Atsushi Onita/Lee Gak Soo vs. Ricky Fuji/Mr. Pogo, FMW Summer Passion 1990 Day Four (7/22/1990)

Since we last left FMW, Mr. Pogo has not only come in as the big new Onita opponent, but as a response to Onita burying the hatchet with Gak Soo and the other karate men, Tarzan Goto has turned on Atsushi Onita to join him, bringing little annoying ass Richard Fuji along for the ride.

Much of that will be important, and is, but I am not talking about this match because of any of those things.

This is not a great match.

Or at least, I don’t know if it is. It might be, experienced another way.

FMW held this show in a ring at sea, although not far from where people could see it. It’s a fascinating thing that puts other matches at such locales to shame because rather than any ramp connecting the ring to the land, everyone in every match arrives by boat, leaving them well and truly alone out there. Several people tumble in to the sea, and in the main event after this tag, there is a battle royal in which people are thrown into the sea for elimination (unfortunately not captured in this fan cam, although a reputable source says Onita and Goto would fight through the water and back onto shore before continuing the brawl). This match — as well as many others on the show — comes close and/or delivers moments like that, and is worth it for that alone.

Beyond that, in another beautiful piece of wrestling fan bullshit from decades and decades ago, there is no ring sound at all on this recording, nor any I can find of this. Instead, there is a full musical soundtrack overlay, ranging from orchestral adjacent to what feels like full on disco ass instrumentals for the main event. It’s beautiful stuff, and although the shaky shaky shaky camera work and lack of ring sound means you will never watch this to see a great match, I also cannot recommend it enough.

Godfrey Ho’s finest aquatic pro-wrestling based feature.

If you loved the WCW Monday Nitro Spring Breakout specials — and who didn’t? — or maybe just strange old silent films, then boy, do I have the barely comprehensible Japanese fan cam half-show for you.

Atsushi Onita vs. Lee Gak Soo, FMW Battle Crush Day Eight (5/19/1990)

This was a Different Style Fight.

You have see this film before.

Atsushi Onita, defending the honor of FMW and also professional wrestling as a whole against a karate fighter in a gi in a Different Style fight. Lots of Onita getting his ass kicked, big knockdowns, struggles to catch a leg only for the round to end, before Our Hero finally breaks through, leading to a very dramatic conclusion.

There are differences of course.

Some are purely cosmetic, like that Lee Gak Soo is in a red ki, symbolizing a major difference in that he is Korean. If the name on the back of the gi didn’t tip you off that it’s a difference, then the horribly nasty look that Onita throws to him that he never quite throws to his Japanese or North American opponents might.

Others are more scientific and quantifiable, like that Lee Gak Soo is a shorter man, and so the match is different in very obvious ways. Onita has a reach advantage, so he can break through the defense faster when he does come back, and Gak Soo also has to be closer to Onita to connect. At the same time, he’s also faster than the other karate fighters Onita’s put himself against, and so as Gak Soo needs to strike multiple time to mimic the power of maybe one Masashi Aoyagi kick, Onita also in turn gets rocked with flurries here in a way he wasn’t always against the others. The different physical dimensions also give this a different narrative dimension too, where Onita is sort of working from above as the bigger guy, and the struggle is less to survive, and more to find a way to break through Gak Soo’s frenzied and frantic attack.

Mostly though, it is this match again, and it works for the reasons this match worked before.

Kicking against cool guy power moves is a beautiful formula, and this is not a match with any visible interest in messing with the formula. Lee Gak Soo is maybe not Aoyagi as an antagonist, but has a certain charm to him along with the believability that his great kicks lend him. Onita’s comebacks are as energetic and triumphant as ever, even when the mountain he’s climbing isn’t quite so big, and above all, the spirit of the fight is an infectious one. The general framework of the match is a great one, and a fairly strict adherence to it produces a predictably great result.

Onita wins with two Fire Thunder Powerbombs in a row, before making peace with Gak Soo after the match and agreeing to team in the future.

While not exactly on the level of what came six or seven months before it and beyond, there are some things that just kind of innately work no matter what, and Onita overcoming a karate fighter is one of them. It’s just a little too hard not to like.

three boy

 

Masanobu Kurisu vs. Sambo Asako, FMW Battle Crush Day Eight (5/19/1990)

This was a street fight.

It is beautiful beautiful stuff.

Not to beat a dead horse, you can read about this in more detail in the piece about the best FMW match to date a month and a half prior to this, but nothing else looks like an FMW brawl. Kurisu has changed in his long sleeve flannel for a short sleeve tan shirt this time, and in the process, looks even more like a Mexican farmer and/or my father if he was Japanese (specifically it’s the mustache combined with this specific kind of short sleeve tan button-down, we are not always in charge of our own memories, it is what it is), while Asako is in a large gi. The camera work — mostly in the uncommonly deep for the time period Korakuen Hall brawl early on — also has that certain quality, lost in the chaos and practically fighting through the crowd to get a view of the fight again, and these things are so helpful.

“Helpful” is the word I use, specifically, because this already rules.

Like the other big Kurisu singles match in FMW to this point, it is kind of just an extended squash, but like that one, I do not care.

Mostly, that’s because Masanobu Kurisu is so singularly nasty about everything.

Nearly everything he does whips ass. What feel like 70% or more of what Kurisu does in this match is whipping or jabbing a steel chair into the initially bandaged up head and jaw of Sambo Asako, but when it’s all so mean spirited and forceful, it doesn’t matter all that much. The other stuff is, again, both disgustingly rude and impossible to look away from on a conceptual level. Kurisu brings back the cowboy boot assault from April, but gets more disrespectful with it this time now that he can afford to, not only whipping Asako across the face with it at one point, but being the first man I’ve ever seen to try and strangle another person with a cowboy boot. Even more effective in riding that line between violence and humiliation is how he repeatedly chokes Asako with his own red belt, not only in the finish, but at one point using it to trap him against the ringpost so he can whip steel chairs at him. On the whole, Kurisu once again manages to not only deliver some of the grossest and most mechanically perfect looking beatings ever, but to also do so while injecting a feeling of complete hatred — not just for Asako, but just like radiating off of him in general — into everything he does that few can match.

It’s not just him though!

Yes, absolutely, Sambo Asako is not a great wrestle. He is a fat guy who doesn’t do a lot all that well. The forearms he throws on his comeback are fairly average, the offense he’s shown elsewhere has not been all that impressive outside of the actual sambo throws that — based on his name — one imagines he has much more practice with than the other elements of his game. None of that matters. His role here is as a sacrifice, and as such, he performs admirably. He bleeds, he takes the beating, he’s so sympathetic, and although uneffective, there’s real feeling and life behind those comebacks, that makes what Kurisu does to him that much crueler.

Kurisu chokes the big fella out against the ropes with his own red karate belt, in the meanest and most interesting possible finish, forcing the referee to finally stop a match that probably ought to have been stopped a long long time ago. It’s perfect stuff, making something out of a weird big old dude, and yet again, enhancing the reputation of a guy who might actually be the most violent man in the world’s most violent promotion.

Another of the unheralded great squashes ever from someone who I’m fast beginning to consider one of the all-time masters of the genre.

Real fighting for real people.

***

Atsushi Onita vs. Wild Bull Man, FMW Battle Crush Day Three (5/14/1990)

This was, seemingly, some manner of a chain match for Onita’s FMW Brass Knuckles Heavyweight Title.

It rules.

Do not misinterpret this. I am not telling you this is great. I am not saying that, in the pantheon of the great brawls, or even just the great FMW matches, there is a place there for this match. You do not need to see this. It is under six minutes, Bull Man is another nothing guy brought in seemingly to fill up some cards by giving Onita an impressive looking (foreign) big guy to get past to delay burning the big stuff so early on, and it’s fairly spartan as hell.

All the same it is very fun.

Wild Bull Man and Atsushi Onita have the sort of match in which going through its virtues is also simply going through a list of things that happened, as everything that happened in it is inherently good at worst and unbelievably sick as hell at best.

The match is almost entirely just punches and chair and table throwing. Masanobu Kurisu and Tarzan Goto get themselves involved to not only continue their issue, but also for Kurisu to get himself in on the action earlier by fucking BELTING Onita with a chair to the head on the floor. Bull doesn’t offer much of anything really, not even having much more than a competent punch to speak of (relative to other guys in a similar position throughout history, this is not nothing, it is nice, but also whatever), but Onita works it around him. Huge bumps for the chain whips, the standard beautiful all time energetic comebacks, hurling entire rows of hairs at Wild Bull Man’s gigantic ass wild bull skull as hard as possible, and the like.

Following a flurry of DDTs and a rarer enzuigiri, Onita puts on a Scorpion Deathlock seemingly rather than flowing the Fire Thunder on a gimme, and with Goto getting his own chair to hold ornery ass Masanobu Kurisu at bay, the shit assed gigantic rube taps out. Cue the surprise if you want, but you were never here to find out who won.

Another FMW fan cam match that is both decidedly Not Great, but also that absolutely whips ass, and will be worth the time of any other completionists out there.

Masanobu Kurisu/The Shooter #1 vs. Tarzan Goto/Sambo Asako, FMW Battle Crush Day Three (5/14/1990)

FMW fan cams, at least to this point, are weird things.

They’re often shot from a little farther away than those from other promotions you find around the same time, or if not, they feel like they are because these are less packed buildings than in your NWA/AJPW/NJPW fan cams from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The style is also less conducive to translating to fancams in the way a bigger style often can be, focusing more — at least in a match like this — on the basics and cool little things. Knowing these guys, save the masked Shooter #1, I know the punches are probably all sick as hell, but all that really translates from far away is how hard Kurisu is hurling those hands and feet, and the few chair shots given out.

So, this unfortunately is not half the viewing experience that it likely would have been if seen on a professional tape, or even just an amateur one from the third or fourth row.

Fortunately, it is still a match with Masanobu Kurisu in it, and to a lesser extent (as he does less), also a match with Tarzan Goto in it.

Every time one of them does anything, it rules, and breaks through even from so far away. Sometimes, that’s less obvious and comes quieter, all through visual qualitty. Sometimes it’s Kurisu selling for big ass Sambo Asako, or the Tarzan Goto tags and big punches. Other times, it is the easiest and, literally, loudest thing in the world, like Kurisu and Goto wailing on the other guys with chairs, or Kurisu beating the absolute shit out of Asako. It isn’t exactly the Kurisu rookie beating, but it is loud in an environment when that is ultra impressive and visually fantastic too. The headbutts, the chops that feel like the most disrespectful chops of all time, and most of all, one of the meanest kicks ever right to the middle of Asako’s gigantic ass to break up a pin. It’s beautiful violence, yet again, that makes this all worth watching.

Sambo Asako eventually taps The Shooter out, but that feels secondary.

It’s hard to call it a successful build up tag, given that one is left dying to see a totally different match (Goto/Kurisu) than the one this is theoretically building up for the end of the tour (Kurisu/Asako), but it’s still a match full of some awesome awesome work from two of the more awesome wrestlers alive.

No match where Masanobu Kurisu kicks a giant man as hard as possible in the asshole can truly be written off, after all.

Atsushi Onita/Tarzan Goto vs. Masanobu Kurisu/Dragon Master, FMW Texas Street Fight (4/1/1990)

(photo credit to BAHU’s wonderful site)

This was, surprisingly, a Texas Street Fight.

It feels too easy to just call it the best FMW match ever, easily, up until the point in which it happened. This is a very young company, and a match as great as this ought to achieve something with the ease that this match does. It’s an accomplishment, given some of the truly great matches to come from FMW already, but it also doesn’t feel like enough.

Forget FMW for a moment.

This is one of the best matches of its kind ever. Relative to its ilk — explosions of realistic violence in professional wrestling — you can count on one hand the matches, up to this point, that have done it as good as this, and fewer that I might say did it better. Over thirty four years later and counting, that list has grown, in no small part because of matches like these in a place like this,

What ought to be mentioned first is that this match is a delight for the senses, or at least the two big ones tickled by watching a wrestling match at home, sight and sound (not to be confused with the movie list).

Visually, this thing is stunning.

Part of that is down to the looks on display. This is almost definitely the best ever collection of looks in a single pro wrestling street fight. Onita and Dragon Master more than know what’s required here and hit the classics with shirts and pants, but it’s the other half of the match that shines. Tarzan Goto shows up with one of the all-time classic real early 1990s looks ever, a tank top over a super tight t-shirt, both tucked into sweatpants, with knee pads over those two. It’s so over the top and weird, so much of a specific period in time, that it makes this feel grounded and real in a way the simple stuff cannot quite achieve due to how often that’s been copied. The same, in a different way, goes for cranky old bitch Masanobu Kurisu, showing up in the pre-requisite jeans, but also with cowboy boots and a green and white plaid shirt, all looking like he ought to be playing an aging bandit trying to settle down on a farm in a Western, or like someone would eventually be cast as him in a later season of NARCOS: MEXICO. Like with Goto, it is such a specific and real feeling look, although somewhat foreign on Kurisu, that it makes everything feel that much realer.

In the moments when the two combine, when Kurisu and Goto fight each other, it feels less like a wrestling match, or even just a wrestling fight, than matches like this have ever felt, looking and thus feeling like an actual fight that just so happened to wander its way into a wrestling ring nearby.

The match is also filmed in such an interesting and spectacular way.

No shot exists in what I would refer to as anything approaching cinematic, but that’s sort of what I mean. The match itself isn’t quite horror, but there’s a kind of found footage feeling to parts of this, as the camera seems almost lost among the chaos. It moves, trying to capture things like chairs being thrown or swung, but occasionally has these sudden steps to the side or back, or a drop down a few inches or feet, ducking out of the way of something flying, or trying suddenly to stop out of the way with someone runs into the frame holding a table or a chair. It is almost assuredly accidental, a consequence simply of being this close to a match this out of control, but the art is the art, and this match gains so much from not just how it looks — the outfits, the colors, the messiness — but in how that’s captured, to the extent that it’s almost definitely a worse match seen from farther away, let alone without the same sense of frantic movement.

It’s also an auditory delight.

Constantly, throughout the match’s near eleven minute runtime, there is something wild that you not only see, but that you can hear. Some things, like great chair shots or strikes thrown with a clear visual connection, will always have some value, but there’s a difference when you hear it, and in this match, you HEAR IT. The chairs have an extra audible impact, every chop is as loud as possible, and there’s a roar to Korakuen Hall at all times here that adds as much — if not more — than any individual sound of impact.

Having said all of that, this isn’t great because it looks so interesting, either on an individual level or up close and at large, or because of all of these loud crashes and vibrant thuds that make it impossible to ignore.

This is as great as it is because, more than most other wrestling matches ever, it’s real fucking violence.

For no longer than eleven minutes, three of the greatest brawlers of all time and a very very capable fourth in the Dragon Master go completely insane. What they’re doing is fairly simple, whipping chairs at each other, simple strikes like chops and punches and kicks, and basic offense. Far more important — and really the key lesson of this match — is how it’s all done. When Kurisu uses his cowboy boot, he gets as much out of it, both in physical impact and the feeling put into the shots, as possible. These chairs are not just swung, they are whipped forward or hurled with as much force as the man responsible can muster up, with enough hatred to power a city. They are not just simple shots either, they are these remarkably cruel and/or vengeful shots, in so many different places and moments, from Onita being chased into the crowd by an insane Dragon Master chair throwing parade and trying to get feet up to block them before returning fire, or each team slamming them down on heads outside, or in my favorite, Onita frantically diving in the way of those on Goto to cover him up in a scene with the sort of genuine feeling that, five years later, Kenta Kobashi could only ever dream of.

Every strike is thrown with more hate than, even knowing what these guys (especially Kurisu) are capable of, I could imagine.

Not many real pro wrestling moves happen in this, as much a byproduct of the runtime as it is the style. We’re talking double DDTs, double suplexes, a Piledriver or two, and the Onita signatures, in a match otherwise populated by these absolute mother fuckers of chops, punches, and some especially Kurisu’s gross short punts to downed opponents. The thing is though, that (a) the lack of wrestling moves in a brawl is a positive in my eyes, the sort of thing that makes it that much more realistic, & (b) each one of those moves has such an impact to it. Not just speaking physically, although yes absolutely, but in how it’s executed by the man giving the move. Each one of these moves has an unspoken “fuck you” added onto it, sometimes in all caps, or the feeling of an exclamation point in it.

In talking about all of the extremely visceral and sick stuff that happens in this match though, it’s easy to also miss that this is simply perfect old ass blood and guts meat and potatoes pro wrestling too.

Wild bad guys starting major fights, putting Our Heroes in real feeling jeopardy as each prospective comeback gets snuffed out with increasing force, and eventually getting every shot revisited upon them and then some. It’s not a marvel of construction and narrative heft or anything, but like all the truly truly great FMW matches to this point, there’s always a struggle. Not just in the movements themselves, but in the entire scope of the thing. The struggle of Onita and Goto to get back in it, the struggle to fight through different things and overcome this awesome physical onslaught, and finally, the struggle to end it in the few moments once they pull together, itself feeling like a desperate and earned reaction to how badly they got beaten up for the majority of the match. It’s the best of all the worlds FMW wants to show you, the easy and tried and true formula, spruced up not only with such phenomenal presentation, but an unmatched commitment and willing to take these ideas to lengths like these.

Onita and Goto finally pull it together in the end, gang up for the first time all match, and Onita manages to pull it out with the Fire Thunder Driver.

The good guys win, prevailing due to self sacrifice and heart in the face of unyielding violence from two of the least likeable wrestlers around. It’s elemental stuff. Not that everything has to be quite so simple, but a match this great with material this spartan shows, yet again, that it never really has to be more than this, so long as you put in the effort, the energy, and the overall feeling that all four of these guys do.

An immense chunk of violence, as real as it gets.

****

Atsushi Onita vs. Masanobu Kurisu, FMW Battle Brave in Korakuen (2/12/1990)

This was a Double Hell Barbed Wire Death Match.

For the less initiated, that means two sides of the ringside area have barbed wire boards there and the drama is about trying to push the opponent (or send them flying) into said wire, which — on try number one thirty seconds into the match — is already something that Korakuen Hall treats like, one has to imagine, a modern crowd would really only react to something like someone pulling a gun out and trying to shoot their opponent in the face (or maybe a 20 foot senton through a glass board).

Essentially, not only does Onita have to fight the meanest bitch in the entire world, but does so in the most dangerous match wrestling’s seen up to this point.

The match is, again, kind of a fascinating thing, looking at it with more modern eyes.

So much of the match revolves around the boards on the outside, but always in slight and spartan ways, much like the barbed wire around the ring in the last major FMW spectacle like this two months prior. Like that match, it works again because they get so much out of it. The struggle to not get shoved out of the ring or off the apron is immense, and feels realer than the struggle in, like, every Inferno Match and unlike many modern No Ropes Barbed Wire matches, some better than this overall, also never totally goes away. Onita is scarred up when the final struggle happens, he doesn’t have it in him to fight with as much animation as in the first minute of the fight, but the desperation is there, in a different form — first solemn, and then triumphant.

What I love most about this is how literally they take the title of the match.

It is not to say that, when outside, Onita is punished by a variety of demons, but that it is next to impossible to escape.

Both because of the wire itself, but also because, Manabu Kurisu is yet again an absolute mother fucker. Not in the same way as he was two months ago, as save for a few chops early on, this is not a body-on-body kind of physical punishment, but in terms of almost never letting Onita back in. It’s a beautiful mix of the scumminess of never letting him back to even really fight all that often and also the cheapness of, effectively, letting the barbed wire do the work — tearing up the back of Onita’s top at a point, and again cutting open his arm — when given half a chance to take it a little easier.

That’s not to say he doesn’t suffer too.

In moments when Onita tries to pull him out too — again seeming to take the title seriously and pulling Kurisu into Hell along with him — Kurisu eats a little bit of shit too, as in an odd way, the Steamboat Rule finds itself obeyed even here. Mostly though, as the main character of the story, this is about Onita suffering and eventually finding a way out of that.

Fittingly, the path forward is not dragging someone else into Hell alongside him, but fighting as hard as possible to escape from it himself.

Onita fights like never before to escape Hell, and it’s only then that he finally actually gets out, and — like always in early FMW — frantically and beautifully hurls bombs as soon as he has this one opening.

Kurisu surprisingly survives one Thunder Fire Powerbomb, but Onita hits a second one right after that for the win.

The match is not perfect. Given the dramatic talents of Onita and the immense abilities of Kurisu to deliver ultra physical punishment, one imagines there is perhaps a better “normal” match within them possible, but for one of these FMW spectacles, it again hits that lovely balance. Violent and dirty enough to scratch that certain itch, but dramatic enough to also feel like a real proper gargantuan struggle.

Yet again, something that is not blow away great on the surface and fairly minimalistic by modern standards, but that succeeds through strength of performance, and above all, total commitment to the idea.

***

Atsushi Onita/Tarzan Goto vs. Mitsuhiro Matsunaga/Jerry Blayman, FMW Battle Creation Day Six (12/10/1989)

This was a Barbed Wire Death Match.

Unlike many other barbed wire matches in (what would come to be known as) a deathmatch fed, the wire is in addition to the pre-existing set up. Strands are between the ring ropes, but strung around the ringposts. Although it was hard to tell in footage that old and that, as far as I remember, never gave a clear shot of how it was set up, it feels roughly the same as the Jerry Lawler barbed wire matches in Memphis, one of which (vs. Sweet Brown Sugar, 10/19/1981) featured a young Atsushi Onita working on the undercard.

Having seen at least one of those matches before, it’s not hard to see the influence, having far more in common with those matches than barbed wire matches yet to come in FMW’s futures.

That’s to say that, there isn’t ever really any one gigantic bump into the barbed wire, or this great building up of the drama to that. Like those matches, it’s a largely regular style brawl, with the barbed wire put on top of it to give it just a little extra sense of danger. The extent of its use is to occasionally push someone into to draw some blood on Goto, and in one instance, to give Onita a real gnarly cut on his right bicep, eventually covering most of that arm in blood within a minute or two, to really give this match some additional visual flair.

As a match, otherwise, it’s also something you’ve likely seen before in other recent FMW matches.

Goto and Onita punch and hurl themselves, while the karate fighters — now including a young Jerry Flynn in his own professional debut, already having something of that natural watchability — kick and punch the shit out of them. The wire adds something to it, and it’s certainly more of a brawl than the previous matches with the legitimate fight gut, but between Onita’s match against Matsunaga, the other great tag brawl, and the Onita/Aoyagi series, the energy and narrative and overall material is pretty similar to what’s come before.

However, again, that match is one of the best and most exciting things in history, so adding a little more drama and a lot more blood to it can only help.

Largely, it’s because for everything else, the performances are still so great.

Matsunaga looks even better than he did a week and change earlier, for one. It’s not a major leap forward, he did not become the best wrestler alive or even on the show in nine days, but he already seems so much more confident. He not only carries himself with a certain element of danger, but his kicks are both more accurate now and feel like they come with just that miniscule additional ounce of force, taking him from someone with promising signs into, here at least, already looking like an outright good wrestler. Although asked to do the least here — basically just be annoying and to get his ass kicked at the end — his partner occupies that previous role of being someone with clear positive signs, who gets the big ideas right enough to count. Goto is, similarly, not the most important part of his time, but he walks the line perfectly between ass kicking off of his own tag in the middle and then sympathy. Even if, like his role in the match, his big shots stand in the shadow of Onita’s, they’re still all real great looking, and have the spirit that helps this stay at a certain level when he has to be in the ring.

It’s Onita that makes this what it is though.

Perhaps only behind the second Aoyagi match, on FMW’s debut show, it’s my favorite Onita performance yet. Most of that comes down to selling, both of his gigantic flesh wound, but also in general. After being hit with a bunch of kicks all over for a count from the referee, Onita has one of the greatest versions of dead leg selling I’ve ever seen, even if it never goes anywhere (the right call, if someone ever did prolonged leg work in a barbed wire match, it would be an indictment of everyone involved), dragging himself up in a way that suggests pain far less than a momentary loss of feeling like when you sit on it for too long. Just as admirable, and even smaller, is some of the great on-the-apron selling ever, constantly hitting and shaking his arm out, while also being animated as hell about the match itself. The same level of mastery is there, yet again, with the comebacks. Onita’s huge fire back clothesline is one of the best regular spots in the entire world at this point, never feeling like it comes as it might in a normal wrestling match and always feeling both frantic and triumphant, feeling more like a block than it does any sort of made shot or field goal, and the final tag totally nails the other part of that, all fist-pumping triumph and hooting and hollering ass kicking.

Onita gets in at the end, trucks total rookie Blayman, and while Goto finally manages to keep Matsunaga back like neither had all match, Onita collapses Jerry with the Fire Thunder Powerbomb for the ten count TKO.

There are greater matches to come, but given what this is, the first real step out of the ordinary into something showier and with more flair — albeit just a little bit more — it’s a total success. While it’s not even the best Onita tag brawl of the past week, it manages to combine that feeling of importance with the earthier type of straightforward brawling, as well as taken the FMW vs. Karate feud to another level cool. It’s not quite the best of all worlds, but it feels like the “most” early FMW match so far, managing to combine the ideology at play in the first few shows, the heavier and grittier type of brawling, and the overall spectacle into one cohesive thing for the first time.

A major leap forward, just so happening to also contain a really great match.

***1/4

Masanobu Kurisu vs. Shoji Akiyoshi, FMW Battle Creation Day Six (12/10/1989)

Jesus Christ.

This is an easy match for someone to not think about. It is only the second ever match in the career of Shoji, who would go on to be known as Jado, and is fairly basic accordingly. On top of only being seven minutes, due to the trimming an undercard match gets on a one hour commercial tape, we only see a little under four minutes of a seven minute match, and as far as clipping goes, something that close to 50% is not ideal at all.

It’s just that what we do see whips so much ass that none of that matters.

With the few exceptions of basic rookie offense, which all looks good too, this is a Kurisu beating and it is one of the greatest beatings I’ve seen in some time. The kicks to the face are, of course, nasty as hell, but it’s the stomps perfectly down onto the face or the ear that really get me, along with the hardest chair shots thrown in FMW yet. If I was good at video editing, I would put together a highlight reel so you could hear just how horrifying some of these smacks and thuds are, but it would just be every single bit of Kurisu offense. Even the few things without an audible connection, like his punches or headbutts, look absolutely perfect.

The entire match is a highlight reel.

Following the fourth or fifth appallingly loud unprotected punt right to the face, Kurisu wins, in the absolute perfect ending to an assault like this, seemingly having enough and/or growing tired of it, and kicking the kid exactly hard enough to knock him out.

Genuinely, one of the best of its kind ever.

I could write more about it. Someone else likely could too or has already. Every single thing about it and in it is unbelievably awesome, but at some point, words are bullshit and although maddeningly short given the quality of every minute of it, this clipped version is short enough that there are no excuses, so just get to it already.

The best sounding match of the year.

fuck it, ***

Atsushi Onita/Dick Murdoch vs. Jos LeDuc/Masanobu Kurisu, FMW Battle Creation Day Three (12/4/1989)

(photo credit again to BAHU’s wonderful site.)

This was a Street Fight.

At the end of the tour on December 10th, Murdoch and LeDuc would be facing each other in a chain match, and when combined with Kurisu’s former judo experience (although having been NJPW Dojo trained a long long time before all this), on top of just being a real mean son of a bitch, he’s at least got a little bit in common with karate men Onita has an issue with, making for quite the handy little piece of promotional material.

Kindly brush all of those concepts and thoughts like “narrative utility” or “storytelling” out of the way for a second though.

Sometimes shit just rocks, and this shit absolutely just rocks.

This is nine and a half minutes, far more of a simple old-style brawl than something that looks like any of FMW’s higher concept attempts and successes in these early months, and it is one of the greatest examples I’ve seen recently that really drives home that old point about quality over quantity.

Everything that happens in this is so great.

Nobody here complicates things too much, either through design (that is not how Onita or Murdoch or Kurisu are, even if the latter is less in his obvious element) or necessity (Jos LeDuc is a gigantic man, both in height and width, and is also in his twenty-first year of wrestling and in his mid 40s, he is not taking more bumps in a match than there are fingers on a hand), and it makes the match so much better. The fanciest thing to really happen here, in terms of the elements that go into the match, is either the several minute run where Kurisu removes a cowboy boot to use as a weapon in the place of punches or the comeback, in which Onita introduces his own belt as a noose for the big guy. Even when something more normal and expected like a steel chair is introduced, they make better use of it than most, not only with Murdoch slowly crunching it around Kurisu’s head and shoving the top of the seat into his jaw and mouth, but also with Murdoch punching the chair repeatedly in that position in not only one but two (2) different spots I’d never quite seen before.

It is also full of some of the best punching and basic brawling you’ll find.

Blood helps too, of course. Onita getting it early on when he’s worked over with Jos’ heavily taped up right hand and with Kurisu’s spare cowboy boot, but then, in another great piece of clear shorthand for how the match is going, also when Murdoch painstakingly draws it out of Jos LeDuc during his hot tag with a series of those perfect overhand rights. It’s the perfect mixture, something that moves things along with a clear sign of the flow of the match and a marker that the things that are happening matter and have consequence, but also tons of stuff going on that just whips a ton of ass. It’s the perfect sort of violence, hitting in every possible direction at the same time, and satisfying on all levels at once.

LeDuc misses finally with his gigantic taped up right hand, hits Kurisu, and Murdoch rolls up Kurisu for the win.

The good guys win, but in the process, Onita mostly gets beaten up, and although Murdoch handled LeDuc like few could, he still didn’t quite manage to beat him. So, if you require some sort of forward movement or table setting for the end of the tour, there is so much that they still leave on the table for that final show, while also achieving so much here and now in this one specific match.

Onita, Murdoch, LeDuc, and Kurisu have a match that feels as big and dramatic as it does gutsy and gritty and literally down to Earth in its dirtiness. Equal parts this impossible to look away from guttural scrap that occasionally feels like something that broke out and simply found its way into a wrestling ring and also this larger than life gargantuan feeling struggle, the latter particularly in the moments when the boys are trying to reckon with the pure size of big ass Jos LeDuc. It’s not the greatest ever, it could be bigger and do more, but it still achieves so many wonderful things, and among them, provides one of those beautiful little visions of one of the many things I could mean when I say something like “pro wrestling ass pro wrestling”. It’s the real shit, the sort of thing that ought to always be possible and that will likely always work, just as much as it occasionally feels like a map forward, maybe one made a very very long time ago and with some now outdated labeling, but one that still gets the idea so completely correct that it’s worth looking at anyways.

Whether or not they ever really set out to get there, this is FMW’s first great build up tag, and also maybe the last great build up tag of the 1980s at the same time. If someone scripted that to be the case, you’d call it a little to on the nose, but as it really did just happen like that, and it’s a real neat little thing.

As with many other wonderful times where guys bleed and punch each other a lot, sometimes you have to chalk one up to the beauty of nature.

***1/2