to decide to put the move on ice. I suspect it was shelved to put over the stepover facelock as Misawa's new finish instead. But by 1994, when the nightmare bump arms race was on, I believe the move was retconned to have always been intended the way that Taue took it. (Weekly Pro coverage of the Kobashi match [special issue #432 (May 5, 1991)] did not contain a photograph of the finish, which likely obscured the contrary evidence.) I cannot confirm any of this, but it feels much more plausible to me than the notion that this superfinisher was busted out three years before it came back again. Baba, Fuchi et al. were good, damn good, but they were booking a wrestling promotion, not writing Babylon 5.