10 Genius Wrestling Bookers And The Best Decision They Ever Made

Best Decision: 'King’s Road' booking philosophy

As an isolationist, Giant Baba’s All Japan had a notoriously short roster; he only had 26 wrestlers at one point, which, presumably, would lead to repetition and recycling of storylines. To prevent this from happening, Baba adopted a different storytelling model that emphasized deep rivalries, where each strike and encounter meant something in a greater narrative.

This came to be known as ‘King’s Road’, and was a Japanese continuation of the NWA booking style.

The results were an astounding success: the stories told by Baba’s wrestlers were so exciting and dramatic that they left fans wanting more. With the rise of the Four Pillars of Heaven (Taue, Kawada, Kobashi and Misawa), AJPW would have some of the most outstanding matches ever seen over the course of an entire decade.

Add into the mix other Japanese wrestlers like veteran Jumbo Tsuruta and rookie Jun Akiyama, as well as foreign workers like Stan Hansen, Johnny Ace and Vader, and you had an elite cadre of wrestlers who put on slightly different, but no less exciting matches on a regular basis.

This is Baba’s biggest legacy: he took a small roster of wrestlers, and adopted a booking philosophy that emphasized clean finishes, complex storytelling, and sudden momentum shifts that made his wrestlers among the best in the world.