Again, it’s great.
Some matchups feel like they cannot fail, and through two and a half matches (one a three minute tournament show outing in early 1990) on tape, Onita and Tarzan Goto feel like one of those. Even with a smaller sample size than many other pairings one might say those things about, there is something about it that feels correct, like pieces in the exact right place. A physical chemistry and ideological cohesion that’s hard to find just anywhere. Although much lower stakes — a regular (presumably) no disqualification style FMW match rather than a big headline-grabbing gimmick match like six months prior — it is, once more, truly phenomenal, and feels like the best thing that FMW has in its back pocket at this point.
Not only because the two combine to have a great brawl, one even better than the last and that’s among the best FMW work ever up until this point, but because more than any other combination, Onita vs. Goto also illustrates what FMW is more clearly than any other matchup can.
Part of that is, again, the enormity with which they not only wrestle, but move.
Everything that Onita and Goto do in this match feels gigantic. There’s little waste, which helps in that classic Big Fight sort of a way, on top of how every move comes with such a powerful movement and force behind it. Deliver everything like it’s the most vital and important thing you could be doing in that specific moment, and it’ll all feel like that, and Goto and especially Onita are masters of this. Even the stare down before the match begins, at least knowing these wrestlers and characters, feels as tense and significant and dramatic as any one wrestling move can. Goto, immovable from the center of the ring with his arms crossed and a hard stare, while Onita puts his hands on his hips approaching him, full of this “alright, come on” energy, maybe not illustrating the full point (they are not enemies to the level they were in August 1990, but tension still exists, largely from Goto, who has not just stopped being a mean mother fucker overnight) to any new viewers, but also even more clearly establishing the overall tone of the thing before it ever starts.
The other part is that it just rocks.
Alongside how all of it feels vital and important, small parts of a larger struggle but each with what feels like a significant impact on said struggle, everything they do also rules on a pure lizard-brained level. It’s both hands working together perfectly, as yes, the action is efficient and meaningful, but it’s also executed super well and almost all rules. The match follows that ultra-tense stare down with the other half of this, Onita immediately drawing blood with thirty seconds of gross headbuttss and a dive, perfectly illustrating the appeal. In between the big emotions, the match offers up a million wonderful thrills like people having tables hurled into their faces, a piledriver through a table, nasty chair swings, some of the best punches I’ve seen in recent memory from Goto, and yet another perfect Onita babyface comeback. It’s so much god damned fun, missing any one gigantic big set piece or huge gimmick moment, but so nasty and mean and easy feeling at the same time that the larger whole overcomes that.
That’s not to say it’s perfect.
Beyond just that (a) almost nothing ever is, & (b) that FMW of this era and matches like this in general would lose some real charm if every move was executed perfectly, there’s a minute or two of Goto working Onita’s leg that never matters at all once it’s over, and they repeat the Thunder Fire Powerbomb a whole lot at the end (although the final one feels like a result of a wonky count by the referee on the one before it), even considering that the general idea is that Goto isn’t quite good enough to beat Onita but might be harder to keep down for him than anyone else in FMW. The match very much feels like the riff session version of the match, not so much practice because practice is not like this, but relative to matches with big props and explosions, something both more bare bones and a lot looser, which while allowing for a lot of the match’s wonderful free-flowing nature, also allowed for some smaller missteps.
I won’t tell you these things don’t matter, because they do.
They’re just the reason this match is “only” really great, and not something even better.
Weigh these smaller problems and minor (although very real) annoyances against the large pile of awesome stuff on the other end, the sort of stuff that makes wrestling fun and rewarding to watch, and one side of that scale tips all the way over to whatever purpose you put it on in the first place. The match is too good in too correct of a way to deny and works in the way that so much of this stuff does, because it gets that, in whatever way they can force that connection, what matters the most is the feeling.
Be it through the purely physical, the glorious violence on display, or the larger sweeping dramatic movements spread out around all of those violent acts, Onita and Goto make sure you feel it at all times. It’s the essence of not only why this is a great match, but why FMW itself is so great. It’s a match that, although not the best one to do this, perfectly lays out all that this is and ought to be.
Equal parts main event and reaffirmation of the original mission statement.
HANDWERK 