Genichiro Tenryu & Great Kabuki v George Takano & Shunji Nakano (SWS, 10/18/90) - GREAT
This was the finals of a one-night tag tournament, either for title belts or a wealth of prestige, perhaps both. Tenryu and Kabuki made quick work of a Bob Orton/Jeff Jarrett team earlier in the night while Takano and Nakano had to go through Takagi and Yatsu in the match immediately preceding this one. So you'd think the advantage would be with the team of Tenryu and Kabuki; even more so than simply by virtue of the fact that team has Tenryu and the other team does not. The cool thing about these early SWS shows with the match timer in the bottom corner is that it lets you see exactly how long it takes for Tenryu to come in and kick someone in the face unprompted (it was one minute and 31 seconds on the dot). Kabuki hasn't bothered repainting his face after the earlier match and my world has been shaken but he will still thrust kick someone straight under the chin. And this was largely a stomping from Tenryu and Kabuki, the young lads floundering and trying to stay afloat, swimming upstream while getting some shots in sporadically. It was a pretty awesome underdog performance from both of them and they really made those shots count when they threw them, hitting some killer dropkicks and high knees as hope spots with Tenryu taking all of them clean in the face. Then with every shotgun blast Tenryu receives he comes back meaner and more aggressive than before and it leads to several instances of someone getting punted in the spine. Nakano must've picked up a knee injury in the semi-finals because it's taped up here and targeted in the back half. As the match goes on the crowd get properly behind the underdogs and they do not like it when Kabuki comes in to break up pins and the like. At one point he walked over and just stomped on Nakano's knee to major heat. Tenryu eating a pin off the German suplex must've been a shock at the time. Maybe he saw where All Japan were going with Misawa and the boys and he wanted his own Jumbo passing the torch moment. You can see why he'd want that because the SWS roster was not particularly deep and the hierarchal gap between Tenryu and the rest was substantial. We'll see how Takano progresses from here and perhaps one day we'll be talking about him like we do Misawa.
This started great and I wondered if we were going to get some big SPECTACLE wrestling. Undertaker is what Undertaker is but the crowd were into him and his zombie shtick so I figured he and Tenryu could make for a fun pairing. The first few minutes were the best and after that it kind of meandered at points, but Yoko and Bigelow working over Tenryu for a stretch was decent enough. If nothing else it made me interested in a Tenryu/Bigelow singles match. Some of the Fuji interference stuff towards the end dragged on for an age and Hebner really should've been taken to task by whatever governing body the referees had. If this was the English FA he'd have been given a STERN talking to about something or other.
