Puroresu Pulse, issue 25

Archive

Section 1- Important Results

Dragons Gate: Doi made a perfunctory first defense of the OBG title against Super Shisa on Sunday.

Section 2- Other news & Upcoming matches

BIG MOUTH: There’s more than a little turmoil right now. They put off their debut show scheduled for 4/23 at Yokohama Arena and there’s nothing clear in sight for them except vague references by Uei of them running a major venue.

Dragons Gate: They’ll be having a big show at Kobe World Hall on 7/3. To date they’ve used this venue very effectively, but we’ll see if they can pull their storylines together into something coherent enough to draw by then.

New Japan: Fujinami will be having more matches in the coming months, as he hopes to do a high-profile series of retirement matches. It appears that Kendo KaShin will be in this year’s juniors tournament, following his winning a tournament in ROH. Last but not least, long-time New Japan figurehead Seiji Sakaguchi will be stepping down from his post, to be replaced by another former wrestler Kengo Kimura.

NOAH: Two matches were added to the 4/24 Budokan show. First, Misawa and Kotaro Suzuki reprise their team from 3/5 as they take on Minoru Suzuki and Marufuji. Second, Kobashi and young lion Go Shiozaki will be faced with Akiyama and Tenryu. In somewhat of a surprise, NOAH will run the Tokyo Dome on 7/18 despite doing rather poorly there last year with a strong card. It’s going to take something huge to even half-fill the venue. Also teams for the Differ Cup were announced, and the lineup appears to be slightly more high-profile overall than the ’03 version.

Section 3- New Japan’s Sumo Hall nightmare

It’s not about one show being enough to bankrupt the company; far from it. It’s not about one show being booked so badly that it will cause long-term damage, because that isn’t the case either. What we have here is a sign of slagging fan interest. That sign is that instead of a legit 11,000 person sell-out of Sumo Hall, New Japan claimed 9,000 and there were reports of it being as low as 5,000. For reference, they did at least that well if not better for every *semi-final* G-1 Climax show over the years, and those were followed by a sold out show at Sumo Hall the very next day! As far as a Sumo Hall show outside the G-1, New Japan hasn’t claimed that low a number in 16 years.

Okay, so what? So, New Japan should have packed the house completely with that card, and didn’t even come close despite the added main event. It featured the second appearance of Ron Waterman since his big push at the last Dome show. It featured Nagata vs Kosaka, with Kosaka getting tons of press due to his being in a huge shootfight the next week. It featured the #1 contenders tournament with Tenzan getting revenge on the top two members of Chono’s heel faction. And then, to top it all off, the first big Kojima IWGP title defense against Nakamura, who was coming off a win over Tanahashi in the Dome show main event.

That’s about as loaded as New Japan could have made the card short of hiring a ton of expensive shootfighters or getting some more big-name wrestlers from other promotions. Considering the hype they put into the Tenzan vs Kojima ‘Triple Crown vs IWGP’ match in February, it’s clear they were expecting Kojima to be a guaranteed draw. Only he isn’t.

One major reason is that Kojima-as-IWGP-champion doesn’t have near the interest as Kojima-as-Triple Crown-champion. It’s the Triple Crown win that signaled his ascent into the big leagues, it’s his Triple Crown chase that was a focus of his career, as the prior IWGP matches he had in New Japan were fairly low-key. And it’s the concept of defending both the IWGP and Triple Crown at the same time that made putting all the belts on Kojima such a potential money maker in the first place! That’s the main reason why Tenzan vs Kojima was able to sell out Sumo Hall with a rather iffy undercard.

So now New Japan is left with a Tokyo Dome main event set up by a flop of a show. A main event that only drew enough to fill 20% of the Dome when run in February. A main event that, run in the much smaller Sumo Hall, might not be a sell-out even with a good undercard. There’s no huge interest in watching Tenzan regain a belt he’s already won three times only to lose right away, let alone with just one title match between the loss and the rematch. New Japan’s only hope for a decent draw would be adding the Triple Crown to the mix AND getting a wealth of outside help, and even then they would be lucky to half-fill the arena.

Frankly I have no idea why any wrestling promotion in Japan thinks it can properly run the Tokyo Dome, and those woes will only continue if WWE successfully runs the venue by putting Akebono in a prominent place on the card. It only hurts the image of puroresu for its biggest shows of the year to not even come close to selling out.

You can hear more of my thoughts on the 3/26 Sumo Hall show on the new edition of the Puroresu Power Hour, available at puroresupower.com

Next Week: Champions Carnival opening days!