[2024-08-24-FMW-E] Atsushi Onita & Raijin Yaguchi vs Dory Funk Jr. & Osamu Nishimura

[Ma Stump Puller]

Batshit insane but deep down in my heart I knew that this was actually kinda heartwarming to see. Dory is at the end of days and Nishimura's got stage 4 cancer with the occasional brain seizure (god bless him, I really hope he's able to at least live a couple more years in relative comfort) and Onita's been fucked since the early 90s. This was always going to be built by the stipulation and sheer spectacle. The bar is so low that Yaguchi ends up being the MVP purely because he's the only guy here who can take bumps consistently without shattering into a million pieces, having to oversell at times for completely nothing since Dory can't even muster the ability to throw on a move or a uppercut. Nishimura's muscle memory is good enough that despite the cancer and chemo wrecking his body he's able to almost dance around Dory's immobile body to create the illusion of movement, doing pretty much all of the work for their side with some arm work (in a deathmatch??) and a couple of teases towards getting thrown into the barbed wire explosives.

The explosions were cool at least (open baseball arena, so they could actually go ham here with the stuff) and Onita's smoke and mirrors shtick means that his botox-riddled ogre face isn't as noticeable as it should be when there's green mist and barbed bats being flung around here. The heel work from him and Yaguchi is convincing enough that you can sympathise with the other side as they get literally blasted with barbed wire bats while Dory gets literally held to the side for most of the final push. SayamaFan's writing on the finish is basically my own thoughts; it was very cool to see Dory actually finish a move! You could tell that this match meant a lot for the people involved (even carny Onita you could tell was feeling it a little bit) and even if it was objectively a complete mess, barely a wrestling match, shouldn't probably had happened, looked fake as hell blah blah; the emotion was real, and that's something Terry would've always been happy with.