10 Wrestlers Who Were Secretly Promo GODS
4. Minoru Suzuki
While many seminal promos have emerged from the puro landscape, and you can infer how phenomenal someone like Atsushi Onita was, you can't know for sure unless you speak and understand Japanese.
Minoru Suzuki’s incredible twilight run coincided with the rise of social media and the western expansion of New Japan Pro Wrestling, and thus his absolutely delightful way with words has been more widely translated.
Suzuki actually cut a great promo of sorts at the expense of the NXT Performance Center in an interview with the official NJPW website, and it's just as well he hasn't done it since: he'd put every content creator out of the game with his superb, witty insights.
"So the kids go [into the Performance Center], and they train, and their trainers find what the gaps are in their games, and they try to fill those gaps right up. So you have this perfectly smooth, grey lump of boring trash."
In addition to perfectly describing why so much of WWE's output can feel generic, Suzuki - the most theatrical killer in wrestling - knows his way around a blunt, terrifying threat. He doesn't need to do much else - why would you ever fill a gap in Suzuki's game? - and "I will absolutely kill you, bastard" is more than sufficient to sell fans on the prospect of an imminent sh*t-kicking.