Jump to content
Pro Wrestling Only

Johnny Smith


William Bologna

Recommended Posts

Battle Royal (AJPW 1/2/1999)

This one is famous for Vader beating up and bloodying Kobashi and then going after him after he's eliminated. Pretty intense! But once we get that out of the way, it's all good clean fun.

An All Japan battle royal allows you to be eliminated by pinfall, and everyone's in the ring at once. Therefor the tactic is for everyone to run over and climb on top  ofanyone the minute he goes down. I've always liked this because it's goofy yet makes sense. So, for example, Mossman goes out after a vertical suplex. It wasn't the move; it's that he has ten guys preventing him from getting his shoulder up.

We get all kinds of hijinks built around this. Momota or someone bridges out of Shinzaki's powerbomb attempt, and everyone jumps on Shinzaki and pins him. Then, since they're already there, they do the same thing to Momota (or someone).

Johnny Smith and Wolf Hawkfield try some teamwork: Smith sets his boot up in the corner so Hawkfield can fling Tamon Honda into it. But halfway through the move, everyone else jumps on Wolf and pins him.

Johnny makes the final four. But, you know, this isn't a Royal Rumble. Making it to the end doesn't mean much. The other survivors are Kimala, Jun Izumida, and some guy I don't know - either Masao Inoue or Satoru Asako.

I won't take you through all the twists and turns, but there's a lot of human drama here. Alliances formed and promises broken. The big lesson is not to trust Jun Izumida. He betrays Kimala, his own partner, to help Inoue/Asako, and then betrays Asako/Inoue to help Kimala crush him into jelly and win.

This was a hoot, and now I really am done. 83 Johnny Smith matches. I'll wrap things up shortly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 111
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Closing Thoughts

I embarked on this project to get to the bottom of something I'd wondered about since 1997. In one of the first All Japan matches I ever saw, Johnny Smith looked like a genius wizard of professional wrestling, but you'd be hard pressed to find a wrestler with a comparable resume who was less talked about. What, I asked myself, is the deal with that?

Well, it turns out Johnny Smith was a technically sound but colorless wrestler who just didn't leave much of an impression on people.

What a revolutionary discovery! I spent the better part of a year figuring out what everyone else already knew. But hell, it's not like I had anything better to do, and I got to watch an awful lot of All Japan.

I'm trying to pass Bulldog Bob Brown on the Most Time Spent Talking About Johnny Smith List, so I'm going to muse for a bit.

Smith was miscast in Stampede; used almost exactly wrong. There are two main things about Johnny Smith:

  1. Good worker
  2. Seems like a nice guy

So here he is trying to keep up with Dynamite Kid, who was a perfect Stampede heel. For one thing, he was a shoot bad person, so the heeling came naturally. Also, Dynamite didn't have to do any actual wrestling to make a match work. A Stampede heel is allowed only to punch and stomp; Dynamite is an absolute top tier punch-stomper.

Then you've got Johnny over there with his nifty holds he's not allowed to do and his resting nice guy face. Giving Johnny Smith a post apocalyptic haircut isn't enough to make him a convincing heel.

So Johnny heads to All Japan, which was the ideal environment for him. You get to wrestle there, and you don't have to pretend to be a Scouser thug.

Smith thrived there, but it took him a while. I think his problem is that he's tentative. In his early AJPW stuff, he does fine, but you don't remember him. It really hit me in the ECW series with Taz. The submission match in particular was almost really good, but Smith was in a new environment and came off like he didn't want to offend anyone.

So it took him a while to get comfortable, but when he did (late 1997 at the latest), he's consistently good in consistently good matches. I'm going to overrate things a bit here because it's my favorite promotion and favorite style, but I enjoyed the tag league match against Misawa and Akiyama (11/15/1997), the Dome match against Gedo and Jado (1/5/1998), and the bout against Kobashi and Ace (1/26/1998) more than anything in the Fujinami project.

And they all had Wolf Hawkfield in them!

The neat thing is that he got pretty popular. It certainly wasn't love at first sight, and - other than the Misawa/Akiyama tag league match - I can't say I ever observed a burning passion on the part of the audience, but by 1997 there's real affection borne of years of hard work. It's not just the Korakuen diehards popping for the arm pump.

Smith got better and more interesting over the course of his All Japan career, but it's not like he was suddenly full of personality. I think a couple things happened:

  1. All Japan got very tricky over the course of the 1990s. The guys started to fill time with sequences – they did a lot of reversals and started playing with the patterns you expected to see. To give a Johnny-type example, he'd been doing the missile dropkick/kip-up/clothesline sequence for years. People expected it. You see them start to tinker with it so often that he basically never got to do it normally. Misawa caught him after the kip-up and turned his clothesline into a Tiger Driver – that kind of thing. Smith never excelled at filling out a match like Stan Hansen, but he was pretty good at this kind of thing.
  2. Smith refined his moveset. I was expecting when I started this to see all kinds of Zack Sabre stuff. Joint holds. Flipping a guy over just by grabbing his wrist. A dude who looks like a CPA making like a vicious English octopus. There was plenty of that in World of Sport, but once Johnny decamps to Canada, it's all punch/stomp/cheat. He gets to All Japan, and it's like he forgot where he came from. His work was generic. He wasn't bad at anything, but his repertoire lacked personality. But by 1997, he's worked some of it back in. He's not doing full-tilt World of Sport, and it's the same couple of sequences every time, but it's distinctive enough that he stands out a bit. King's Road with an English accent.

Johnny Smith was a really good wrestler. He's so mechanically solid that you take it for granted, and he seldom does something he can't do well. Thinking back to the embarrassing screwups Fujinami used to ruin finishes with makes me appreciate just how solid Smith was. And he wound in up in a great place for him to do great work; he became a really solid system player in late 1990s All Japan.

So, in conclusion: Nice work, Johnny. I'm glad you got out when you did, and I'll never forget about the time you kicked out of a Tiger Driver and made everyone scream for you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Various Winners and Losers

Johnny wasn't the only guy in these matches, and if we're being frank, you almost always come away with a stronger impression of the other guys than you do of Johnny. So here are some wrestlers who came out of this thing looking better than they did going in, and vice versa.

Stock up

Stan Hansen - Half of this thread was about Hansen, so there's no need to belabor it here. He was just great. He made a lot of potentially dry six man tags work through sheer force of personality.

Steve Williams - I was never a Williams fan. I've always found him overhyped, and he and Gordy bore the hell out of me every time out. But he killed it in the Johnny Smith Project. No long singles matches, no Oklahoma Stampedes, not much Gordy. Lots of face punches, a couple backdrops, and plenty of brawling with Hansen.

Owen Hart - I'd never seen young, pre-knee injury Owen, and holy crap. He was incredibly graceful and athletic. I wonder where he got it. I didn't enjoy much about all that Stampede I had to watch, but Owen's bodypress sunset flip almost made up for Ed Whalen.

Johnny Ace - Long-haired Johnny Ace is dope. He just went full tilt into everything, including shoving his own face into kicks. That's not to say he let anyone off easy; he was lucky to be working a style where being so physically awkward that you stiff everyone is a plus.

Definitely a Samson thing going on with him. He was nowhere near as compelling after he got the haircut.

All Japan Pro Wrestling - All Japan had a deeper bench than I thought they did. The rap was always, "They have the best handful of wrestlers in the history of the world and not much after that." I attribute this to a couple of things:

  • At the same time New Japan was piling up Meltzer stars by doing increasingly implausible shit off the top rope, All Japan's junior heavyweight division consisted of the same couple of unpushed short guys wrestling each other or an equally unpushed foreigner six times a year.
  • They put the old man comedy match on TV an awful lot.

Meanwhile, they were rolling out these really solid mostly-foreigner multi-man tags. They didn't really matter; there was nothing on the line, they weren't advancing storylines, and they didn't even have consistent factions, but I liked every one of them.

You had Smith, Patriot, Furnas & Kroffat, the Youngbloods... RVD would pop up now and then. Albright had his moments. I mocked Wolf Hawkfield a lot for having a stupid name, not being very good, looking like Dee Snyder, having another stupid name, and pretending to be a Virtua Fighter, but he usually did enough not to ruin anything.

Stock Down

Davey Boy Smith - Got completely outwrestled by his fake brother. The Bulldog was my favorite wrestler back in the 90s. He had a title match against Diesel that was so bad everyone involved apologized to Vince, but I didn't notice because I was cheering for him so hard.

Maybe he wasn't actually that good. He didn't do anything of note when Johnny was around. I watched what I could of him in the 1994 Carnival, and he wasn't any good in that either. A suspicious number of my favorite Davey Boy Smith matches have Bret Hart in them.

Mike Awesome - Awesome's schtick in general hasn't aged well. It's all bumps for bumps' sake, and when you consider what became of Mike Awesome, it's hard to justify the recklessness.

Toshiaki Kawada - I discovered that my favorite wrestler is a lazy sack of crap! I mean, did he have beef with Johnny or something? He just wouldn't work with him. Kawada figured into a lot of these matches, and he spent a lot of time just sitting on the ground like . . . well, like a sack of crap.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

Really interesting retrospective on the guy. I remember watching a lot of this stuff when I was going over the AJPW daily TV format matches and Smith was always a consistent figure in tag matches. It's a shame he would mostly just be a sidekick to bigger faces and stuck to the same few spots over and over, which is probably why most tended to think he was limited.

His stuff here kinda reminds me of a better George Hines: pushed when necessary, technically very competent but ultimately rather dry. That said, it's a good type of dry that as you mentioned, you almost forget how on point his execution was. His 2000 Kobashi singles match shows he could've probably been a bigger deal if he hadn't spent most of his career behind more colorful faces.

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

Man, Johnny Smith vs. Taiyo Kea from 2001 is really fucking good. Smith works the arm but Kea throws him out the ring and Smith bangs his leg into the guardrail. Kea proceeds to work the leg and Johnnys selling is absolutely on the money. They do all these awesome counters and Smith does a bunch of cool shit being the master of the hammerlock, like nailing Kea with a HAMMERLOCK PILEDRIVER. Fucking great. The crowd chants for Johnny big time and boos the fuck out of Kea. This was pro wrestling at its finest. I might have to go on a Johnny Smith deep dive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, Jetlag said:

Man, Johnny Smith vs. Taiyo Kea from 2001 is really fucking good. Smith works the arm but Kea throws him out the ring and Smith bangs his leg into the guardrail. Kea proceeds to work the leg and Johnnys selling is absolutely on the money. They do all these awesome counters and Smith does a bunch of cool shit being the master of the hammerlock, like nailing Kea with a HAMMERLOCK PILEDRIVER. Fucking great. The crowd chants for Johnny big time and boos the fuck out of Kea. This was pro wrestling at its finest. I might have to go on a Johnny Smith deep dive.

Smith/Fujiwara is absolutely worth searching out for the 3 or so minutes that aired, it's basically his Holy Grail of lost footage alongside the missing Korakuen match with Kawada and the 30 minute draw he had with Fuji in 2001 (real unfortunate for the last one given those two would've cooked good)

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There actually is a full version of the legendary Smith/Hawkfield vs Misawa/Akiyama draw. Nothing mindblowing happens in the first 20 minutes but there is some solid hold for hold stuff between Smith and Akiyama, and lots of spots where Smith and Hawkfield are helping each other out to cut off the offensive runs of Akiyama and Misawa to keep things plausible. Very impressive build to the last ten minutes. You have to hand it to them for getting this much reaction out of Smith kicking out of a Tiger Driver at the last minute. Definitely a classic when you add in all the storytelling, cool bits of wrestling and a fucking Streetfighter character being there.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/14/2024 at 6:17 AM, Jetlag said:

There actually is a full version of the legendary Smith/Hawkfield vs Misawa/Akiyama draw. Nothing mindblowing happens in the first 20 minutes but there is some solid hold for hold stuff between Smith and Akiyama, and lots of spots where Smith and Hawkfield are helping each other out to cut off the offensive runs of Akiyama and Misawa to keep things plausible. Very impressive build to the last ten minutes. You have to hand it to them for getting this much reaction out of Smith kicking out of a Tiger Driver at the last minute. Definitely a classic when you add in all the storytelling, cool bits of wrestling and a fucking Streetfighter character being there.

 

Sweet! I found that, plus some other stuff. NJPW World killed my other thread, so now I'm back in the Johnny business.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


×
×
  • Create New...