Happy Saturday Everyone!
I decided to review some FMW on here because I don’t think I’ve done that before and this show happens to be up on YouTube so it was easy to find.
FMW was started up by Atsushi Onita in 1989 after Onita had been forced to retire from All Japan Pro Wrestling due to his injuries not allowing him to work the All Japan style anymore. Onita had previously worked in Memphis where he had first discovered the weapons based brawling style that the Memphis territory would use when it was time to settle the score in a feud.
Feeling that he could promote an entire company around that style, and thus disguise the fact that he physically wasn’t capable of working a more athletic technical based style anymore, Onita set up Frontier Martial-arts Wrestling, with himself as the top star.
The combination of wild action and Onita’s unmistakable charisma on top led to FMW becoming a viable option for a lot of wrestlers and fans during the 90’s, with the company enjoying steady success and big gates for Onita’s matches with the likes of Terry Funk and Genichiro Tenryu.
Onita eventually “retired” from wrestling in the mid-90’s, but the new stars such as Masato Tanaka and Hayabusa struggled to carry the load now Onita was gone and this inevitably led to Onita going back on his word and wrestling again, thus earning him the name “Mr. Liar”.
This show represented FMW’s first foray into the world of Pay Per View and a few ECW guys are on the card (ECW and FMW had a bit of business agreement going on at one stage which was why the likes of Mike Awesome and Masato Tanaka would sometimes show up in ECW around this time). The card looked interesting so I decided to give it a review.