When was Wrestle Kingdom 9?
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Wrestle Kingdom 9 in Tokyo Dome was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by the New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) promotion, which took place at the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, Japan on January 4, 2015. It was the 24th January 4 Tokyo Dome Show and the first event on the 2015 NJPW schedule. The event featured ten professional wrestling matches and one pre-show match, six of which were for championships.
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Behind the scenes, Jericho became part of a group of people that started pushing for the show to air on American pay-per-view (PPV) for the first time since Wrestle Kingdom 9 in 2015. Some in NJPW felt that airing the show through NJPW World would be enough, hoping that the Jericho signing would increase subscriber numbers. While NJPW was now considered more popular than in 2015, when Wrestle Kingdom 9 did 14,000 buys on American PPV, it was noted that the 2018 show would take place early Thursday morning in the United States as opposed to a weekend like it did in 2015, which was seen as a major negative in terms of getting buys from the country. In late November, it was reported that NJPW had turned down Fite TV's offer for PPV rights outside of Japan and would not be allowing the event to air on American PPV, wanting their streaming service to be the only way to see the event live. On December 3, it was announced that the top matches from the show would air on AXS TV on January 6, 2018, as part of an 11-hour block of NJPW programming with additional matches airing between January 12 and February 9. Five matches, including the top three matches, will air on TV Asahi as part of a special episode of "World Pro Wrestling" on the night of January 4.
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On August 10, 2014, NJPW made two announcements. Firstly, Wrestle Kingdom 9 would be held at the Tokyo Dome on January 4, 2015. Secondly, NJPW revealed a partnership with Jeff Jarrett's Global Force Wrestling, which it approached about bringing the event to a new market. On November 4, GFW announced that it would present the event live on American pay-per-view television and that it had a PPV market of 125 million homes.
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Wrestle Kingdom 9 featured ten professional wrestling matches and one pre-show match. It saw professional wrestlers performing as characters in scripted events pre-determined by the hosting promotion, New Japan Pro Wrestling.
The event was headlined by Hiroshi Tanahashi defending the IWGP Heavyweight Championship against Kazuchika Okada. Tanahashi won the title by defeating A.J. Styles on October 13, 2014, at the NJPW King of Pro-Wrestling event. Okada became the number one contender at Wrestle Kingdom 9 by winning the G1 Climax on August 10, 2014. Over the following months, he defended his position against Karl Anderson and Tetsuya Naito. The Wrestle Kingdom 9 main event was the seventh match between Okada and Tanahashi since February 2012 and their second January 4 Tokyo Dome Show main event after Wrestle Kingdom 7 on January 4, 2013.
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The event was attended by 36,000 people. Through NJPW's partnership with Global Force Wrestling (GFW), the event was broadcast with English commentary as a GFW event. It was available on PPV television in the United States and Canada, and broadcast worldwide on the Internet via Flipps and New Japan Pro Wrestling World. Critics issued positive reviews; "Philly.com" said it featured "good, quality wrestling", while "Paste" magazine said it presented "some of the most passionate and poignant performance art today". Readers of the "Wrestling Observer Newsletter" voted Wrestle Kingdom 9 the Best Major Wrestling Show of 2015; they also named the Ibushi–Nakamura match as the 2015 Pro Wrestling Match of the Year.
Wrestle Kingdom 9
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The event was broadcast on American PPV as the first GFW event. The four-hour "GFW Presents New Japan Pro Wrestling's Wrestle Kingdom 9" telecast was available from pay-per-view providers in the United States, including DirecTV, Dish Network, AT&T U-verse, Comcast, Verizon FiOS and all cable systems, and in Canada from Bell ExpressVu, Rogers, Shaw, Sasktel and Telus. The event also aired live on New Japan Pro Wrestling World, an Internet streaming site introduced by NJPW in early December 2014 which reportedly had 20,000 subscribers worldwide in late January 2015. In Japan, the event also aired on PPV in SKY PerfecTV!'s Sukachan service. In January 2016, Dave Meltzer of the "Wrestling Observer Newsletter" stated that Wrestle Kingdom 9 "was the only live pro wrestling PPV event ever broadcast [internationally] from Japan".
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AXS TV, which acquired the rights to broadcast Wrestle Kingdom 9 from the TV Asahi Corporation, aired the event in five parts from October 9 to November 6, 2015, to viewers in the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. Commentary was provided by Mauro Ranallo and Josh Barnett.
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The Wrestle Kingdom 9 undercard featured several matches involving the Bullet Club, which was led by A.J. Styles. The group dominated NJPW for most of 2014, holding all four of its heavyweight championships during the summer. After the NJPW–GFW partnership was forged, GFW head Jeff Jarrett joined the Bullet Club on August 10. On December 7, during a Bullet Club post-match assault on Tomoaki Honma, NJPW veteran tag team Tencozy (Hiroyoshi Tenzan and Satoshi Kojima) stormed into the ring to the aid of Honma, driving the Bullet Club away. They then joined Honma to challenge the stable to a six-man tag team match at Wrestle Kingdom 9. Bad Luck Fale, Yujiro Takahashi and Jeff Jarrett—making his NJPW ring debut—were scheduled to represent the Bullet Club at the event.
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In the double main event, Shinsuke Nakamura successfully defended the IWGP Intercontinental Championship against Kota Ibushi, and Hiroshi Tanahashi successfully defended the IWGP Heavyweight Championship against Kazuchika Okada. A Tanahashi–Okada heavyweight title match had headlined Wrestle Kingdom 7 two years earlier and was also the main event the following year at Wrestle Kingdom 10. Although the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship was successfully defended, the IWGP Tag Team Championship, IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship and NEVER Openweight Championship changed hands. The appearance of Pro Wrestling Noah wrestlers led to a storyline in which NJPW's Suzuki-gun group began wrestling at Noah events starting the week after Wrestle Kingdom 9.
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Wrestle Kingdom 9 also showcased a rivalry between Toru Yano and the Suzuki-gun group, which had been going on since 2013. In May 2014, Yano's tag team partner Takashi Iizuka joined Suzuki-gun, which led to Yano recruiting Kazushi Sakuraba as his new tag team partner to continue the feud. The rivalry lasted for the rest of the year, resulting in two Wrestle Kingdom 9 matches: one between former mixed martial artists Sakuraba and Suzuki-gun leader Minoru Suzuki, and a tag team match pitting Yano and a "mystery partner" against a Suzuki-gun team. The latter became an eight-man tag team match, with Suzuki-gun represented by Iizuka, Shelton X Benjamin, and the Killer Elite Squad (Davey Boy Smith Jr. and Lance Archer). Yano recruited three partners from the Pro Wrestling Noah promotion: Naomichi Marufuji and TMDK (Mikey Nicholls and Shane Haste).
Wrestle Kingdom 9