The Terrifying Decline Of NJPW
It's very difficult for fans to care about inferior versions of long, 30 minute-plus matches in the same format. As great as New Japan was for years, the main event style was daunting even then. It's daunting, very familiar and simply not as good now. A decade and change of the Okada main event style was, particularly in the last few years, all a bit much. It's hard to emulate that formula. Has it been mentioned that Gedo's NJPW promoted countless incredibly long main event matches? The last thing you'd want to do after reading a 500,000 word book is read another 500,000 book by an inferior author.
Tsuji, Umino, all those guys simply aren't as good. They really aren't anywhere close yet. It will take NJPW years to become as great as it once was. It would also take a complete philosophical overhaul for NJPW to even feel refreshing. That's the hard part. For many, there just isn't an incentive to dive back in. NJPW is stuck. And on those Musketeers again...
Gedo perhaps didn't feel like he had to be bold because SANADA was his guy; he just built him more slowly than he had Okada and Omega. He persevered, much like he had with Naito. SANADA, the recent winner of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Most Overrated award, is getting a kicking domestically and internationally. He's not as great in the ring as the last fleet of top guys technically, and to be blunt, he shows such little emotion that it's a mystery he was ever deemed capable of leading the promotion. SANADA is a factory-made version of what somebody thinks a top NJPW guy is: an eerily, perfectly handsome void. Not to go two-footed on the guy when he's down, but really, he's such a nonentity, amid this talk of the Musketeers and the lack of conviction there, that it's easy to forget NJPW has pushed a talent into the main event bracket. That talent is just that forgettable.
Gedo is at fault too. He probably should have realised that SANADA has given every indication that he just doesn't want it. New Japan is less bound by tradition than it once was - the creation of the IWGP Women's title evidence of that - but the promotion is still weirdly stubborn about certain things. The charismatic superstar Hiromu Takahashi should have graduated to the heavyweight ranks ages in ago in anticipation of this malaise, but that sort of move usually takes forever, too long, if it actually happens.
Worse still, as often happens when a promotion suddenly realises how highly the water is rising, NJPW is now desperate.
CONT'D...(4 of 5)