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Post by Hobo on Jun 13, 2009 10:44:27 GMT -5
Mitsuharu Misawa dies in Hiroshima City Hospital.
In the main event of today's NOAH show, Misawa was dropped on his head with a backdrop by Saito. He could not move after, and the match was stopped.
On the way to hospital died Misawa. The death was at 22:10 clock time is confirmed.
Mitsuharu Misawa
6/18/1962 - 6/13/2009
Mitsuharu Misawa, one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all-time, was declared dead at 10:10 p.m. Saturday night at a hospital in Hiroshima after being dropped on his head in a tag team title match.
Misawa would have turned 47 on June 18th.
Misawa & Go Shiozaki were challening Bison Smith & Akitoshi Saito for the GHC tag team championship in Hiroshima and Misawa was dropped on his head at about 8:45 p.m. and knocked unconscious.
According to eye witness reports, Saito gave Misawa a "routine" back suplex that was described as a "7" in danger on a scale of one-to-ten. He did not get up. It was chaos in the ring as they attempted to revive him using CPR and the crowd was hushed for a while, and began a "Misawa" chant. He turned purple in the ring and was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
His heart stopped beating in the ring. The cause of death may have been a heart attack.
The wrestlers were told on the bus that he had passed away.
While it is being reported that he passed away at the hospital, he may have actually passed away in the ring.
Misawa was the Japanese high school national wrestling champion at 187 pounds in 1980, and was recruited by Giant Baba into All Japan Pro Wrestling. He gained his first taste of stardom in 1984 when he was chosen to be the second Tiger Mask. After unmasking in 1990, he became an even bigger star after a series of singles matches with Jumbo Tsuruta.
He was Japan's biggest pro wrestling star of the 90s, and one could make a strong case for him as the top wrestler of the decade. He was the Wrestler of the Year in 1995, 1997 and 1999.
After the death of Shohei "Giant" Baba, Misawa wrestled a little over one more year for All Japan Pro Wrestling, while working as company president. After consistently butting heads with owner Motoko Baba, the widow of Shohei Baba, he and 90% of the All Japan roster quit the company to form Pro Wrestling NOAH.
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Post by Hobo on Jun 15, 2009 17:22:00 GMT -5
other weekend tragedy; ref Tanabe passes away; Misawa cause of death Although Pro Wrestling NOAH and the family of Mitsuharu Misawa attempted to keep the cause of death quiet, it has been reported in Japan from police reports from talking with hospital workers that the death was caused by a spinal cord injury from the back suplex and not heart problems. Ted Tanabe, one of the best known referees in Japan, passed away on Monday in Japan from a heart attack. Tanabe suffered a heart attack while officiating in a match on a Sunday show for Osaka Pro Wrestling. He was rushed to the hospital and passed away the next morning. He was 46. Tanabe worked for several independent promotions. He probably gained his most fame during the heyday of Michinoku Pro Wrestling, where he did part of the comedy Lucha routines. He also did a heel ref gimmick during his career. Note to webmasters/reporters: When recapping news from this site or from our newsletters, please include a link to www.f4wonline.com as opposed to "From F4W", "From Figure Four Weekly" or derivatives. Thank you! |
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Post by Hobo on Jun 16, 2009 17:55:40 GMT -5
From Bryan Alvarez:
Perhaps the greatest wrestler of all time has died.
Sometimes when a wrestler passes away people look back fondly on their career and remember them as being perhaps bigger than they actually were. When the day comes, for example, that Ric Flair dies, people will be writing the same thing, and you will find people who will state the same about Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart and Kenta Kobashi and others. Many said it about Lou Thesz.
The difference here is that if you look at Mitsuharu Misawa's stats, it's tough to argue otherwise. He wrestled 24 five-star matches between 1985 and 2003. Readers of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter voted him Best Flying Wrestler twice, one half of Best Feud of the Year twice, awarded him five Match of the Year honors, Most Outstanding twice, Most Underrated once (which today seems impossible to believe), one half of Tag Team of the Year three times, and Wrestler of the Year three times. If nothing else, at the very least, he was the best wrestler of the 1990s. And while these are all Observer awards, I can tell you this. I don't follow a lot of Japanese pro-wrestling, at least on a weekly basis, but I'm often sent tapes, links or DVDs and told I must watch a certain match. In the last 15 years, the guy who was in the vast majority of those matches, maybe 75 to 80 percent, was Mitsuharu Misawa. He remains the best I have ever seen at building a match. I cannot tell you how many times I was told of this fantastic Misawa match, and 15 minutes or so in I thought to myself, "This is really good, but hardly a match of the year." And then, by the time it was over, I was sitting there in awe thinking, time and time again, "That was the best match I ever saw."
Misawa died on June 13th in the middle of a tag match in Hiroshima, Japan, at the Green Arena. He was teaming with Go Shiozaki to face GHC Tag Team Champions Bison Smith and Akitoshi Saito. He was just shy of his 47th birthday. According to ringside observers, Misawa was behaving somewhat strangely, shaking his head throughout the match and looking listless. At about the 27-minute mark, he was hoisted into the air and given a backdrop suplex by Saito, said to be a seven on a scale of one-to-ten on the danger scale. He didn't get back up. The referee dropped down and asked him if he could move and he said no, and then his heart stopped beating. It is believed he probably died at that point, although he was not officially declared dead until 10:10 p.m. on the way to the hospital. They were unable to revive him in the ring with CPR, chest compressions and an automated external defibrillator. Police believe his spinal cord severed and caused a heart attack, and that it was basically an injury that had been waiting to happen due to years of accumulated injuries.
Video of the post-match scene is tough to watch, as Misawa's body lays there in the ring surrounded by wrestlers and ringside doctors trying to revive him. The 2,000-plus fans in the building, many of whom are crying, alternate between periods of hushed silence and chants of "MISAWA!" The wrestlers in the ring are surprisingly calm. At one point they take off their shirts to help wipe sweat off of his body to prepare him for the AED. Although doctors are giving chest compressions, which of course are necessary only when one's heart is not beating, there isn't the outright panic that perhaps one would expect in the situation. It almost seems like they are all extremely concerned, but also confident that this is Mitsuharu Misawa, the toughest man in the world, and of course he is going to get up in the end.
"The moments at ringside felt an eternity," noted ROH's Chris Hero, who worked the show. "Never in my life have I wanted the fighting spirit to jump into someone's being more than I wanted tonight. The fans chanted, 'Misawa, Misawa, Misawa.' They wanted their hero to get up so f***ing bad. Just get up. Come on! You're too tough for this. Too strong. I grabbed his boots and held onto them 'til they took him away."
The show was immediately suspended and all of the wrestlers were told to return to the tour bus. Shortly thereafter, they were informed that he had died.
It is tough to explain to American fans what an enormous story this is. Most fans of a decade or more will compare this to the death of Owen Hart, who fell from the rafters in a WWE PPV stunt gone wrong at the Kemper Arena on May 23, 1999. But the reality is that Owen is now only the second most high-profile wrestler to die in the ring. Misawa was by far the biggest Japanese star of the 1990s, perhaps comparable in the US to Steve Austin or the Rock. But more than that, he was also the owner and the lifeblood of Pro Wrestling NOAH, so you would have to imagine Rock or Austin doing what they did while simultaneously being the owners of the World Wrestling Federation. I guess if you can imagine Steve Austin, after suffering his neck injury in the match with Owen in 1997, taking over as owner of WWE after Vince McMahon died, and then taking another bad bump in the ring on a televised show and dying in the ring. But even this scenario doesn't take into account the worker that Misawa was.
He was recruited by Shohei "Giant" Baba into All Japan Pro Wrestling in 1981 after being a Japanese high school national wrestling champion at 187 pounds. He was good enough early that within three years he was given the honor of playing the second generation Tiger Mask (Tiger Mask II), a super popular character from a manga cartoon of that time period. The first incarnation, which was played by the legendary Satoru Sayama, was one of the most famous wrestlers in Japanese history and had numerous incredible bouts with the likes of Dynamite Kid, tapes of which inspired an entire generation of lighter-weight wrestlers.
As Tiger Mask II he had a lot of great matches, including one five-star bout (meaning, I should note, that he was having five-star matches over a period of nearly 20 years), but didn't really get over as a major superstar. The unmasking took place on May 14, 1990, during a match in which he teamed with Toshiaki Kawada to face Samson (Hiromichi) Fuyuki and Yoshiaki Yatsu. At one point Misawa simply told Kawada to untie his mask, and then he ripped it off and the place went nuts and immediately began chanting "MISAWA!" In hindsight, it was one of the most important unmaskings in the history of wrestling, because it led immediately to him becoming a megastar following a series of incredible matches with Jumbo Tsuruta. In particular, his June 8, 1990 victory over Tsuruta was a symbolic passing of the torch to a new generation of superstars and changed the company forever. At the time, a new group called SWS had raided a number of stars from both New Japan and All Japan and Baba was pretty much forced to create a new superstar. The combination of Misawa's unmasking and win over Tenryu in a one-month period accomplished that so successfully that it has to be remembered as one of the greatest examples of superstar creation in Japanese history.
Misawa's tag matches with the likes of Kobashi and Kawada were among the best matches not only of the '90s, but of all time. His full list of five-star matches during the '90s alone were versus Jumbo on June 8, 1990; with Kawada & Kobashi vs. Tsuruta & Akira Taue & Masanobu Fuchi on October 19, 1990; a rematch on April 20, 1991; a rematch on May 22, 1992; with Kobashi & Jun Akiyama vs. Kawada & Taue & Yoshinari Ogawa on July 2, 1993; with Kobashi vs. Taue & Kawada on December 3, 1993; with Kobashi & Baba vs. Fuchi & Kawada & Taue on February 13, 1994; with Kobashi vs. Taue & Kawada on May 21, 1994; versus Kawada on June 3, 1994; with Kobashi vs. Taue & Kawada on January 21, 1995; with Kobashi vs. Steve Williams & Johnny Ace (John Laurinaitis) on March 4, 1995; versus Taue on April 15, 1995; with Kobashi vs. Taue & Kawada on June 9, 1995 (more than a few have called this the greatest pro wrestling match of all time); with Kobashi & Satoru Asako vs. Kawada & Taue & Tamon Honda on June 30, 1995; with Akiyama vs. Kawada & Taue on May 23, 1996; with Akiyama vs. Williams & Ace on June 7, 1996; with Akiyama vs. Kawada & Taue on December 6, 1996; vs. Kawada on June 6, 1997; with Akiyama vs. Kawada & Taue on December 5, 1997; versus Kobashi on October 31, 1998; versus Kobashi on June 11, 1999; and with Ogawa vs. Kobashi & Akiyama on October 23, 1999.
He also had one final five-star match with Kobashi on March 1, 2003. Realistically, his five-year feud with Kobashi from 1998 through 2003 may have been the greatest in-ring feud of all time, with three singles and one tag team five-star match on big shows during the period.
But there is the tragic side. One of the hallmarks of all of those great matches was the spot where each guy would be dropped on their head numerous times. Some of them looked more dangerous than they actually were, with the guys tucking their heads safely. But many of them clearly caused irreparable harm. I always remember talking to people while watching these matches and they would ask, "How do those guys land on their heads like that?," and you knew the only answer was, "Well, they're really landing on their heads like that." It got worse during the late '90s as Kobashi and Misawa pretty much had one mega match a year, and each year's match built off the previous year's, meaning it was constantly a game of "can you top last year?" Somehow, they always did. But they paid the price.
Misawa of late was in horrible physical shape. He'd gained a ton of weight, almost certainly because his knees were completely shot and he couldn't get out there and run every day, or really do any form of cardio outside of matches in the ring. His shoulders and neck were shot. Unlike in the US nowadays when you can take a guy like Batista and pretty much rattle off all of his major injuries, the mindset is very different in Japan and Misawa was probably walking around with severe injuries nobody ever knew about. God knows what, if any, painkillers he was taking. He almost certainly had a broken neck, and it very well could have been a situation where his doctor, like Steve Austin's, told him his neck was in such bad shape that one bad bump could cost him his life. Unlike Austin, who retired in his late 30s and has no desire to ever come back, Misawa continued to roll the dice in the ring. He'd only wrestled a few minutes in each of the matches on this latest tour, relying on partner Shiozaki to do most of the work.
Baba died on January 31, 1999, of cancer. He had broken into wrestling under the tutelage of the greatest star in Japanese history, Rikidozan, alongside Antonio Inoki in early 1960. Rikidozan, whose early television battles against evil foreigners post-World War II made him a national hero in the country to this day, was murdered three years later, and Inoki and Baba went on to become top stars for his Japanese Wrestling Association. In 1972, Inoki split off and formed his own group, New Japan Pro Wrestling, and Baba shortly thereafter, with the backing of Nippon TV, split off and formed his own rival group, All Japan. Nine days before his death, Baba, who had seen as much live pro wrestling as pretty much any human being who ever lived, declared the Kawada vs. Misawa Triple Crown match on January 22 as the best pro-wrestling match he'd ever seen in his life. The match was notable for the fact that Kawada legitimately broke his arm just moments after it started and then finished the match, the two of them working it as if it was just part of the story and nothing out of the ordinary.
Following Baba's death, Misawa frequently clashed heads with Baba's wife Motoko, who had a reputation particularly amongst the foreigners as being a "dragon lady." Misawa, who had been chosen company president and had been booking since probably 1997 when Baba first fell ill, felt his creativity was being stifled and was upset that he wasn't being given a bigger ownership stake in the group. He gave her an ultimatum, she called his bluff, and he ended up bailing. At the time it was thought to be a death-knell for All Japan, particularly since Misawa took 90 percent of the roster -- All Japan was left with just Stan Hansen, Kenta Kobashi, Maunuakea Mossman (who later became Taiyo Kea) and Masa Fuchi -- and the TV station that backed the company from the day it was formed, NTV, pulled out in favor of Misawa's new promotion.
NOAH, as the new company was called, was Mitsuharu Misawa. He was the owner and the main booker and it was his creation all the way down to the green canvas, a tribute to his trademarked colored tights. He was their first champion, beating Yoshihiro Takayama in the finals of a tournament on April 15, 2001. He won the title from Takayama twice, the second time on September 23, 2002 after Takayama had won it from Yoshinari Ogawa. Most likely, the idea was to have Takayama constantly fail in title matches against him only to eventually pin him clean in the middle as a megastar-creating torch passing, the same way he'd become a megastar by beating Tsuruta a decade earlier. Whatever the plan was, Takayama's career suddenly screeched to a halt after he suffered a stroke in the ring due to the enormous amount of head trauma he'd suffered as an unsuccessful MMA fighter (although, ironically, his being on the losing end of great wars ended up being what helped finally push him over the edge as a superstar). Misawa's last great five-star match on March 1, 2003, saw him drop the title to Kobashi. Perhaps the idea at the time was that this was his last-ever title run. However, Kobashi ended up getting cancer, which pretty much ended his career as a top guy, and with NOAH reeling they took a chance on some lighter-weight wrestlers. Naomichi Marufuji, who probably weighed around 200 pounds at the time, won the title from Akiyama on September 9, 2006. The idea was to create a new megastar, but it didn't quite work out that way. Misawa ended up beating him for the title less than two months later. At the time it seemed like an incredibly short-sighted move, almost WWE-like in the attitude that Marufuji didn't become a megastar immediately and thus they needed to go back to the old formula. But from Misawa's point of view, he'd gone from a star to a megastar in 30 minutes in 1990, so what was taking so long?
Regardless of why decisions were made, he was never able to create a new megastar in the same way that he was created himself. To varying degrees he tried and failed with Yoshinari Ogawa, Takeshi Rikio, Marufuji, Takashi Sugiura, Takeshi Morishima, all the way up to the very end when he was trying to give the rub to Shiozaki in his last match in the finals of the Tag League tournament against the current champions. NOAH matches were still great, and in fact of late they may still be presenting the best cards top-to-bottom of any promotion in the world. But there was no new Baba, Misawa, Kobashi, etc.-level superstar on the horizon. Earlier this year, it all came full circle when they lost, symbolically after 37 years, their slot on NTV. Besides the issue of losing television, long-term it was going to make things even tougher in the sense that the biggest stars they had were the stars that were created and pushed on the masses when the NTV show was at its peak. It's hard enough creating stars at 2 a.m. It's impossible when there is no network TV to speak of. They still had a show airing on cable TV, but according to one source in Japan the rights fees for network TV could run as high as 200 million yen annually, and the rights fees for cable TV were zero. Misawa had been scrambling to try to raise money in the wake of losing NTV, and that stress also likely played a part in his physical deterioration. In a way, it's almost symbolic that Misawa died the way he did, doing what he loved, when he did.
NTV newscaster Kazuo Tokumitsu, who is the Japanese equivalent to a Walter Cronkite in America, spent a very emotional 20 minutes covering the story on his Sunday morning show. He is an NTV board member and large shareholder, and some even believe he might have been a partial owner of NOAH (his son is also a B-level wrestling announcer, described as "very flat"). Tokumitsu, 68, initially gained his fame as an announcer for Rikidozan matches and was one-third of a super highly-rated comedy show also starring Akiko Wada and The Destroyer Dick Beyer on NTV in the '50s. He was also the lead announcer for All Japan from its debut in the '70s through the early '90s. He was the one guy who stood up for pro-wrestling when NTV was threatening to drop them off the station, but he lost the battle. He talked about Misawa's life and career and asked fans to please continue supporting the company. Rival network NHK covered the story, but apparently only briefly (we heard of one 60-second news bit, and another source living in Japan had seen nothing), which made many hardcore fans extremely upset. It was the top story Sunday on Yahoo Japan and Google Japan, and amazingly it even made the front page of the ESPN.com Web site. WWE (through John Laurinaitis), TNA, ROH, and numerous other promotions posted condolence pieces, and a number of wrestling promotions around the world, including AAA in Mexico, observed moments of silence or applause for him before their shows this weekend.
In a surreal coincidence, he died the same day the movie "The Wrestler" opened in Japan. The film, which concludes with Mickey Rourke's character Randy the Ram apparently dying in the ring, was heavily advertised on the NOAH cable show. Also ironic is the fact that Misawa may be the only wrestler I have ever heard of who did a spot after particularly intense matches where he would roll out of the ring and have the doctor in attendance administer chest compressions to add more drama to the situation.
At press time, in a move many US fans will probably find shocking, we were told Samurai TV will be airing the entire Hiroshima event on Wednesday, June 17th at 11 p.m. JST, including Misawa's final match and the aftermath. There is a great deal of speculation as to what the future of the company holds. They ran a show the next day which did huge walk-up business and all future events are apparently still on as scheduled with no major announcements having been made. It should be noted that when Baba died and Misawa made his move, many people thought All Japan was finished for sure. They still survive nearly a decade later, although some would classify that as a miracle. They did not, however, have the major financial problems that NOAH is currently facing.
With his death, the two biggest Japanese headliners of the '90s are gone. Most of Misawa's greatest matches took place at Nippon Budokan, basically the Japanese equivalent to Madison Square Garden. Misawa headlined more successful Budokan shows than anyone else in history, and on the New Japan side Shinya Hashimoto headlined nine different successful Tokyo Dome events. Hashimoto died on July 11, 2005, of a brain aneurysm, just shy of his 40th birthday.
His death is even more tragic when you consider an interview done Monday by Ryu Nakata, the ring announcer and office manager for NOAH. He told the press that just four days before he died Misawa was talking backstage with his wife Mayumi about how he planned on retiring by the end of the year to go into a business in another field. He acknowledged that his body was broken down and that it was time for him to step away, and that there were discussions about starting a Misawa Sayonara Tour to say goodbye. Nakata said that Misawa was never one to go anything but all out, and even all out these days wasn't much, and that he should have retired two years earlier but he kept going because both Kobashi and Jun Akiyama, considered the number-three star in the promotion internally, were battling their own chronic health problems.
Misawa was an intensely private person and there were friends of his who knew him for years that never even knew he had a wife and children. His family didn't want his cause of death to get out and are planning a private funeral for later this week. NOAH is planning a public one for later on down the road, and already there have been discussions by many wrestlers in all the major companies of coming together at some point for a major tribute show. Nippon TV's G+ cable channel is also planning a Misawa TV special to air soon.
"My heart goes out to his family," Hero concluded on his blog. "His students. His peers. His friends. His fans. His opponents tonight and his partner. It was a freak accident. No one is at fault. Rest in Peace Shacho."
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