10 Wrestlers Who Had To Destroy Themselves To Get Over
2. Atsushi Onita
Broadly, to get over in Japan, being an in-ring wizard is imperative.
The biggest stars of the modern era - Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Keiji Mutoh, Hiroshi Tanahashi, Kazuchika Okada - were all geniuses capable of arresting crowds in 30-40 minute epics using only their arsenals and psychology to ascend to the realm of legends.
Atsushi Onita, the stadium-drawing sensation, was an exception to this rule. Technically limited in comparison, he boasted two attributes with which to delight 40,000 punters in the early '90s: he was a chain-smoking, leather jacket-wearing, charismatic badass, and he blew himself to bits immediately after puncturing his skin with barbed wire.
An innovator of the death match, and indeed several warped, near-ludicrous derivations of it*, Onita wrecked his body to amaze his public, but not before teetering perilously close to danger, enhancing the spectacle with a new, suspenseful mode of psychology. The cumulative effects were destructive, funnily enough: Onita had to win a 'Current Blast Royal Rumble' in January 2017, Iron Sheik-style, because he couldn't take a bump to the outside.
*Onita per Cagematch last wrestled, in July of 2019, Christ, under a Sudden Explosion Current Blast Street Fight Bunkhouse Anywhere Current Blast Bat Death stipulation.