Sports

Back when I lived in the UK, one of my co-workers told me about how, in his free time, he was a member of a local pro-wrestling team. I was completely shocked. Not the fact that a grown man was into wrestling – though in my mind it was just kids with Hulk Hogan dolls that liked wrestling – but more that, at just five-foot-four, he was shorter than my mum. Surely if someone like him could make it (and he has, he’s currently a minor star in WWE), then it all must be even faker than I had already thought it to be. I was disavowed of this opinion the first time that I saw a Japanese pro-wrestling deathmatch. What on Earth is a deathmatch? Hardcore wrestling, where disqualifications, count-outs, and other such protections are eschewed and weapons are not only permitted but encouraged, has lurked on the fringes of the wrestling circuit since at least the mid-20th century. But it was not until a Japanese organization, Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling (FMW), got involved in 1989 that hardcore truly lived up to its name. Centered around the organization’s founder and brightest star, Atsushi Onita, FMW became the home of the…