All Japan Battle Royal 1/2/98

1/2/98

ER: Spectacular. Few matches bring me as much joy as All Japan's annual year opening battle royal, and this is a nice weird crew. There is no loyalty in sight, just a lot of guys keeping butts to ropes and seeing who is gonna be dumb enough to step foot in the circle and get pinned by 15 guys. This battle royal is most well known among wrestling nerds for being THEE match where Skull von Crush gets a pin on Misawa. I think 90% of the people reading this site all had some kind of moment where they read or heard that Vito once pinned Misawa, and it immediately sounded like bullshit. I first read it in the 1998 or 1999 PWI 500 issue, and it sounded fishy. It was a trivia tidbit that got repeated a lot online, mainly because many were unfamiliar with the dogpile pinfall style of All Japan battle royals.  And I'm willing to bet upon learning that, most think that Crush was one of 15 guys pinning Misawa. In reality, the moment was much more exciting. It came around the halfway point, several had already been eliminated (big names like Hiroshi Hase and Akira Taue were out first, so the ring had cleared a bit), and Crush got in the middle of the ring and went right after Misawa. Crush hit Misawa with a stunner, Misawa being the only person I've ever seen take a stunner and then do a forward roll bump after, and Crush pinned him with really only a couple helping hands. So the moment was much more than the "one of 15 guys" narrative that became the immediate answer whenever the trivia piece would get mentioned, as it was Misawa getting pinned expressly because of the move he took from Skull von Crush.

Skull von Crush's somewhat validation wasn't the only fun bit we got. Haruka Eigen continues to be the master of big mouth shit talking in these matches; he always lands a cheap shot and then hides behind a bigger ally, this time literally jumping and running behind Baba. It's so great. Giant Kimala is a fun target in this one, people kept running up on him and he would fight back with big head chops and headbutts. He and Dr. Death had a weird thing and kept going after each other. Jun Izumida was the eventual winner! A guy who hung back at the right moments and had hilarious little things like trying to sneak up to cheapshot Akiyama but getting caught. Major guys, most notably Kawada, went after Baba in moments that really lit up the crowd, Baba running down every single one of them, blasting Baba chops and eventually getting pinned after getting dogpiled after delivering a nice Russian legsweep. Baba had this fantastic arms out What the Fuck face after getting ganged up on. "You came at the 60 year old KING? Seriously?" We got the lovely and unexpected final 4 of Akiyama, Izumida, Johnny Smith, and Johnny Ace. The Alliance of Johnnies is extremely short-lived, as Smith hits Ace with his great reverse DDT, the Akiyama palmed the back of Izu's head and threw him melon first into a falling headbutt on Ace. Izu gets a really fun and exciting win, letting Akiyama and Smith have a nice battle before letting one pin the other and then flipping the pin. God I love these battle royals.