What in the actual fuck? How did I not know this existed?! I don't have a clue how this match even came to be, but all four are dressed for warfare and let me tell you, Dick Murdoch and Masa Kurisu punching each other in the face is everything I could've dreamed of. Kurisu is dressed in cowboy boots and a flannel shirt like he's going to a west Texas karaoke bar. Murdoch is in jeans and already shirtless so presumably he's just come from another bar fight somewhere. Jos LeDuc is wearing the tightest t-shirt he could find, it barely covers his torso and after ten seconds of walking around he looks like what I would describe as a squeezed toothpaste tube. Kurisu is handed a bouquet of flowers at the intros and he throws them into the crowd, so Murdoch throws his own bouquet at Kurisu and it all KICKS OFF. It's a seedy alley fight front to back, which is really what you want. Onita bleeds and probably weeps. LeDuc worked Puerto Rico at least once in his life so he knows how to convincingly bite someone in their bloody forehead. Murdoch grabs Kurisu by his remaining hair, holds his head in place, cocks a fist and punches the wee gremlin straight in the nose. Kurisu and LeDuc wallop Onita half a dozen times with a cowboy boot then Murdoch comes in like a bull in a china shop and Onita literally folds a chair over Kurisu's head! Murdoch punching and kicking the chair while it's still welded to Kurisu's face was amazing. And I would say it's only fitting that a match like this ends in a picture perfect inside cradle.
Atsushi Onita & Tarzan Goto v Mitsuhiro Matsunaga & Jerry Blayman (FMW, 12/10/89)
This one I'd heard about from a couple people and in some ways it's even more surreal than the previous match. Jerry Blayman is Jerry Flynn and he must've been wrestling for about five minutes at this point. Perhaps this was the match that turned him onto the shoot style trail. Getting headbutted in the face by Tarzan Goto is probably a much less fun way to live your day-to-day life than being put in worked armbars so who can really blame him all things considered? The ring is surrounded by barbed wire and I can't imagine too many barbed wire ring matches had happened before this, so there's a sense of horror any time someone so much as presses against it. Flynn and Matsunaga are kitted out in full gis and they just kick the life out of Onita and Goto the whole match, which is pretty much exactly what you want from a pair of reckless karatekas in a setting like this. At one point the referee even took a kidney shot for trying to stop Matsunaga from repeatedly spin kicking Goto as he was hanging through the ropes tangled in barbed wire. Onita ends up with a huge gash in his arm after a spill into the wire and spends the rest of the match intermittently staring at it in shock. People are going absolutely ballistic for all of this as well, especially during the heat segments. Tarzan Goto as dishevelled blood-soaked wrecking ball is spectacular and I about lost it when he grabbed Flynn by the gi and repeatedly yanked him into headbutts to the face. Flynn then takes a backdrop suplex and a sick high-angle powerbomb like a karateka who's been doing pro wrestling for five minutes. What a madness.
No comments:
Post a Comment