8 Things You Didn't Know About WWE's Kyoki (FKA Hiromu Takahashi)

8. He Wrestled With A Broken Neck

The days of wrestling old were chock-full of broken necks. It felt as though every year carried at least one report of a significant wrestler having a brush with paralysis, primarily because of such spots as a middle-rope Tombstone Piledriver being commonplace in the emerging Joshi scene. That level of 'Neck Stuff' wasn't as prevalent in the WWF, of course, but broken necks still were; Jose Estrada Jr. went down with a compressed neck when Edge dove onto him with a somersault plancha, reaffirming that even the most basic wrestling match poses a real risk of danger.

It still happens today.

Hiromu Takahashi cracked his neck upon taking a Phoenix Plex from Dragon Lee in 2018, and reports in the following days of him having officially broken his neck were sadly predicted. Astonishingly, Hiromu finished the match, retaining the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship against Lee in a gruelling 16-minute match as part of New Japan's G1 Special in San Francisco. Regarding his injury, Takahashi put it down to "stubbornness" that allowed him to persevere.

It would be trivial to remark that there's never a good time to break your neck, but it came at a particularly cumbersome time for Hiromu Takahashi. He'd just managed to return to the summit of the junior heavyweight division, so for his abdication to be the result of an injury, rather than the culmination of a scorching Wrestle Kingdom mid-carder, was mournful.