10 best retired wrestlers you have never heard of

8 Atsushi Onita

Not sure if really brave...or really foolish.

While Megumi Kudo was one of the pioneering women of hardcore wrestling in Japan, Atsushi Onita was to deathmatch wrestling in Japan what Paul Heyman was to hardcore wrestling in the United States with ECW.

Onita wrestled for AJPW for many years, but his biggest contribution was his founding and running of Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling (FMW). FMW was Japan’s most prominent deathmatch promotion, and under Onita’s leadership, the promotion flourished for several years.

Onita can thus say that he’s one of the few people in wrestling history that wasn’t just a great and accomplished wrestler, but he was also a successful and influential promoter.