While Kenny Omega is talking plenty of trash on Will Ospreay ahead of their forthcoming match at Wrestle Kingdom 17, AEW's “Best Bout Machine” has also found some time to discuss other aspects of professional wrestling, including his run in DDT Pro Wrestling, the promotion he worked for before jumping to New Japan Pro Wrestling in 2010.
Speaking with Monthly Puroresu, Omega was asked how his tag team with Kota Ibushi, The Golden Lovers, came into existence, and the 39-year-old Winnipegger explained the genesis of the legendary pairing and how they initially began as foes. Booked for a Falls Count Anywhere match in their first bout against each other back in 2008 that would go on to win the Independent March of the Year award, Omega knew he'd stumbled on something special that would go on to define the prime of his career.
“That’s when I started to get hungry again,” Omega said. “I was like “Oh my God, we did this! I did this! I was a part of this!”And at that point there was no plan to ever bring me back. I emailed Nakazawa and said “Hey, is there any interest to maybe bring me back? I’d really love to come back?” Then I waited a month and try to do it again. Wait a month, try to do it again. And finally he said “Oh, it sounds like they’re going to bring you back. They’ve got an idea.” So I went back, not knowing what I was going to do. And they had said “Hey, we’ve got this cool idea. We think that we need to have the rematch between you and Ibushi. And let’s try to make it bigger and make it better. Let’s try to one up the last match that you did.” The plan there was for me to lose again. And then that would have been my second trip and I would’ve been able to hopefully have another great match with Ibushi. And then I would have gone home and that would have been it. And as we built kind of towards the second matchup, I’d spent a lot more time with Ibushi. Hanging out and we became real good friends and we thought “Hey, what if we changed the narrative a little bit?” Instead of another rematch of our singles match, as we didn’t think we could top it.”
When asked about how “changing the narrative” worked as a foreign performer who didn't yet speak the language, Omega extrapolated on the pairing.
“We actually would hang out all the time, with a number of people,” Omega said. “And we had this real nice family and this one, man, the father was a Buddhist priest. And he was very well off and he had a ton of connections and we would sit in these huge palace looking places. They would have this incredible food. It was really cool. And it’s funny how when I reached the height of my career in New Japan, I never found anything else like that. That was a once in a lifetime experience to meet these guys. We would hang out and there’d be just random wrestling on one of the TVs in the room. And their kids were playing with their wrestling merchandise. In this huge room with food everywhere. And just for lack of anything else to do. We’re just like “Let’s just talk about what we got to do.” Which is work towards this match and how are we going to pull it off? Because our first match together between Ibushi and I, was a falls count anywhere, two out of three falls match. And they wanted us to one up that. How do you one up that? How are we going to make it crazier? What is it that we’re going to do to really hook people into this thing in the end?”
As it turns out, the best way to take things up a notch and really capture the attention of fans across the wrestling landscape was to work together and develop an innovative offensive style that took Japan by storm.
AEW's Kenny Omega found something special with Kota Ibushi.
While working matches against Ibushi was clearly working well for “The Best Bout Machine,” his career didn't really take off until he realized that working with “Golden Star” as a team could unlock something truly special in the Japanese market that launches him to international acclaim.
“Anyway, we came up with the idea, let’s try to convince (DDT promoter) Takagi-san for us to be a tag team instead,” Omega said. “And both of us thought Takagi-san is never going to go for it. So we went and presented him with the idea that “Hey, if you give us a chance to be a tag team, instead of continuing this one-on-one feud together, we promise that we will show you something that you’ve never seen before in tag-team wrestling. And we’ll revolutionize what tag team wrestling means.”
When asked if he felt the duo could deliver on the premise of becoming the sort of transcendent in-ring performers who transform tag team wrestling forever, Omega was candid about his expectations.
“No,” Omega replied. “Ibushi was like “I’d put my career on the line that we can make it happen.” And Takagi-san said “You’re not putting your career on the line! Shut up! Don’t go that far. If you really that passionate about it. Sure. We’ll give it a shot, test it and see if it’s okay.” I remember we came up with a couple double teams and we had real good natural chemistry together and it felt good and it was on a random house show. A show away from Tokyo. And we thought, “Well, we might be onto something. But we don’t have that one thing that is really going to convince DDT to stick with this.”
“Ibushi being Ibushi, he’s got all these strange hookups and he has like secret dojos that he trains in.”
“He said: “Come to the secret dojo and we’ll work on something.” That’s where we came up with some of our more famous double-team maneuvers; that’s when we came up with “The Golden Shower” which is a double 450 off the top rope. I think it was less impressive that we were able to do a double 450 but that when we did it, we naturally jumped at the same height we naturally had. We naturally had the same spin speed, the way that we talk as the exact same. It just looked too pretty. And when we saw the video of us sitting on like a training dummy and us hitting it from multiple angles and distances, we thought, “Oh my God, this is what we need to bring to the table.” This is what it is.”
Could Omega and Ibushi reunite in AEW when the latter becomes a free agent at the end of January? Only time will tell, but their expansive history certainly makes that a possibility.
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