10 Times Wrestlers Held Championship Belts Hostage

3. Brock Lesnar - IWGP Heavyweight Championship

Brock Lesnar Japan
NJPW

One of the uglier chapters for an otherwise enormously prestigious Championship, Brock Lesnar's controversial reign as IWGP Champion hit the skids when 'The Beast' claimed to be owed money for prior and future appearances.

Lesnar defeated Kazuyuki Fujita and Masahiro Chono in 2005 to claim the prize, but wouldn't lay down to lose it until he wrestled former WWE opponent Kurt Angle for an entirely different organisation. With the financial dispute never reaching a settlement, NJPW stripped him of it in 2006 as that business relationship ended in acrimony, but Lesnar kept the actual belt and went on to work the Olympian on a 2007 Inoki Genome Federation show.

The loss to Angle at very least resulted in the tidying up of the situation - Kurt was defeated by NJPW's recognised new Champion Shinsuke Nakamura to unify the belts and clean things up. Lesnar never worked for NJPW again ahead of his 2012 return to professional wrestling in WWE.

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Michael is a writer, editor, podcaster and presenter for WhatCulture Wrestling, and has been with the organisation for nearly 10 years. He primarily produces written, audio and video content on WWE and AEW, but also provides knowledge and insights on all aspects of the wrestling industry thanks to a passion for it dating back over 35 years. As one third of "The Dadley Boyz" Michael has contributed to the huge rise in popularity of the WhatCulture Wrestling Podcast and its accompanying YouTube channel, earning it top spot in the UK's wrestling podcast charts with well over 65,000,000 total downloads. Within the podcasting space, he also co-hosts Benno & Hamflett, In Your House! and Podcast Horseman: The BoJack Horseman Podcast. He has been featured as a wrestling analyst for the Tampa Bay Times, Fightful, POST Wrestling, GRAPPL, GCP, Poisonrana and Sports Guys Talking Wrestling, and has provided in-person coverage of some of the biggest pay-per-views and Premium Live Events in wrestling history, including WrestleMania, Survivor Series, All In & Double Or Nothing in destinations such as New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, London and Cardiff. Michael's background in media stretches beyond wrestling coverage, with a degree in Journalism from the University Of Sunderland (2:1) and a series of published articles in sports, music and culture magazines The Crack, A Love Supreme and Pilot. When not offering his voice up for daily wrestling podcasts, he can be found losing it singing far too loud watching his favourite bands play live.