More Than Just Hardcore (30 page)

Onita had a menagerie of different attractions, a wide variety with something for everyone. Yes, he had exploding rings and barbed wire, but he didn’t have them every match, or even every night. He usually had one wild and crazy match per show, and it was a very well organized and well done show. It was no fly-by-night organization with nothing going for it but blood and guts, like some of the independent groups you see in the States today. He had no TV, but was a success in part because he booked it as “a big night.” It was a night of entertainment for those people, with all manner of attractions for the people who came to the shows.

FMW also had a very tight-knit group of guys working together. Onita ruled the whole thing with something of an iron hand, but was also inclusive. Onita had girls on the ring crew, and it was brought to his attention that one of the girls was dating one of the men who worked on the crew, a big no-no.

Onita called a companywide meeting, explained the situation, asked what the employees thought he should do, and then took a vote! The other employees voted to let both of them go, and they liked those kids, but everyone knew they broke the rules.

Evidently, his promotional philosophy worked, because you don’t put 41,000 and 50,000 people in Kawasaki Stadium without having a good game plan. Are you looking for a good booker? Call Onita. No one else in the world would have done what he did to get over, at that time.

And now he was the celebrity and millionaire he’d always wanted to be. Every time I would arrive in Japan and see him, the first thing he’d have to say to me was, “Terry, I am big star now.”

Nowadays it’s, “Terry, I am senator!”

Well, no shit you’re a senator! I knew it before he told me, just like I knew he was a big star. But that didn’t matter—he had to tell me. Every damn time.

To be honest, I wasn’t surprised when he got elected to the Japanese House of Councilors in 2001. When he got a direction, he had a do-or-die mentality. The guy came from absolutely nothing over there. He was a nobody and worked his way into becoming a wrestler, and then had his knee torn up so bad that he had it wired, and he can hardly walk on the damn thing. And he came back from that! He wanted to be a star, and he became a star on his own. He started out without a pot to piss in, and made himself a huge success. I’ll tip my hat to Atsushi Onita any day, even if he is probably embezzling the entire Japanese treasury, as you read these very words. Just kidding!

The only thing I ever really hated that Onita did was when he did an angle in late 1990, with Jose Gonzales, the man who stabbed Bruiser Brody to death. They staged an attack where Gonzales stabbed Onita to build for a match. The match never happened, though, because Brody had been a pretty beloved figure, and people in Japan were pretty pissed off about the whole idea. When I heard about it, I knew how it would be received. It turned out to be one of the few things he did that did not work. He had felt it would be really strong, and he couldn’t have been more wrong.

I was pretty pissed off, too. I just thought it was pretty shitty for him to even conceive that it would work, and if it had worked, he wouldn’t have abandoned it. I will never understand things like that. There are limitations to things you should do, even in wrestling, and exploiting something so tragic is on the list of things you don’t do. I don’t know how I could live with myself and look myself in the mirror if I’d tried something like that. Maybe he thought it would be OK since Brody was only a gaijin, an American wrestler.

I spent a week there for FMW in 1993. On my last night in, we did the exploding ring match with the ropes replaced by barbed wire with land mines strapped into it, at Kawasaki Stadium. I had no idea how powerful or dangerous these things were. I put my trust in the dynamite man’s hands. The barbed wire didn’t bother me, but the explosions did.

The first time Onita whipped me into one of the explosives, my first thought was how loud the thing was. Don’t ask me what it was that blew like that, but the percussion from it also pounded me pretty good.

Those were some brutal matches, and I saw Onita take a lot of stitches, after they were over. He had a lot from other matches, too. The amount of stitches he had done was just ridiculous. Hell, I’ve glued together cuts, or taped them shut, and just went on down the road. I’ve saved tons of money doing that.

The fans in FMW weren’t like the All Japan fans. In All Japan, when I’d been there, the fans would politely applaud and only got really excited on rare occasions, although the clapping became less as the crowd slowly got more Americanized, over the years. The FMW fans were wild. They were in love with Onita and the stuff he put on.

In 1995,1 went back to Kawasaki Stadium for another group, the IWA. The group, run by Kiyoshi Asano, did a “King of the Death Match” tournament. The official attendance was 28,757, but it sure seemed like more than that when we were out there.

By that time, Onita wasn’t working that many shows, and I was a free agent. IWA was willing to pay what I wanted, so I went.

Where Onita’s shows were filled with top attractions from top to bottom, the IWA was a different story. There was a whole lot of blood, and a lot of crazy, violent matches, from start to finish.

There were some weird deals going on, too. There was a doctor in Tokyo who was doing circumcisions and offering two free “King of the Death Match show tickets to anyone who came in and got one done on their kid, or themselves. All that stuff is paid for by the government, since Japan has socialized medicine, which meant the guy got paid by the government for every one he performed. I think he did pretty well. What a business! He probably didn’t know what to do with all that foreskin!

But every ticket he had was counted as one already sold by the promotion, which was similar to how the Yakuza, Japan’s version of the mob, used to contribute to a lot of sellouts for wrestling in Japan.

The Yakuza always had numerous ways of making money. They weren’t involved in the drug trade back when I went to Japan regularly for Baba, and I don’t know if they are now or not. Back then they made money from gambling—they ran every pachinko parlor in Japan. They also ran events, and the way they ran events was that they bought 2,000 tickets to a wrestling show in a 2,500-seat hall, almost “buying the show,” in effect. Then they went to every business in town and sold tickets. Not buying tickets was not an option.

They were very fair about it, though. They would go to a big business, making a lot of money, and say, “You buy 100 tickets.”

The next guy might be a mom-and-pop operation, in which case they’d say, “You buy two tickets.”

And when they were done selling their tickets, the show was officially declared a sellout, which it was. There might be a few hundred empty seats, but the tickets were all sold.

The deal with the King of the Death Match was, every match in the tournament was a different kind of bloody stipulation match. I worked the semifinals with Tiger Jeet Singh, a big foe of Inoki’s in the 1970s. Our match was a barbed wire/broken glass match. I knew Tiger well enough to know that even though I was going over, I would also be the one taking the bumps into the barbed wire, because he sure wasn’t going to. What else did I expect? Tiger was Tiger, and I knew and accepted that before the match even started. As long as I accepted that beforehand, by God, we’d have a match!

After defeating Tiger, I moved into the finals against my good friend, Cactus Jack. By that time the show had gone from afternoon to nightfall. It was the Forever Show, but the fans were still there and still elated. They had known it was going to be a long one. Hell, some of them brought their lunches!

The final match, billed as a “barbed wire explosion ladder match,” turned out not to be all it was cracked up to be, kind of like the electrified cage match from Halloween Havoc 1989.

The idea was, we’d have all this stuff in the ring, which would be surrounded by explosives. At the 10-minute mark in the match, they would all go off, causing an incredible explosion of the ring. Before the match, Cactus and I went to talk to Asano. We didn’t care about the explosive force, the dangers to our own bodies, or any of that. We just wanted to know, “Is this going to work?”

Asano said, “Oh, going to work very well. I spend $20,000 on this.”

We said, “OK, that’s good, then.”

We figured if he was spending that much on the damn thing, it would work.

They also had some explosive boards with barbed wire around them, and those weren’t any pleasure. Asano had huge amounts of barbed wire rolled up onto a board, and hitting those was just atrocious.

Finally, the countdown started as Cactus and I kept battling, and the crowd was in great expectation of this tremendous explosion that was going to take place.

I said to Cactus, “We’d better be ready for this one.”

Finally, the sirens went off, the lights were flashing, and Cactus and I figured we had them, as we both lay dead in the ring. And then the huge explosion went, “Poof.”

Poof! That’s all there was! Hell, compared to the bombs they used in FMW, these felt like a puff of fresh air. There was nothing to them! They were half-assed explosions, from a half-assed promotion.

I looked at Cactus and he looked over at me, and we didn’t know what to do. Finally, I stood up in the middle of the ring, put my hands out and said to the fans, “WHY?”

All those people had sat through all these matches for the big death match finish, and all they got was “poof.”

But my reaction showed them I was as disappointed as they were, and they accepted it as Cactus and I went on and continued the match. Eventually Cactus tangled me up in another exploding barbed-wire board and beat me, but we both left the ring with some nasty burns.

I still had a name in Japan, and I felt that Cactus beating me in the finals of that tournament would help him a great deal, and I wanted to help him. When we first went over there, Mick was not looked at in Japan as a top wrestler. The first time Mick had gone to Japan, it was a few years earlier, and he had gone in for Baba. Baba saw nothing in him and wasn’t willing to look at him as a potential success. That’s nothing against Mick—it’s just that Baba wasn’t willing to try to make successes out of people who had not proved themselves in the States, in his eyes. Until the American companies started signing guys to guaranteed contracts, Baba had always been able to get away with his approach, because he could pick from the cream of the crop. Everyone wanted to work Japan, because that was where the biggest money was, so Baba could pick and choose who he wanted. Those contracts for Americans changed everything in Japan, because the Japanese had to make their own boys now. I’m not so sure shoot wrestling would even exist over there today, much less be as popular as it is, if the Japanese groups still had access to the top Americans.

What happened to Mick in his first trip to Japan happened to a lot of guys. You have to prove yourself in Japan, and Baba almost always reserved his big pushes to Americans for the ones who had already made a name for themselves in the States. If an American who hadn’t made a name for himself in the States was coming into Japan, he was coming in to do jobs, and that was Mick’s role in his first tour.

By 1995 in the States, Mick had already become someone special, in WCW and the independents. But in Japan, he needed a bump, a push, and I felt winning the tournament would be a good push for him. I think it helped him.

We ended up going to the hospital together, and the next day we got on the same plane. Neither one of us looked too good, but it was great money, and I would do it again.

Now you might ask, “Why would you do these things to yourself?”

Well, we were with an independent promotion, and that meant very little coverage and no TV, so Cactus discovered what I had learned a long time ago, in Japan. They have a great many newspapers and magazines covering wrestling, and if someone was entangled in barbed wire, or had a stick up their ass, that guy was much more likely to find his picture in one of those periodicals than if he had a headlock on someone. We endured the crazy spots to steal coverage in the weeklies and dailies for what we were doing.

One thing that got us a fair amount of press was the “fire chair.” Cactus and I were wrestling on his first tour for IWA, when he lit a chair on fire, and proceeded to wear my ass out with it. Now we had discussed it, and he was only supposed to hit me once. He ended up hitting me about six or seven times, until I finally just tackled his fat ass and told him, “OK, Cactus, now that’s enough of that shit! That’s enough!”

But damned if the flaming chair didn’t make a few magazine covers! And it should have—it looked like Cactus was holding the goddamned Chicago fire over his head.

The other thing about it that struck me (if you’ll pardon the pun) was that when I walked by it on to my way to the ring for the match, I noticed the thing had been completely doused in kerosene. I could see it glistening, and I could smell it.

I thought, “You know, I was the one who was supposed to soak that thing, but I didn’t soak it that damn much! Is that damn Asano trying to kill us?”

But the more time passes, the more I think my buddy Cactus might have been the one to come behind me with an extra gallon of gas.

Cactus and I represented IWA on a show at the Tokyo Dome, April 2, 1995, where 13 promotions were represented, each providing one match. The match was Cactus and the Headhunters against me, Shoji Nakamaki and Leatherface, who had wrestled for Vince Jr. in the 1980s as Corporal Kirchner, in a barbed wire match with baseball bats.

Weekly Pro Wrestling, one of the wrestling magazines there, was the show sponsor and was involved in getting me to come in for the show. When I first heard the idea, I thought it was utterly absurd! Thirteen different offices were going to be able to work together to put on a show?

We had worked out a spot where the Headhunters and my partners would be outside the ring fighting, and I would do a moonsault, crashing onto them. It worked out beautifully, with the Headhunters catching me.