Ladies and gentlemen, after much wait and much hype, the time has come! New Japan Pro Wrestling brings you Wrestle Kingdom 14 – two days of it, in fact! The WrestleMania equivalent of Japan’s biggest promotion becomes all the bigger, starting tonight! This is sure to be one of the most incredible weekends in wrestling history! I’m Jordan Huie of the Overtimer and I’ll be here with my coverage of the shows as they happen!
With all my duties covering WWE and AEW I haven’t really had much time to talk about New Japan this past year, but I am a massive fan and I can’t let a stop at the Tokyo Dome go by without getting in on it! So let’s take a look at what we have on tap for Night 1!
Tencozy (Hiroyoshi Tenzan & Satoshi Kojima) vs. Yuji Nagata & Manabu Nakanishi
In New Japan you can basically work as long as you want to, provided you don’t mind becoming something of a glorified side attraction. I mean that in the nicest way, but I can’t really think of a kind way to put it…
All four of these men are largely in that boat. Usually there would be an exception to this whenever the G1 came around but none of them have even competed in that since 2017. So it’s basically matches like this, as well as bouts against young lions and occasional big tags alongside modern stars for these guys until they’re ready to hang it up. But that’s fine. They get to keep doing what they love for a living and the New Japan audiences really cherish their legends, they’re always happy to see them.
And it’s safe to say everyone involved here qualifies as a legend, all four of them former IWGP Heavyweight Champions. But since Tencozy are also an established and decorated tag team, it seems logical to think that Tenzan and Kojima will take this.
