Remember my Best And Worst Of Wrestle Kingdom 9, when I wrote this about the eight-man tag team match featuring three stars from Pro Wrestling Noah?
I can almost guarantee that there’s no hostility between NJPW and NOAH, and that this match won’t start any long-running angles.
Here’s what you have to realize about me… I’m wrong a lot. “Wrong” should be my middle name. My favorite Social Distortion song is “I Was Wrong.” While I’m still fairly confident that New Japan Pro Wrestling and Pro Wrestling Noah have no bad blood amongst themselves, it now sounds like we might see something long-running between these two companies after all. That is, of course, assuming that a few rumors turn out to be true.
The BIG rumor circulating right now is that Jado and Gedo, the bookers of NJPW, have purchased all or part of Pro Wrestling Noah and are now running it. This took off after a LuchaTV interview with Super Crazy was posted to YouTube two days ago. You probably remember Super Crazy, he’s a journeyman luchador who spent time with ECW and WWE before landing in Pro Wrestling Noah, sporadically appearing for them since 2011. The entire interview is in Spanish, and I’m thinking that this where a lot of the confusion started. A few well-meaning people probably mistranslated Super Crazy’s remarks as saying that NJPW was now running Noah, the comments were spread around on Twitter, you know the drill. I don’t have an official translation of the interview on me at the moment, but here’s what you need to take away from it: New Japan and their parent company Bushiroad have NOT purchased Pro Wrestling Noah, but it does appear that the working relationship set up at Wrestle Kingdom will be extended into the future, presumably with Jado and Gedo overseeing the whole thing. This lines up perfectly with NJPW’s Suzukigun stable “invading” a Pro Wrestling Noah event earlier this month, as you can see in this video.
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Suffice it to say, it looks like we’ll see more of the same down the road. Don’t lie though, I bet some of you were excited to see Noah rebranded as Japan’s version of NXT. Does that make Naomichi Marufuji their equivalent of Sami Zayn?
