More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  I thought it was a tremendous maneuver on Pillman’s part! He knew where he was going from the start.

  Another old friend, my fellow WCW booking committee member Jim Cornette, called me in 1993 to work a couple of shows for his Smoky Mountain Wrestling group. Cornette started the company after leaving WCW in 1990, and I think he guilted me into working for him by harping on the way I disrobed him 10 years earlier!

  So he called me in to work with Bob Armstrong.

  Cornette ran that company pretty well, especially for a guy who’d never been the boss before. The thing was, that company was a one-man show, and Jim Cornette was that one man. And he loved every minute of it, because he was everything to that company. He wrote the checks, he booked the matches, he set up the promos, he produced the TV—he was a one-man show. But that was the way Cornette liked it.

  Cornette was also very creative. I think if WCW in 1989 had said, “OK, Jim Cornette, you’re in charge, so bring in your booking committee, and we’ll run this thing your way,” they would have been a lot more successful than they were by having him as a member of the committee, but with no real power. He certainly could have put in people he could have controlled, and would have had things going in the right direction, because Jim Cornette had much more knowledge of the business than Jim Herd did. Of course, that would never have happened with TBS running things.

  A couple of years after I was there, Cornette had to fold up Smoky Mountain Wrestling. As great a job as he did, Cornette couldn’t keep that thing alive to see its fourth birthday. I hate to say it, but I wasn’t surprised. Hell, at that point in 1995, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see anyone go under in the wrestling business, and I still wouldn’t be.

  One, the TV costs are huge. If you can’t get someone to pay for it, you’re in trouble, and there’s not many people with that kind of money. If you’re not lucky enough to be born into a very wealthy family and don’t have someone backing you with an extreme amount of money, you are going to fold up.

  Two, you have to pick your location. As I said before, a big part of the reason Vince was successful when he took the WWF nationwide was because of his location—he was based in New York City, media capital of the world, and his Northeastern base had tremendous populations from which to draw. When Cornette started up Smoky Mountain, he based it in Knoxville, Tennessee, and ran little towns in Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. Cornette went to his home area, the place he loved, not to the place he would have picked if he’d been thinking strictly as a promoter. His problem was, that area didn’t have the population to make him a huge success, and he knew it when he went into the thing. He knew he was running a risk of seeing the demise of his promotion, due to the population in the area. It just wasn’t enough people to support that company on a weekly basis in the 1990s.

  To this day, Jim Cornette lives, breathes, eats, sleeps and walks wrestling. And he is very satisfied, being in his own world. His world revolves around professional wrestling, and Jim Cornette doesn’t care if that world is in New York City or Yackumoff, Tennessee. In fact, I think he’d prefer Yackumoff. But it doesn’t matter much, as long as Cornette gets to be creative in pro wrestling, something he’s very, very good at, and have control over it. Cornette is one of the few in our business who truly doesn’t give a shit about the money. He loves to create, and he loves to call the shots. The only way Cornette doesn’t function well is if he’s in a creative position, but can’t have control. If he’s subordinate, he has a tough time, because he’s strongly opinionated. You’re not too likely to convince Jim Cornette that your way of doing something is better than his.

  CHAPTER 23

  Getting Extreme in Japan

  Atsushi Onita ended up being a very influential figure in Japanese wrestling, and it was a very unexpected event that started him on his way. In 1992 Onita took a few castoffs from the major two companies in that country and formed FMW, Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling.

  I had known him for nearly 20 years at that point. In the 1970s, Onita was full of energy, just a screaming banshee of a kid. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew he wanted to be a millionaire and he wanted to be a big star.

  FMW was based around main events featuring Onita in pretty innovative, and pretty brutal, stipulation matches. Some involved electric fencing, or explosives. Most involved barbed wire. Hell, the referees in those matches looked like goddamned beekeepers with all the stuff they wore to protect themselves. You would have thought we were Martians, infecting the world with radiation, instead of wrestlers.

  A lot of that wild style came from Onita being exposed to barbed wire matches and other crazy stipulations in Memphis, Puerto Rico and some of the other territories he was around, and some of it, I think, came from some of the bloody matches he saw with people such as myself and Abdullah the Butcher when Onita was working for All Japan. But Onita took all of it to another level, partly out of necessity. He knew when he was starting up that he wasn’t going to be able to get a lot of top, big-name talent, because a lot of those names had allegiances with Baba or Inoki.

  I got involved in FMW after Onita came out to the ranch and talked to me about it. He didn’t have to ask for directions. He had lived here for a month or two, more than a decade earlier.

  In 1980 Masa Fuchi and Onita had wrestled in the Dominican Republic for a guy named Jack Veneno. Veneno was also the champion, and Onita was brought in to wrestle him. The office there wanted Onita to drop two straight falls, but Onita refused to do it and stiffed Veneno in the ring. When they got back to the dressing room, one of the promoters said they wanted to talk to Fuchi and Onita in the office.

  When Onita went through the door, about four Dominican wrestlers went in after him, and they shut the door behind them, locking Fuchi out of the office. They beat on Onita until they got tired of beating on him.

  He was hurting when he called me, and he and Fuchi came here. And they stayed in Amarillo for a while in 1981. They didn’t have a pot to pee in or a dollar to their names. They stayed until Onita was feeling well, and I got them booked for one shot in San Antonio, and then for a stint in Tennessee.

  While they were staying with my family and me, Fuchi insisted on cooking, as his way of making a contribution to the household. Fuchi would go into the kitchen and drive my wife crazy! He’d get the biggest damn pot he could find, three or four gallons, and he’d fill it up with rice. He cooked pounds and pounds and pounds of rice, with all kinds of other things. It would take him an hour and a half, and he tore up the kitchen every time. He made Japanese soup with rice and all kind of ungodly things, which we had to have every night for supper. But he was taking care of us, in his own way.

  My daughter Brandee became the biggest fan Onita ever had in the States during this time. She was hospitalized with the measles, and Onita had to go see her at the hospital, so Vicki took him. He asked her to stop at the grocery store first, though. He came out of the store with, literally, a grocery cart full of candy and brought it to her in the hospital. Of course, Brandee felt better after seeing that, and Onita got over with her like a million bucks.

  I hunted around and bought Fuchi and Onita an old Chrysler I had found advertised for $400. As you can imagine, it wasn’t a luxury vehicle, but it was a usable car, and they drove it for about a year and a half, until it was spent. Fuchi had an international driver’s license and Onita didn’t, but Fuchi was a horrible driver, so I took Fuchi’s license and a picture of Onita, and used a copy machine to make Onita an international driver’s license. He used it successfully for about a year and a half in this country, showed it to the police when he was pulled over and everything.

  He came back several times in the 1980s, like when he tore up his knee in Japan, and Baba didn’t want him anymore. Ironically, the match where he got hurt was supposed to be the start of his big push. After he won, he did this huge leap over the ropes and out of the ring, like he had done every night. On this night, though, someone had spilled some water on the f
loor pads that surrounded the ring. He slipped on the water and cracked his knee.

  It tore ligaments, blew out cartilage and truly shattered his kneecap. They wired it back together at the hospital. I saw an x-ray of his kneecap, and it looked like a spider’s web. He bawled like a baby that night, but I didn’t realize the true reason for it, at first. He was crying because he knew his injury was so severe that he would not be productive, and Baba would let him go.

  And Baba did let him go. Onita felt like the true love of his life, wrestling, was gone. What no one knew was, that injury would turn out to be a major turning point in Japanese wrestling history, because of what Onita would end up doing.

  That leap, that moment of catastrophe for Onita, was the beginning of the end of Baba’s dynasty in Japan. It was a moment that changed the course of Japanese wrestling history every bit as much as Vince deciding to go national changed wrestling in the States, because in that moment, Onita knew that he was finished with Baba, because of that injury. That knowledge led to him looking for ways to remain involved in wrestling, which ultimately led to the formation of FMW And FMW was tremendously influential, not only in terms of the hardcore ring style it made popular, but because it was the first small group to really succeed on the major level. Once FMW took off, it showed others that smaller promotions could thrive, and that spelled the end of the total dominance that Baba and Inoki’s groups had.

  Onita stayed at my house, and he decided he wanted to import beef jerky, but that didn’t work out. Then he tried to sell me on going into business with him selling portable telephones.

  I said, “What the hell is this? No one’s going to use these things over here! You’re out of your mind! That’ll never work!”

  I guess I should have listened to the son of a bitch—hell, he had cell phones before anyone did!

  Another time, he had one of my shotguns and told me he wanted to go hunting. Well, I didn’t give him any kind of safety lesson, or anything. What I did was, I took him out on my property, far enough that he wouldn’t hit the house, and just let him go. He was shooting up in the air at ducks flying around and whatever else caught his eye. I just went back in the house and wouldn’t let my wife or daughters outside until Onita ran out of shells. He was out there for about 30 minutes and came in. He hadn’t hit a damn thing, but he was very thrilled with getting to shoot a gun.

  The times I went to Japan and he was there as a young wrestler, he’d always try to carry my bags. I always told him, “Don’t you carry my bags. Just leave them there. I can carry my own damn bags.”

  Now, he was running his own company, and I was working for him!

  He told me about the company and how it was doing, and then he told me he’d pay me $20,000 to work one match! That was really all it took for me, but I told Onita there was a call I needed to make first.

  I called Baba, even though I hadn’t worked for him in quite a while. I said, “Baba, I am going in for Onita, if you’ll allow me to.”

  I knew he would, but making that call was a part of showing him respect, which was just how business was done in Japan, graciously and properly. I was always able to stay on good terms with Baba, because I busted my ass for him all those years. I never screwed him around, and I hope he never thought I screwed him around. I never jumped to Inoki.

  Because of what I’d read about FMW, I was expecting a crazy, violent show, but Onita really put on quite an amazing show. FMW was not just bloody, hardcore matches. Because of the limits he had in terms of getting top male wrestlers, Onita had exceptional women wrestlers, like Magumi Kudo and Combat Toyoda. Those girls weren’t just good—they were phenomenal! They were the best female wrestlers I’d ever seen.

  He also had high fliers from Mexico, and his own high flier, Hayabusa. He had The Sheik at 65 years old, every bit as frightening as he’d ever been. He had great workers who could do some serious wrestling. He would have boxer versus kickboxer matches, even bringing in former boxing champion Leon Spinks, at one point. The mixing of wrestling and martial arts was done out of necessity, but it was a formula that proved to be successful and continues to be successful to this day in other companies.

  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 firs
t 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!