10 Wrestling Decision-Makers (And Their Biggest Mistakes)
6. Antonio Inoki
Biggest mistake: Inokism (merging wrestling & MMA) Although Inokis New Japan during the 1980s and 1990s was a massive success, especially due to Inokis focus on junior heavyweights, even he was prone to making some mistakes.His most notable was a policy that has been labelled Inokism by fans, and it refers to merging professional wrestling with mixed martial arts. There is some ambiguity and uncertainty as to what Inokism/Inoki-ism really means. It can be best described as taking professional wrestlers, who have been trained in a very specific way, and have them become skillet at shoot-fighting as well as wrestling. The philosophy behind this idea is so that New Japans wrestlers would be seen as real fighters, as opposed to the somehow less real Strong Style of New Japan Pro Wrestling in General. What you get when you take someone like Keiji Mutoh or Jushin Liger, who are wrestlers through-and-through, and make them perform MMA, is a series of bad matches and strange ideas, especially considering that several New Japan wrestlers were put up against legitimately-well trained MMA fighters. The other side of the coin is that Inoki also began bringing in legit MMA fighters to New Japan as a means of countering the above problem, and he pushed them to the moon, going over the companys best wrestlers, even if they had limited wrestling experience. In response, some of New Japans best wrestlers, like Keiji Mutoh and Shinya Hashimoto left the company; and many other wrestlers, who had spent years cultivating images of themselves as legit, tough-as-nails fighters, saw their careers delayed or ruined. It was Inokis worst decision ever because it really damaged New Japans drawing power for many years. New Japans popularity dropped significantly, allowing NOAH and the remnants of All Japan to rise higher, and New Japan wouldnt reach a new zenith of popularity until the Tanahashi era of the late 2000s, which only happened after Inoki sold his shared of NJPW to Yukes.
Alexander Podgorski is a writer for WhatCulture that has been a fan of professional wrestling since he was 8 years old. He loves all kinds of wrestling, from WWE and sports entertainment, to puroresu in Japan.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Queen's University in Political Studies and French, and a Master's Degree in Public Administration. He speaks English, French, Polish, a bit of German, and knows some odd words and phrases in half a dozen other languages.
