A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [97]
Onita’s build was fairly dumpy and he wasn’t much of a wrestler, but he had unbelievable charisma and personality. After his matches the fans would storm the ringside area as he doused himself in water while grabbing the microphone. He would then cut a long promo, bursting into tears every time. He became famous for his crying and the fans cried along with him, because he proclaimed himself to be a warrior for the people, with his tears signifying his fighting spirit.
People bought his shtick hook, line, and sinker and chanted O-NI-TA! while Joan Jett’s version of “Wild Thing” blared throughout the arena. He ended up becoming a cultural phenomenon and a senator in the Japanese Diet. Not bad for a marginal wrestler with only one move.
Once the match started, I got stuck working mostly with Ueda the kickboxer. He didn’t seem like he had any interest in being there and didn’t seem to have any interest in pulling his punches and kicks either. He was basically kicking the shit out of me. But one of the rules of FMW was that there were no rules, so I thought, “Fuck this guy,” rolled to the floor, and got a chair. It was Shane Croft in Calgary Part 2—The Return.
When I brought the chair back in the ring, he made the mistake of turning his back on the pretty boy. When he turned around, I hit that sumbitch in the head as hard as I could. He dropped like a sack filled with more potatoes (stiff shots) than he’d hit me with earlier. He could’ve killed me in a real fight, but just like in my encounter with Bruiser Bedlam, my attitude was if I’m going down I’m taking someone with me.
Much like in Mexico, the Japanese were notorious for taking liberties with the foreigners. If you fired back by taking a few liberties of your own, you earned their respect and it was pure business after that. The rest of the match went fine and Onita ended up pinning Mark Starr. He hadn’t pinned one of Sudden Impact because he wanted to see what we had to offer. It must not have been enough because we didn’t work with him again for the rest of the tour.
I knew that pro wrestling (or Puro-Resu as they call it) was big in Japan, but I didn’t realize just how big until I got there. There were over a dozen different companies operating on an island the size of Montana. Clips of the matches ran nightly on TV, while results from the previous night’s matches were listed in the national newspapers next to the baseball scores.
There were two wrestling-heavy newspapers, Tokyo Sports and The Weekly Fight, as well as two glossy first-class magazines that featured some of the best sports photography I’d ever seen. They were called Weekly Gong and Weekly Pro Wrestling, which everyone called Baseball Magazine because it was published by a baseball magazine company. Got that?
There was something that made perfect sense about calling a wrestling magazine Baseball Magazine in Japan. After all, this was the home of television shows named Heavy Metal L-Game and Space Runaway Ideon and baseball teams called the Nippon Ham Fighters and the Hiroshima Carp. The majority of the Japanese media and high-school-educated people could speak just enough English to where it made just enough sense to not make sense. I call it Japanglish.
It was a thrill to see a full-page color spread in the magazines of Sudden Impact’s debut in Japan. The pictures were amazing action shots of the unique moves that we were doing and the text called us Canada’s Steiner Brothers. That was high praise, as the Steiners were two of the biggest gaijin (foreign) stars in Japan and a great team.
After an unimpressive debut in FMW (the Curse lives on), Sudden Impact worked mostly in the first half of the future shows. But that really wasn’t a surprise, as our technical style didn’t fit in with the barbed-wire, bombs, and bloodbaths mind-set of Onita. We stood out in FMW, but not necessarily in the best of ways.
Most of the shows had between 1,000 and 3,000 fans in attendance and even though they were the largest crowds I’d worked in front of, I was surprised at the fans