Bryan Danielson will battle Kazuchika Okada at NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 18 on January 4, 2024.
Ahead of his match at the Tokyo Dome, Danielson spoke with New Japan Pro Wrestling about his experience training at Antonio Inoki’s dojo back in 2002 and more.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On wanting to go to NJPW when he began competing: “New Japan, when I started wrestling, that’s where I wanted to be… I was training at the Inoki Dojo and I was going regularly on tours … and me and Curry Man had won the IWGP Jr. Tag Team Championships as a tag team and, all of the sudden, I just stopped getting booked and it was really, really frustrating.”
On training at the Inoki Dojo: “I first started training [in the Inoki Dojo] in 2002. The mentality was, and this was directly from Inoki, is that we treat professional wrestling like a sport and you train legitimate combat sports… The mentality for us was we’ve got to train our ass off. If we want to live up to this ideal that Antonio Inoki had of wrestling.”
