10 Most Revolutionary Individuals In Wrestling History

Despite ECW’s well-known reputation for hardcore wrestling, Paul Heyman’s promotion wasn’t the first to revolutionize the product. That distinction belongs to Atsushi Onita, the founder and promoter of Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling (FMW).

Taking the world of puroresu in Japan and flipping it on its head, Onita’s FMW was, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the must-watch promotion for those who loved wacky, dangerous and ultra-violent wrestling. FMW was the first to popularize the ‘death-match’ concept, and was a very liberal user of barbed wire ring ropes and fire as a weapon. 

It was commonplace to see things such as explosives, ‘land mines’, rings completely on fire, and other such death-defying craziness on FMW.

That wasn’t it, though. On top of putting on insane death-matches on a regular basis, FMW had many women competing in these matches as well. Chief among these was Megumi Kudo, the creator of the legendary ‘Vertebreaker’ Piledriver. She would take part in barbed wire matches on a regular basis, and showed such unbelievable brutality that, allegedly, she and her fellow FMW women were legitimately feared by the AJW joshis.

So while ECW was the rebellious, grunge-inspired promotion that ran roughshod in the U.S. during the 1990s, it wasn’t the hardcore revolutionary some people claim it to be. It was simply a follower of a crazy style made popular in Japan.