FMW Texas Street Fight (4.1.90) review 

 

April 1, 1990 

 

We’re in Tokyo, Japan at Korakuen Hall. Although the name of the show would suggest Dallas, Houston or the Double Cross Ranch. The show is named after the texas street fight main event. Which just means there’s no tags in a tag match. Also, Jimmy del Ray, Sambo Asako faces another Korean wrestler, Megumi Kudo, midgets and Sweet Georgia Brown*! Let’s fucking go! 

 

*Sweet Georgia Brown** (and the midgets) may not have made the TV edit. 

 

**You may know Sweet Georgia Brown by another name; Jacqueline.  

 

 

Megumi Kudo & Reibun Amada vs. Miwa Sato & Keiko Iwami 

Kudo is a familiar name, I would assume, for you reading. Kudo was originally an All Japan Women’s wrestler as a teen but didn’t make the grade and became a kindergarten teacher. One can only assume she got fed up with screaming brats and wanted to kick some ass. She comes in, along with Amada, sporting pro-USA gear.  

Poor Miwa Sato gets beaten up, as always. The crowd boo and Sato is already a highly sympathetic figure. It’s pretty easy to get heat on her. Her partner is named as “Keiko Iwami” on YouTube but I’m pretty sure it isn’t. Cagematch has it as Kumiko Matsuda.  

 

The match is decent with Kudo & Amada largely controlling it. USA, USA, USA! The big comeback rallies from Matsuda and especially Sato get reactions. Kudo finishes with a high crossbody off Amada’s shoulders and Matsuda eats the fall. This was solid. Kudo is the stand out here, as you’d expect, but I can see why they paired her with Amada. **½ 

 

Kim Hyun Hwan vs. Fumihiro Asako 

Hwan is Lee Gak Soo’s trainee. He literally debuted last month.  

Asako had been feuding with Lee Gak Soo and coming off on the shitty end of their encounters. Hwan follows his master’s technique of ‘doing kicks’ and ‘making Bruce Lee sound effects’. Another insufferable Korean prick, how wonderful. This is under a rounds system and Kim wears a gi to start with but then decides to go bare chested for R2. He is an enormous gaping arsehole. Asako catches a few of his big kicks. AAARGH. More kicks, including a really stiff one to the face. AAARGH. Kim starts doing the Ali shuffle. Could he be any more of a heel? Asako throws him to start R3 and tries to remove the fucker’s arm. He doesn’t succeed but Hwan taps out like the little bitch he is.  

 

This had early MMA vibes about it. The mismatched sizes especially. Asako is way heavier, probably 100lbs heavier. The styles are also completely different with Asako’s sambo battling Hwan’s kicky-kicky nonsense. The good guy won in the end, but I like the idea of Hwan having those ranged attacks against Asako’s close up power. In the end Hwan just got too cocky and got too close. A great extension of the Asako-Lee Gak Soo series. Asako being man enough to get his ass kicked all match before winning. A true champion. ***¼ 

 

AWA Light Heavyweight Championship 

Jimmy Backlund (c) vs. Lee Gak Soo 

Dirtbag Jimmy del Ray comes in as champion, against FMW discovery (and Bruce Lee enthusiast) Lee Gak Soo.  

The crowd is actually chanting “USA” here. There’s a healthy rivalry between Japan and Korea. Like Asako in the last match, Jimmy is forced to absorb a lot of kicks. The crowd is less sympathetic to his pain though, which means the match is flatter. Jimmy gets sick of the chop socky behaviour and knees Soo in the ballsack.  

 

The ‘different style fight’ rules heavily favour Lee Gak Soo, who can get a KO and win. Jimmy seems less capable in those aspects of wrestling. He can take Lee down but then what? Jimmy spends most of the match just taking kicks and looking useless. Every time he gets Lee grounded; it looks like he’s going for a pin. He doesn’t do anything that looks remotely painful. He just lies on top of him.  

 

I’ve seen a lot of Jimmy del Ray matches so I know he can work but this style does not suit him at all. Lee eventually wins by 10 count after landing another in a string of kicks. This was dreadful. A complete mismatch of styles, which unlike the last match, didn’t work at all. Jimmy just didn’t know what to do here. Lee Gak Soo and all his kicky stuff felt like he was in a different match. ASS. 

 

Texas Death Match  

Atsushi Onita & Tarzan Goto vs. Masanobu Kurisu & Dragon Master 

Dragon Master is Kendo Nagasaki. This begins as carnage. The ringside chairs are all wiped out. They don’t do the ‘walk and brawl’ either. It feels like a real fight that happens to have spilled into the stands.  

A few minutes in we get a shot of Onita, bloodied, just walking around ringside looking dazed. It’s like a war zone. The rules of a Texas Death Match are that you have to score a pinfall AND a subsequent 10-count to win. Before we get the first fall all four guys are bleeding.  

As the camera follows the action, from ringside, it’s like walking through a one-shot take in a war movie. Tables and chairs flying around. The action switching from one guy to another. Onita tries to block a chair shot by putting his legs up so Dragon Master just chair shots him in the leg. Powerbomb puts Kurisu down and he can’t answer the count. Onita yells “fuck you too” while he’s executing the move. Just sensational.  

 

You talk about your cinematic wrestling, but this was cinematic wrestling. The lack of hardcam especially. Even on TV, it feels like we’re in the action. In the thick of it. The only real criticism is that the creativity was done by the 10:00 mark and they went home right after that. It’s just ten minutes of guys hitting each other with chairs and bleeding. Which, in certain promotions and with certain wrestlers, would be shit. I mean, this is shit, basically. There’s nothing to it but Onita! There’s something about him. He just drags me into it, gets me emotionally invested. *** 

 

The 411: 

FMW’s chaotic in-ring style was ahead of its time in 1990. A lot of what you see here would become staples of hardcore/extreme promotions during the decade ahead. Did they go too far, too fast? I much preferred the matches Onita was having where they pretended to wrestle for a bit before the carnage kicked in. A lot of this is just dudes hitting each other with plunder. Whereas Onita’s bitchin’ 1989 stuff usually started out like an MMA style match and devolved into violence. Now we’re starting with chair shots, doing more chair shots and then more chair shots. You can see where it’s going, from a modern perspective, and that definitely takes the edge off my excitement.  

 

It’ll be a while before people figure out how to combine the violence and pro-wrestling together too. Despite this, FMW is refreshing compared to the slovenly North American mainstream promotions, who are increasingly going ‘child friendly’. The 1990s would be a divide between kid friendly mainstream and uber-violent Indies before everything changed in the second half of the decade.