A Lost Classic: Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy at Budokan in a Never-Before-Seen Gem

See It For Yourself

If you are a hardcore wrestling fan of a certain age, you’ve likely spent hours scouring the internet for the legendarily great All Japan Pro Wrestling matches of the 1990s, a bevy of bonafide bangers in the parlance of the youth.

It was a special time to be a wrestling fan, as we watched young Mitsuharu Misawa, freshly free of the Tiger’s Mask, go from Jumbo Tsuruta’s understudy to the most magical ace of the era. Misawa was a champion’s champion, defending his hard-won position in wrestling’s top company against former friend Toshiaki Kawada, the prodigy Kenta Kobashi, big ole Akira Taue and a collection of fearsome foreign menaces.

Match after match, year-after-year, the promotion set new standards for excellence, combining strong strikes, dangerous suplexes and intricate sequences of reversals and escalations that created a new kind of in-ring narrative. The best matches were great on the surface level—but even better for those in the audience who had been paying attention, rewarding fans who watched the matches closely for all the nuances wrestlers inserted into their work.

The best of these contests can be identified by date alone:

6/3/94

6/9/95

1/20/97

6/8/90

That fateful night in June of 1990 was arguably the most important match of all the greats from the decade, setting the stage for all that would follow. It was a tenuous time for the company, which had recently lost Genichiro Tenryu, it’s shiniest, most vibrant star, to the irresistible lure of easy money and the chance to call the shots with his own vanity promotion SWS. In response, Misawa ripped off the Tiger Mask, an anchor in a way for someone hoping to scale even greater heights, and announced his intention to challenge for wrestling primacy.

His victory over Jumbo, a standard-bearer since the 1970s, made it clear this was more than idle talk. With the support of Giant Baba, Misawa was ready to stake his claim as the next mega-star in Japanese wrestling.

It was also only the second-best match of the night, a shocking recent revelation thanks to the discovery of the complete match between Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy, one that had long existed as a mere snippet.

The semi-main event that night told a similar story on the gaijin side, with the old battleship Stan Hansen, an All Japan mainstay since 1982, taking on a prime Terry Gordy, just three days removed from winning the Triple Crown championship from Tsuruta. This too was built as a passing of the torch just like Jumbo/Misawa—only Hansen refused to hand it over and go gently into the darkness. Instead, we saw two bulls, big, burly, mean men trading vitriol and shockingly hard blows for a solid 20 minutes. It was an angry, snarling bastard of a match between men from another time, nothing asked and nothing given, every inch contested via trench warfare.

One of my main criticisms of contemporary wrestling is the contrived cooperation that is the centerpiece of most of today’s “great” matches between extraordinary athletes who seem to lack a grounding in the basic tenets of the entire enterprise. This doesn’t look at all like two men in a dance. No one would call this beautiful. It’s an ugly, awful scrap, so tense that it becomes awkward at times, feeling like something that could go sideways at any minute. Nothing in this match happens without a struggle.

Even the so-called rest holds are fiercely contested, with Hansen especially refusing to make anything easy. There are times you can feel Gordy’s patience with big Stan’s bullshit wearing thin, where the former Freebird has to lay them in particularly hard just to keep Hansen from eating him alive. It is in this jittery, strained tension that the match truly comes alive.

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This is worked pro wrestling, make no mistake. But it’s a work taken to its logical extremes. It looks like two men battling for supremacy and control, proud athletes fighting for the prize of prizes— and not at all like a pair of artists hoping the crowd chants “both these guys.”

There are zero “this is awesome” chants here—instead the crowd exists on a razor’s edge between chaos and control, every moment so fraught it almost hurts to watch. My favorite sequence occurs towards the end when Gordy appears to be on his way to victory. Instead, Hansen grabs ahold of the ropes and refuses to budge, taking an awful beating in the process but not the kind of concussive powerbomb that might finish him for good. There’s so much pride there, an angry denial of Father Time’s ravages.

This is primal, powerful and special stuff. It’s not to be missed, especially if there is a piece of you that longs for the way it used to be.

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.