10 Coolest Wrestlers Of All Time
7. Atsushi Onita
Though nobody familiar with the Japanese language has a hope in hell of deducing what Atsushi Onita was on about, one need only see and hear the reactions to his promos to determine that they were incendiary.
He held his audience in the palm of his hand with the bewitching control of a cult leader. A leather jacket-sporting smoker with blood drenched on his wrist tape, Onita's look inspired Raven - and his claret-drenched garbage style influenced the influential ECW league. Judged under the six degrees of separation principle, Onita had a profound effect on the WWF's Attitude Era.
Onita's cult was Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling - an absolute sensation in early '90s Japan with its impossible, literally explosive violence and and tens of thousands of bloodthirsty punters. An entire generation of westerners shared that sentiment; Onita's No Ropes Barbed Wire Street Fight Death bouts became the stuff of tape-trader legend. FMW was a force for both good and bad; for every ECW, the knock-on effect became gradually more tacky.
Happily - at least for those with an aversion to the atrocity of one such league, Combat Zone Wrestling - Onita held them to ransom earlier this year, transferring his latter political acumen to create buzz for a match most CZW fans will never see.