>>5443No, this is the pic. Basically in the 90s Vince was still willing to work with Japanese promotions but was slowly backing off as Inoki had begun working closely with WCW and Baba was becoming even more conservative and insular with his "Walled Garden" approach to booking. So pretty much all Vince had to work with was Tenryu's Wrestling and Romance promotion and Sasuke's Michinoku Pro. WaR wasn't a touring promotion in the sense we know and was more of a big event promotion where Tenryu would hire a bunch of freelancers and borrow talent from other promotions. Michinoku pro was basically the Sasuke Show, and so all Vince could do was borrow Sasuke's top student Taka Michinoku and his drinking buddies to form Kaientai. FMW was the rising star in its in the mid 90s and won a ton of read awards in Gong and ShuPro, but other than that was pretty small scale outside of the annual Kawasaki stadium shows. Sure they sold out all their house shows, but those shows were usually pretty small by the standards of Japanese white hot 90s wrestling scene.
Somehow Onita managed to get ahold of Stamford through his old AJPW contacts and arranged a meeting with Vince. Onita shows up to the meeting, has his picture taken with Vince, and then thanks them for the meeting, bows, and returns home to Japan without explaining anything. As soon as he is back in Japan Onita sends out press releases to every major publication in Japan announcing that FMW is now in a working relationship with WWF, and that FMW will be featuring a bunch of hot young talent from the US that will make FMW more exciting than anything AJPW and NJPW were doing at the time. The Japanese wrestling world went into a tizzy as it seemed both Inoki and Baba had fumbled with one of America's two biggest promotions, and that the wild card Onita had managed to outplay them.
It was complete bullraisin, but lead to a year of packed houses in bigger venues as everyone kept showing up thinking that each event was finally going to be the one where Onita had all of WWF's stars showing up.
Those hot young stars that Onita promised? They were all ECW guys who had previously worked in the FMW during the early days like Sabu and Mike Awesome.
To this day I don't think Vince knows who Onita is, or why the meeting was arranged in the first place. JR doesn't even remember the event in question when asked but he was the guy that ended up putting the whole meeting together according to Onita. This is why Onita will always be King Carny in my mind. He worked Vince so hard, made a raisin ton of money off of it, and Vince never even knew. Real nigga raisin, you wouldn't ken it.