Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you are ready to stay up late tonight! In the wee hours of tomorrow morning, New Japan will be going live with a major event, New Beginning In Osaka! In a can’t-miss clash, Jon Moxley defends his IWGP US title against the one and only Minoru Suzuki! NJPW’s New Beginning tours effectively kick off the year on New Japan Pro Wrestling’s calendar after Wrestle Kingdom served as the 2019 season finale. While it’s made up of several events, some bigger than others, it all culminates with this last big one here!
The way most New Japan events work, the first half of the card is basically made up of big filler tag matches, made to get a lot of people on every card without having a grueling match every time. This leaves the latter half as the big stuff, which is actually built to. So we’ll just be dealing with the last four in these previews.
IWGP United States Championship: Jon Moxley (c) vs. Minoru Suzuki
This, my friends, is an absolute match made in Hell. One of those matches you just never would have thought about as a real possibility a year prior. But in 2020, this kinda madness is what pro wrestling is all about and I sure do love it. I really wasn’t certain that Mox would even be sticking around in New Japan after the Tokyo Dome, but I sure am glad to see that he is. He’s got plenty of big matches still left to have around here, this one included!
The story here is as simple as one can get, really. Jon Moxley and Minoru Suzuki are both two legendary asskickers, and they each want to kick the other’s ass. That’s pretty much it! And it’s glorious. They’ve been battling across arenas every chance they can get of late and it’s been chaos every time, lovely teasers for what we’ll see here in this utter dream match. It’s fair to say this is the biggest US title match they’ve promoted in a long time, if not the biggest ever. You could easily headline a show with this one but it speaks to how big the main really is that it’s here in the semi instead.
Suzuki is the king, no doubt. And you could argue Mox should be dropping that title and moving onto bigger ones. But really, they have the chance here to really up the stock of the red, white and blue belt, which would be significant given how many more events in the US they have this year. And while they do need it to be on someone who can actually defend it in America, Suzuki isn’t going to be defending a title regularly anyway. So I’mma say Jon Moxley retains.
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