NJPW: 5 highlights from the first half of Best of the Super Juniors

It isn’t just newcomers and youngsters stepping up in this year’s tournament. In each year’s G1 or Best of the Super Juniors, there are wrestlers who are clearly there to eat losses without necessarily losing any of their own prestige. Typically reserved for the old guard and Third Generation – names who have built their legacy and are now more in the habit of giving back.

Someone may have forgotten to pass that information onto Rocky Romero, Yoshinobu Kanemaru, and Tiger Mask.

Rocky has stood out as an immediate ray of hope and sunshine in this year’s tournament. When I first started watching New Japan, Rocky was teaming with Alex Koslov as Forever Hooligans and I was completely shattered when Koslov announced his retirement in 2015.

Rocky would move on and form another fantastic team with Trent Beretta as Roppongi Vice and has largely been known as a tag team wrestler, manager, and commentator for the last several years. It became easy to write Rocky off as a face in the crowd amongst the more active members of the roster.

In the 26th Best of the Super Juniors, Romero has reminded everybody just how good he is in the ring. Looking at the brackets, everybody was probably quick to assume Will Ospreay would defeat Romero on May 16 – myself included. As the match went on, though, I began to believe in the magic of the former Black Tiger.

With the importance of the BOSJ hanging over everybody’s heads, Romero turned out a performance that should absolutely propel him back into the Junior Heavyweight division as an active competitor. Despite Romero’s legacy in New Japan, he’s only won the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship once, and that was under the Black Tiger moniker.

Could this be a career resurgence for the 8-time holder of the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Titles?

While he hasn’t turned out incredible performances like Rocky, Yoshinobu Kanemaru is another outstanding part of the Junior Heavyweight division who often gets lost in the shuffle. Like Rocky, he’s easy to write off as one of the least-promoted members of his stable. When the focus is just on Kanemaru, though, he comes to life.

Much like Romero’s match with Ospreay, Kanemaru’s match with SHO on May 22 seemed like a no-brainer. SHO is one of the most popular names in the division, and a victory over Kanemaru should have been an easy couple of points. Kanemaru, though, had ideas of his own.

In one of the greatest moments of the entire tournament so far, and a true “hands on head, mouth agape” moment for me, Kanemaru baited SHO into brawling throughout Korakuen Hall before using a Young Lion as an obstacle to pick up a count-out victory over one half of RPG3K. The look on SHO’s face when he realized what had happened was absolutely priceless.

Kanemaru continued his pattern of shock victories with a shot of whiskey and a small package stealing 2 points from Taiji Ishimori.

Tied for fourth place in a competitive A Block, Tiger Mask seems to be more motivated than ever before. Nursing a damaged knee hasn’t slowed him down, and the legend has looked good with victories over TAKA Michinoku and Kanemaru thus far. Plus, he continues to have one of the best tombstone piledrivers in the game.

While Tiger Mask hasn’t had as many standout matches as Romero or Kanemaru, he’s coming to the tournament with a chip on his shoulder that nobody has been able to knock off just yet. If he can string together a few more victories in the coming days, he could upset the clear favorite Shingo Takagi as the winner of the A Block.