This has been a great couple of days for charitable acts in the world of professional wrestling. We’ve seen Triple H, The Rock, Vince McMahon, and CM Punk all complete ice bucket challenges for ALS awareness recently, and now more wrestlers seem to be jumping on the very respectable bandwagon of doing their part to fight awful diseases. News broke recently out of New Japan Pro Wrestling that G1 Climax winner Kazuchika Okada is raising money for childhood cancer prevention as only he can – by clobbering his opponents with his finishing move, the Rainmaker.
The NJPW official website and Tokyo Sports are both reporting that Okada has started the Rainmaker Fund, to which he will donate 30,000 yen every time he wins a match using the Rainmaker. Furthermore, he has decided to retroactively include all Rainmaker wins from this calendar year. With an uncle and a cousin who have both been diagnosed with forms of cancer, the pursuit of cancer research and prevention is undoubtedly a personal one for Okada. By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with the Rainmaker finisher, it’s a short-arm lariat that appears to hit with the force of heavy artillery.
So, let’s do the math here… 26 Rainmaker wins this year, multiplied by 30,000 yen… at the current exchange rate, that’s just over 7,600 American dollars he’s raised so far. And as the winner of NJPW’s biggest annual tournament, it’s very likely that the wins (and donations) will just keep coming. Wouldn’t it be great if the money that funded the cure for pediatric cancer came from one of Japan’s greatest wrestlers and his talent for clotheslining guys into oblivion?
