A History of Violence: 20 Years of Takashi Sugiura in NOAH

By: Colin McNeil

The unstoppable force meets the immovable object. 

It’s a cliche. Especially in professional wrestling, where the phrase has been dog-eared over decades of repetition on posters everywhere from high school gyms to the Pontiac Silverdome. But there’s one man for whom the latter half of that thread-bare cliche fits like a tailored suit — Takashi Sugiura. He is Pro Wrestling NOAH’s immovable object.

Sugiura is 51 years old and at the top of his game. He’s been sweating and bleeding under the green-tinted lights of NOAH for over two decades now. He has buckled every belt the company has to offer, several times over.

And on July 11 the immovable object of Sugiura met the unstoppable force of Naomichi Marufuji, a man who’s been in NOAH even longer, with the GHC Heavyweight Championship hanging in the balance.

It was the latest in a long history of main events for the man known as The Killing Machine. Main events that have played out in stadiums with attendance records well north of 10,000, and in halls for crowds of less than 500. 

Across every era, Takashi Sugiura has been there. Through the calm waters and fair winds of the mid 2000s, to the years the ark listed adrift in a sea of declining ticket sales and controversy, Sugiura has remained immovable, implacable and unignorable. 

Black Trunks and a Green Mat

Sugiura’s first steps on an emerald canvas came relatively late in life— he made his debut at 30 years old on December 23, 2000, as the first graduate to emerge from NOAH’s training infrastructure. 

He shared the ring with some icons of the ark that night, losing to the likes of Takeshi Morishima and Yoshinobu Kanemaru at Tokyo’s Ariake Coliseum. His was the third undercard appetizer in a Grand Voyage show that featured a now infamously shortened match between Shinya Hashimoto and Takao Omori, and capped off by an unforgettable clash between Kenta Kobashi and Jun Akiyama.

A decade later, the name “Sugiura” would be linked next to them on the list of all-time NOAH greats. But it would be a bullet point earned, not given, and he’d spend the next six years competing as one of the most over-torqued juniors to ever lace up a pair of boots.

A compact wall of muscle with a stare that, even two decades ago, could make a stone flinch, Sugiura quite simply looked out of place in NOAH’s Junior Heavyweight division in the early 2000s. 

And less than three years after his debut match, he’d be wrapping the blue leather of the GHC Junior Heavyweight Championship around his waist for the first time, inside the hallowed halls of the Nippon Budokan.

While these were early days for Sugiura, NOAH itself was in full bloom. Business was good, the product was world-class, and it was calm seas and clear skies for the newly launched ark.

Sugiura would manage two title defenses before Jushin Thunder Liger ended the streak four months later in front of 40,000 people at the Tokyo Dome.

That loss was an early preview of what would become Sugiura’s signature style of violence. 

A gut-wrench suplex on the ring’s entrance ramp, elbows thrown with the worst of intentions, chained German suplexes — many of the calling cards were already there in 2004. And so were glimpses of another, less physical hallmark of his identity: the mean streak.

There’s a moment in this match, about eight minutes in, where a fan standing at the entrance ramp barricade starts screaming. He’s dressed head to toe in a full Liger outfit and launching desperate words of encouragement at his motionless idol. Sugiura notices. He holds up the limp head of a rag-dolled Liger, presents it to the cosplaying fan like a trophy, and stomps it back down to the rampway. The defiant cacophony of the fan quickly fades away. 

Prologued at the Tokyo Dome that night, Sugiura’s prejudice to brutality would come to define his presence in NOAH over the next decade and beyond.

A year and a half later, he would unite with Yoshinobu Kanemaru, one of the men who handed him his first loss as a professional wrestler back in 2000. Together they would put an end to the blockbuster 690-day GHC Junior Heavyweight Tag Team reign of KENTA and Naomichi Marufuji.

Kanemaru and Sugiura would hold the junior tag championships twice over the next year and a half. Their second run would overlap with Sugiura’s own repeat Junior Heavyweight title reign, making him a double champion in the latter half of 2006. 

And so, five and a half years in, Takashi Sugiura had done all there was to do in NOAH’s junior division. He hit the under-100kg glass ceiling with the reverberating crash of an Olympic Slam delivered onto canvas and board.

Bleached Hair and Gold Belts

As the decade wore on, Sugiura refined his style, moved up to heavyweight, and entered a period of career growth and opportunity that would be make-or-break for NOAH’s first trainee. 

It was an era of long shorts and bleached hair for Takashi Sugiura, whose blend of crisp power moves and brute aggression had crystalized into something unmistakably Sugiura by the close of the 2000s. 

He quickly found heavyweight tag team success with Naomichi Marufuji, the man he had toppled two years prior, capturing the GHC Tag Team belts with him in 2007.

Outside of the ark too, Sugiura was being positioned as a star. He featured in the penultimate match at New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Wrestle Kingdom III along with Mitsuharu Misawa, and made it to the semifinals of the G1 Climax tournament seven months later.

It was all building to something extraordinary: his December 2009 war with then 27-year-old Go Shiozaki for the GHC Heavyweight Championship. If there’s one match in Sugiura’s career that’s a must-watch, one moment that marks the meridian between mid-card hero and bona fide main event talent, one answer to the question: “Why Sugiura?”— this may be it.

Bell to bell, it’s lightning in a bottle. Or perhaps, lightning in the Budokan.

The pace is set at 11 from the opening seconds, and it never really gears down. Every boot to the face, every running knee, every suplex is delivered with an edge of true danger. The mean streak and naked aggression that peeked out from behind the curtains back in 2004 was now center stage.

The Killing Machine had arrived.

Shiozaki gave as good as he got, but after 25 minutes of barely contained violence, Sugiura’s name is the one being called over the loudspeakers. They may not have known it at the time, but the 12,000 strong crowd witnessed a changing of the guard that night. The era of the All Japan Pro Wrestling legends was finally passing. 

Sugiura proved he really was among the stars by which NOAH could set its course going into the next decade. In fact, NOAH’s immovable object would turn out to be nothing short of a savior for the heavyweight title — providing a safe harbor in uncertain seas, both for the belt and the company itself. 

Because aside from a swansong run by Misawa himself three years prior, for the last half-decade the top title in the company had been passed around more times than a bar bill at the end of the night.

Since Kenta Kobashi’s sublime 2003-2005 run, short reigns featuring one or two defenses dominated the heavyweight championship’s resume, and neither old favourites like Akira Taue nor fresh faces like Takeshi Morishima were booked to stick around.

Sugiura’s first touch of heavyweight gold put an end to all that.

His inaugural reign spanned 581 days and included 14 title defenses — the most in the history of NOAH’s heavyweights. Nine years after debuting in the shadow of the likes of Akiyama and Kobashi, Takashi Sugiura was now casting his own. But while his own star was going nuclear, NOAH’s was beginning to flicker. The tragic death of founder and living legend Mitsuharu Misawa, the loss of a lucrative television deal, an organized crime scandal and a talent exodus after the sudden release of Kobashi manifested in empty seats and red ink on NOAH ledgers. 

This was the flotsam through which Sugiura needed to navigate the ark heading into the 2010s.

Hard Times and a Hard Man

Following that first, record-setting GHC Heavyweight reign, Sugiura entered a singles main event cool-down period. He returned to tag team success and captured gold with Naomichi Marufuji again in December of 2012.

But just days before the two would mark their second reign as GHC tag team champions together, NOAH announced the release of Kenta Kobashi. A few weeks later, Go Shiozaki, Jun Akiyama, Yoshinobu Kanemaru, Atsushi Aoki, and Kotaro Suzuki all abandoned ship for All-Japan Pro Wrestling. A year after that, KENTA would leave for WWE. The following spring Takeshi Morishima was forced to retire.

On the heels of several major blows to the company’s ability to do good business in years prior, NOAH had now lost many of the men meant to carry it through tough times. It would be January 2016 when Takashi Sugiura recaptured the heavyweight championship. But the NOAH he now found himself standing atop of was a far cry from the one in which he’d last buckled the belt.

It’s the empty seats that tell the story. 

Sugiura’s first heavyweight title win was in front of a 12,000-strong crowd in the mecca of Pro Wrestling NOAH, the Nippon Budokan. The second time he’d win the Global Honored Crown’s top title, just five years later, would be in front of 2,573 people at the Yokohama Cultural Gymnasium. Seven months later, as part of a third reign, he’d defend the title in front of less than 500 people.

But while the winds of change swirled around a battered and sea-weary ark, NOAH’s immovable object remained. Through changes in management, sagging attendance and a Suzuki-gun invasion angle courtesy of NJPW that left the company’s product hobbled, Sugiura continued to wrestle at an impossibly high level, consistently. 

In 2018, he once again strapped gold to his waist, defeating Kenoh in a physical 30-minute match to begin his fourth reign as GHC Heavyweight Champion. And this time it would stick. 

Two-hundred and eighty days later, a 48-year-old Suigura would pass the torch to Kaito Kiyomiya, the youngest GHC Heavyweight champion to date.

And for the first time in a long time, things were looking up for NOAH. The men who could carry the company into its next era, men like Kiyomiya and Kenoh, had arrived in the main event, and business was starting to stabilize. 

But what about Sugiura himself? Nearly two decades on, what was left for the man who had held every championship in the company and set records doing it?

How about a brand new title?

 In 2019, NOAH debuted the GHC National Championship — an openweight belt with a blank slate that was begging for an inaugural champion capable of giving it meaning, purpose, and identity. 

And Sugiura —the man who had become NOAH’s first native wrestler in 2000, the man who brought desperately needed stability to a heavyweight title adrift in 2009, and the man who helped buoy a battered ship in the mid 2010s— would be the first to wear it.

 

A National Title and a National Treasure

That was two years ago. Sugiura has since lost the belt and won it back again, becoming the first two-time National champion in history. 

In 2020, Sugiura paired up with Kazushi Sakuraba to capture wrestling fans’ hearts, and a Tokyo Sports award, in the tag team division. He capped off the year with an age-defying five-star title match against Go Shiozaki exactly 11 years to the day of their 2009 classic.

Immovable but hardly immobile, at 51 years old Takashi Sugiura simply refuses to be a spent force. 

He’s been there for the sold-out domes. He’s been there for the empty seats at prefectural gyms. And he’s here now for the resurgence of NOAH, wearing a red leather belt that no doubt will bear his mark for a long time to come.

This article was first published in Monthly Puroresu Issue #5