[1991-08-05-SWS] Genichiro Tenryu & Ashura Hara & Takashi Ishikawa vs Yoshiaki Yatsu & Haku & Shinichi Nakano

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Tenryu and Yatsu are the principles, and I'm left wanting a singles match between the two. Glad there's one coming. Haku looks really good in this environment, between the athleticism and heel tactics. I wish he had worked Japan more. The Yatsu team heel tactics are really fun, considering that it's usually Tenryu with that attitude, so the tables are turned. Good match.

[Childs]

This actually felt like less of a Tenryu-Yatsu tease than the previous tag involving those two. The match was easy to sit through, with a lot of action and hellacious shots. But it never took on the kind of identity that would make it stand out in the memory. Tenryu and Hara struggled to find the timing on their old double-team spots. Haku fit right in, as Loss noted.

[PeteF3]

This is fun and fast-paced for six beefy guys, but this illustrates how far ahead of the pack AJPW was than everyone else when it came to 6-man layouts. You get six well-defined characters in those matches with definitive strengths and weaknesses relative to everyone else, and it comes through in virtually every spot in the match. Here you have Haku as sort of a monster and Nakano getting hidden as sort of the underdog, but that's about it--everyone works the same against everyone else. Still, the action was all well-done and the post-match confrontation was nice and intense. This is definitely an environment conducive to Haku, and he could have been a depth asset to any of the big Japan promotions.

[Kevin Ridge]

Haku out there raises my interest. They don’t seem to be wasting any time out there as a bunch of lariats and suplexes are thrown right away. Hara’s chest was beaten up. Haku did seem to fit in well and came off like a monster. An extended run in Japan for him could have been fun.

[soup23]

Beffy tag but I can't help but feel I would rather see Tenryu doing something else. Yatsu looks pretty rough and Hara was looking worse for wear in 1988. Haku fit in well and seem motivated even busting out a good dropkick. I don't know where that bottle he grabbed at the finish was headed but Tenryu's team is able to secure the win.

[El-P]

A bunch of surly old guys beating the shit out of each other, with younger butterface underdog Nakano and savage King Haku in workrate mode thrown in for good measure. This is about as good as SWS could get.

[garretta]

Thanks to Soup for confirming who won; the cameras missed the winning fall.

 

There wasn't much fancy about this; El-P said it best when he called it "six surly old guys beating the shit out of each other". This was a nice change of pace for Haku, and it proved that he had more left in the tank than Vince thought. I liked the hatred between the two teams, and the near-riot at the end proved that the issues between former partners Tenryu and Yatsu were a long way from being settled. I didn't have much of a clue who Nakano and Ishikawa were when the bout started, but they both kept up their end of the match very well.

 

For those of you SWS experts out there: Is there anyone on the roster whom you feel could have had a decent run in the WWF if Vince had made the call? I mention the WWF specifically because that was the promotion that worked with SWS at this time.

[dawho5]

Haku does look really good. I'd have liked to see him in either AJPW or NJPW. Everyone was laying in their shots, especially Hara with those lariats. Reminded me of the 1988 AJPW tags this is trying to reference, but not quite as good. Looking at the match listings August is pretty loaded too. I doubt this even makes upper half of the month even with Tenryu's post match throwing shit around.