On paper, it sounded like an awesome spectacle: Atsushi Onita, the father of the Japanese death match…
…would wrestle the former undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world. And not only had he held the title, he’d won it from Muhammad Ali.
But the devil was in the details. There would be no exploding rings or barbed wire, and the boxer in question was Leon Spinks.
Though I’m no boxing expert…
…I’m fairly confident calling him a one-hit wonder:
Spinks lost his title back to Ali in his first title defense, then got KO’d by Larry Holmes, then spent the rest of his career going 50-50 against guys without Wikipedia pages.
His career reached its nadir in 1988 with a 33-second loss to Toni Morrison.
In the early 90s, Spinks wrestled a number of tours of Japan with FMW, competing in worked boxer vs. wrestler matches.
In May 1992, Leon Spinks would face Atsushi Onita, veteran of some of the wildest, most dangerous matches in wrestling history.
That month alone, Onita had competed in three street fights, a No-Ropes Barbed-Wire Death Match, and a No-Ropes Barbed-Wire Fire Tornado Death Match that nearly burned the Sheik alive.
A year earlier, Onita had battled Tarzan Goto in a No-Ropes Barbed-Wire Mesh Current Explosion Death Match. It was in this very type of match that he would now face Leon Spinks…
…minus the barbed wire, the electrical current, or the explosions. FMW billed it impressively as a Different Style No-Ropes Wire Mesh Death Match, and never had so many modifiers meant so little!
Leon Spinks, wearing boxing gloves, took on his bare-fisted challenger for the FMW Brass Knuckles title.
At the outset, Spinks knocked Onita down for a six-count…
…so Onita could retrieve the razor blade from his forehead bandage.
Then, the champ landed one jab to Onita, which he ludicrously sold by spinning around and flopping into the cage. Onita did the world’s most obvious blade job right on camera…
…followed immediately by numbers two and three.
Onita rose to his feet after a count of eight, then immediately got knocked down again by four more weak-ass punches, one of which actually landed.
This same sequence happened over and over again: Punch, fall, rest, repeat. And boy were some of these punches lame!
If you knew Spinks exclusively from his wrestling career, you’d wonder how the hell he ever beat Ali. Granted, you could say the same for his boxing career. But back in 1978, he could really throw some punches.
Fourteen years later, the same man who went fifteen rounds with Ali was hopelessly winded. And this was just five minutes in, with big long rests after every other punch!
At last, Onita fought back with a “clothesline”, smooshing Spinks into the smooth, forgiving steel.
Onita dropped Leon Spinks with some anemic back suplexes…
…then made the champion submit to an abdominal stretch.
The new champ grabbed the mic and told the crowd to screw the haters—there was no better wrestling than death match wrestling!
(As opposed to whatever the hell this match was)