The King of Sleaze: Saying Goodbye to the Great Tarzan Goto
Tarzan Goto has died, which makes writing about him tricky. Because, goddamm, he was something, but it wasn’t always something pretty.
Tarzan Goto was among the last of his kind, a sleazy-looking, lumpy, badass lurking for years on the margins of Japanese independent wrestling. Most tributes will focus on his early matches with Atsushi Onita, especially the first Exploding Barbed Wire Cage Death Match from August, 1990 that set the table for decades of death match wrestling to come.
And those bouts were awesome, though almost quaint compared to where the style would go, more about the tease of violence than an endless cacophony of exploding light tubes and glass. But to me, Goto was best in early, more organic moments, when the matches focused more on violence than spectacle.
One of my favorites is a 1989 bout just before the FMW promotion shifted gears, when the focus was still on the ground-breaking feud between pro wrestling and the martial arts, particularly karate. In December, Goto teamed with Onita to take on karatekas Jerry Flynn (hilariously labelled here as Jelly Greyman) & Mitsuhiro Matsunaga in an unhinged, barbed wire match from the days before barbed wire was something you saw routinely around the globe.
While Onita emerged as the unquestioned star, crying his eyes out at the beautiful horror of it all, it was Goto who shined, a lumbering monster in yellow headbutting and stomping his way to glory before eventually being felled by martial prowess, forced to tag in Onita to close the show.
Come for the barbed wire, stay for the stiff strikes that will make you question everyone involved’s sanity. (See it for yourself here)
Goto’s best match didn’t involve a single strand of barbed wire and the only explosions were possibly ear drums and noses from the force of the clotheslines, stomps and headbutts that made it occasionally uncomfortable to watch in a way that only the best wrestling manages to make you feel. The meat of this match is the wrestling, and the two deliver a classic. The blood and brawling are mere garnish. Goto could go—and this match is proof.
It happened seven months before their more famous death match at Kawasaki Stadium and has been forgotten to time, but was a fantastic bit of sleaze, the progenitor of 1000 ECW brawls to come. (WATCH HERE).
In his later years, having burned through the rest of the wrestling world in an uncontrollable blaze of glory, Goto ran his own shows, mostly at a restaurant he owned in front of small crowds of a few dozen fans. Even as his weight ballooned and age crept up on him, these were never tinged with irony or nostalgia. He was a by-god-wrestler until the end.
May he rest in peace.