Tuesday 8 May 2012

Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling: 5th May 1993

I have acquired (legally) some 1993 FMW shows from Tim up via WrestlingDVD.net. Top seller. Anyway, this is the first one, and it's the annual big outdoors May show for FMW at the Kawasaki Stadium. It's also freely available to watch online.

There's a whole load of clipped matches to open the tape. The only thing I'm disappointed not to see a full version of is the M-Pro six man pitting The Great Sasuke, Kendo and Battle Ranger against Super Delfin, Espanto 4 and Espanto 5. What's shown three minutes of some beautiful lucha and Kendo doing his awesome comedy spots with the rudos and a magnificent Sasuke quebrada. I need to find more Kendo from this time period.

The joshi tag title match (Kudo and Combat vs. Toyota and Yamada) was heavy on workrate and low on smarts and personality. I lost count of how many times momentum changed in the last fifteen minutes of what I would laughably refer to as the finishing stretch (the match was 22 minutes), and thinking back now, I can't really remember any specific moments that happened for about 90% of this. It's all blurring into one and I didn't care it. I did like Combat's lariat, and the Doomsday Device was pretty nasty (but even that wasn't allowed to be the finish). Oh, and Toyota's shrieking really grates after about seven seconds, and I don't know what to do about that except for sit here and engage in casual chauvinism.


The worked shoot between judo guy Gregory Veritchev and boxer Leon Spinks is this weird thing where I thought pretty much everything they did looked kind of lousy, but I found it oddly compelling. Partly, I though that what they started off doing was so unentertaining it built up this perverse expectation that it was going somewhere. Spinks just keeps punching Veritchev for the first few rounds and knocking him down and then he'd just beat the ten count. After about eight minutes of this, Veritchev gets close enough to manage a takedown, and from there on in he gains more and more advantages, manages a couple of throws and submissions, and finally wears down Spinks enough to get a tapout. I really got into this as a story of a grappler surviving and overcoming a striker. If the striking had actually looked better and they hadn't stretched out the stuff up front, this might have been pretty cool.

The main is the pretty famous exploding ring barbed wire match between Terry Funk and Atsushi Onita. I'm not sure, when watching something like this, where the line between wrestling match and performance art really is. The actual elements of a contest are not exactly front and centre - the core of this is about survival and endurance, while the actual finish is almost throwaway, and the biggest moment of drama (Onita attempting and failing to save Funk from the imminent ring explosion) comes two minutes after the bell has rung.

None of this to say that it doesn't work. It completely works. Onita, wrestling as the underdog, takes a bunch of barbed wire bumps and bleeds a lot while Funk yells "get that son-of-a-bitch up" at, well, no-one really. When the tables finally get turned and Funk hits the wire, it's hard to imagine a better time for his wobbly legged, glassy-eyed selling. Sidenote: his spacial awareness is amazing - there's about five times where he stumbles and teeters on the end of the wire, just to mess with the crowd, and that could easily go wrong. There's also a brutal flurry of punches that are really ugly and unrestrained, in a way that is completely appropriate for the setting. Post-match heroics, Onita breaking down on the mic, and Funk's interview where he thanks Onita for saving him but won't accept he's been bested (complete with sad Bambi eyes from Onita as Funk walks off) is all icing.

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