This Sunday, AEW is holding their second Revolution pay-per-view, scheduled to be headlined by Kenny Omega vs. Jon Moxley for the AEW World Championship. The match will be an Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch, which originated in Japan with Atsushi Onita’s Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling. The first match of this type took place between Onita and Tarzan Goto in August 1990 at FMW’s Summer Spectacular in front of 4,520 fans. Since then, Onita has competed in various variations of this match and faced names such as Terry Funk, Tiger Jeet Singh, The Great Sasuke, and Hayabusa over the years.
Onita would send AEW a video that aired on Dynamite as part of a package promoting the upcoming AEW match, but Yahoo.co.jp has revealed that AEW wanted Onita to be in attendance to witness AEW’s tribute to the match he made famous. However, sadly, due to being booked in a tournament previously established by the late Mr. Pogo, he cannot attend. He has though commented on the match in Japanese, which you can read a translation of below.
AEW isn’t the first US promotion to promote an exploding deathmatch. While ECW tried and failed to have Onita vs. The Sandman, CZW did manage to deliver the gimmick in 2017. They initially announced Onita vs. Matt Tremont in No Ropes Barbed Wire Exploding Baseball Bats Match, but it became a six-man tag match when Hideki Hosaka, Raijin Yaguchi, Danny Havoc, and Ricky Shane Page got involved. Sadly the match was didn’t meet expectations as CZW didn’t have the budget to do it properly. That, though, won’t be a problem for AEW and has the potential to be an unbelievable spectacle between two great workers.
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