This was a Texas Bull Rope Death Match.
Although for how much they used it — yet again for a match on an FMW smaller show fan-captured recording (although this one holding up much better in terms of audio and video quality, desync, actually seeing the match) — it could have easily been a chain or a dog collar match, or nothing could have even existed for how rarely it was used, outside of the simple utility of binding them together.
None of that matters.
Goto has had a bunch of these hyper-dramatic big FMW matches by this point that blend his propensity for realistic feeling violence and high-level energy that makes everything he does cool as hell with a narrative utility, and the result has been some of the best and most memorable matches of the era. This is not one of those matches. There is no such narrative function, longer-term work either continued nor culminated, and there is very little in the way of character work.
Instead of all that, sometimes shit just rocks.
Handed a young but vaguely promising Mike Awesome in a six a half minute brawl, Goto creates maybe not quite a miracle, but something more than anyone else with Awesome so far, either in tags or singles. It’s not a complex matter though, despite what phrasing like that might suggest, so much as that Goto only lets Awesome do a few things, like his powerbombs and clotheslines, and fills the rest up with delightful nonsense. Hard shots of his own, cutting Mike up, and most of all, spending half of the match outside where both men hurl tables at each other’s face and smack each other in the head with chairs as hard as possible, all before coming back in to do a few more sick power moves.
The thrills are simple, but still so great and so satisfying.
Goto plants him with a real motherfucking pancake proto Neutralizer on his face and a bunch of the rope, and given that such a thing makes Goto’s splash off the top a lot more improbable than usual, that’s the end.
I am not going to tell anyone that they have to see this, but the joy of being an absolute psycho with projects like this is finding dumb little chunks of fun like this, and six minutes and change of Tarzan Goto and a young Mike Awesome hurling each other and pummeling each other with all types of objects makes a whole lot of things worthwhile.
hell yeah dude
HANDWERK 