10 Dumbest Decisions In Wrestling History
6. Inokism
The founder of New Japan Pro Wrestling almost destroyed it.
He injected NJPW with a lethal dose of... MMA fighters absolutely pasting and irrevocably damaging pro wrestlers.
That is a paraphrase of Vince's famous (and hilariously delivered) line in 2002, and weirdly, despite their total contrast in characters, there was a touch of the Vinces to Inoki's latter approach to promotion. It was rooted in abject self-indulgence and, consequently, nothing grew. Inoki recognised the rise of mixed martial arts in the east, a genre of real combat that seduced his sensibilities of legitimacy, but there was already, you know, f*cking mixed martial arts for that.
Inoki dispatched judoka Naoya Ogawa to legit brutalise Shinya Hashimoto on the January 4, 1999 Tokyo Dome show. Hashimoto's carefully manufactured aura as a hard man was exposed in minutes. This flashpoint somehow informed the shape of NJPW to come, and doubled as stark metaphor for how searingly counterproductive all of this was. The trained killers were always going to annihilate the trained performers in the fighters versus wrestlers shoots. This astonishingly stupid mentality contradicted everything about the company; the wrestlers always presented as the real tough guys were, in fact, pretenders.
But there was still wrestling to enjoy!
Wrestling matches between MMA fighters who were abysmal at wrestling.
Wrestling fans hated watching their heroes look like weaklings. Any prospective MMA fans already had MMA, which was thriving, and the MMA fights in New Japan were predictably one-sided destructions wholly lacking in technique and drama.
Everybody hated all of this, except Inoki, who looked at the busted noses of his wrestling talent and said "That's such good sh*t!"