Johnny Smith

[Owen Edwards]

On 4/9/2024 at 10:02 PM, William Bologna said:

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.

(1) fantastic thread overall, love this and love Johnny

(2) I liked this one. DK is actually bumping late into the match, and looks better than his tours to AJ in '89 and early '90. Maybe he's more pilled up. He's limited - he doesn't do anything massive or crazy - and other limitations mean it's not actually as good as, say, the Bulldogs/Malenkoes in '89, but he's actually better here than there.

[William Bologna]

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. 

[William Bologna]

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.

[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!