(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.
HANDWERK 