I love pro wrestling! I love heavy metal! And I love when I get to talk about pro wrestling and heavy metal.
Lately, the WWE product has left me a little jaded in what seems like a never-ending loop of the Authority angle, I needed something more. So when New Japan Pro Wrestling announced that their biggest event of the year, Wrestle Kingdom 9 would air in the States with the greatest commentator of all time, Jim Ross, doing the announcing, I was excited to finally get an alternative to the stale WWE product. I'd loosely followed New Japan and NOAH in the past, mostly just looking up good matches but I'd never watched a full event.
Put it simply, if you consider yourself a pro wrestling fan, go out of your way to see this event. All the matches were great, the last two were phenomenal and specifically the Nakamura vs Ibushi match was the best match I've seen in a really long time.
But what does this have to do with metal? Well, as I was watching the show, there was a montage of past Wrestle Kingdom events and to my surprise I saw footage of the IWGP World Champion, Hiroshi Tanahashi just hanging out with Marty Friedman. I totally forgot about it until MetalSucks brought it to my attention and that made me go digging.
Turns out at last year's Wrestle Kingdom, Friedman accompanied Tanahashi to the ring. Tanahashi's gimmick is that he loves to air guitar before and after matches, so I guess the New Japan brass thought it would be great to bring in an actual shredder for him to air guitar to.
I even found the entire match, where Tanahashi faced my current favorite wrestler, the best wrestler in the world, Shinsuke Nakamura. This whole video is incredible, but if you want to just see the Marty Friedman part, just fast forward to 5:50… http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19i0lw
Why would Marty Friedman ever want to go back to Megadeth when he could do cool shit like this all the time?
Are you a fan of New Japan Pro Wrestling? Do you love Nakamura as much as I do? Would you be interested in a weekly wrestling column, if I wrote one? Let me know in the comments.
