Beginning in 2024 I began to keep track of every match of professional wrestling I watch for the year. At first I thought this was going to be daunting, it turns out I just like making spreadsheets. The month of January is typically a big month of professional wrestling, between New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Wrestle Kingdom in the Tokyo dome and WWE’s Royal Rumble it's hard to not get excited as the calendar switches years. Aside from those huge events, January has swept in some shocking contract news for several huge stars, and the rebranding of a promotion that is somehow still alive.
Wanting to get ahead of the curve WWE added special tags to their weekly shows for the first week in January. Monday Night RAW Day 1 edition was expected to be pretty exciting with Drew McIntyre challenging Seth Rollins for the World championship as well as some other more exciting matches. We couldn’t have been more wrong. My average match score for the whole show was a defeating 4.8, now this score was weighed down by an injury for Giovanni Vinci and Drew McIntyre looking like an idiot, not understanding rope breaks 20 years into his career. The next night was NXT’s New Years Evil special, which thankfully was a MUCH better than RAW. The finals of the NXT Men’s Break Out Tournament, which Oba Femi won, As well as 3 good women's matches including Lyra Valkyria and Blair Davenport.
For the first week of 2024 I was WWE’d out. Which was great news because there was definitely more wrestling outside of the WWE bubble. Stardom put on their New Year Stars Triangle Derby, the one night trios tournament which ended with God’s Eye becoming the new Artists of Stardom Champions. Charlie Dempsey challenged for the AJPW Triple Crown Championship, which was real grappling at its finest. Dempsey will almost definitely be my favorite wrestler in the next year or two and his excursion in AJPW was like getting a glimpse into the future. AEW opened the year with a fantastic showing of Orange Cassidy and Dante Martin. Mariah May made her in-ring debut against Queen Aminata who also was signed to AEW recently. A breath of fresh air for AEW’s Women division. Feeling a little overwhelmed about how much I had to watch, I skipped most of Stardom Gate and just watched Mayu Iwatani vs Syuri, which blew me away. A fantastic match between two of the best wrestlers around today.
Then came Wrestle Kingdom! As excited as I was for this show, NJPW really needs to cut back on the amount of matches at this event, some of these opening matches felt sort of pointless. The New president of New Japan became the NJPW World Television champion by defeating Zack Sabre Jr. which I can only hope means ZSJ has big things in his future. Before I talk more about the things I loved about Wrestle Kingdom, I wanna point out that I was beyond excited to watch Yota Tsuji vs Yuya Uemura. Based on the story we were told, I was expecting a huge match that would be a look ahead to the next few years for NJPW, but what we got was a match that was barely 10 minutes and felt like it never got to third gear. What they put on was not bad by any means, but when the bell sounded I was left confused. I can only hope these two lock up again and are given a chance to really shine.
In Typical Wrestle Kingdom fashion the main events are practically guaranteed Match of the year contenders, this was no different. The triple threat match for the IWGP Global Heavyweight Title was fantastic but compared to the last two matches on the show, it just doesn’t make the cut. In a rematch from AEW’s Forbidden Door, Kazuchika Okada collided with The American Dragon Bryan Danielson. While watching these two beat the ever living shit out of each other, I was mortified of another injury for Bryan as he has been wrestling on a not fully healed broken arm and a broken orbital bone. To my knowledge somehow no one came out of this match with something broken.
One of my earliest memories of watching NJPW is seeing Tetsuya Naito completely trash the IWGP Intercontinental Championship, even breaking the belt at times, its once pristine white leather now grayed and frayed. A sight that I don’t think I'd ever seen in wrestling. Years later he is the main event of Wrestle Kingdom against SANADA, a former faction member of Los Ingobernables de Japon. There was history in this match, it was important to the wrestlers. I hope Naito will cherish this world title now that it is his.
All of that was in the first week of 2024, holy shit. The next notable event in January was the return of TNA. Like many others I was very skeptical about this. The overall card looked promising. TNA chose to have their first match be a Knockouts Ultimate-X match which was a phenomenal choice. A match design that no one else has done, a signature for TNA combined with their deep roster of women. Giselle Shaw walked out the victor of this match. Giselle has been doing great work anytime I check in on Impact/TNA. Rosemary and Havok returned as The Decay, another long time stable of the company. One of my favorite matches of the night was for the X-Division championship, Chris Sabin, El Hijo Del Vikingo and Kushida. I’m genuinely convinced no one in this match can put on a bad performance. My other favorite of the night was Trinity and Jordynn Grace for the Knockouts Championship. We all knew Trinity was wrapping up with TNA, This match was a swan song for what was a great run for her. I would’ve loved for this match to go another 10 minutes, despite these two no longer being in the same company. They will lock up again in the future. The main event for the show ended with Moose becoming the new World Champion. I’m personally not a fan of his but he has been a TNA guy for years and is a name that many people will be drawn to.
The bangers didn't stop this month as NJPW put on Battle in the Valley in San Jose California. At this show we had a phenomenal No DQ match between Shingo Takagi and Jon Moxley with everything you could want from these two. The event was also Will Ospreay’s goodbye to NJPW against Kazuchika Okada who at the time we didn’t know was not far behind him. Not even halfway into this month I am exhausted, Dynamite on January 17th had an insane card headlined by Samoa Joe vs HOOK. The outcome didn’t surprise me but both of these men came out looking like a million bucks. Reminiscent of Jeff Hardy and The Undertaker so many years ago, HOOK earned Joe’s respect. Speaking of Jeff Hardy however the following week on Dynamite he faced off against Swerve Strickland in a match that shocked me. Why the hell did they pop off like they did? It was a random Wednesday night. We finally saw the return of Thunder Rosa to Dynamite. Rosa has been out with back injury for what feels like ages, to say I’m excited for her return is an understatement. This show was main evented by Adam Copeland vs Minoru Suzuki, a match that got announced on twitter to the shock of everyone, Adam Copeland included who found out that this was actually happening on twitter alongside the rest of us. In typical AEW fashion their main events on dynamite are given about 10 minutes which is always so underwhelming especially when a dream match like this falls into our laps.
The icing on the cake for every January in professional Wrestling is the Royal Rumble. Which this year took place in St. Petersburg Florida, which I personally hope they never return to. Following the Women’s Royal Rumble match they were asleep for the entire show. I was shocked with how much better the Women’s rumble was this year compared to the men's rumble match. So many interwoven stories, even a surprise entrant or two. Formerly Trinity returns as Naomi in the Royal Rumble. We got the debut of Jade Cargill in WWE, and Jordynn Grace came to send off her rival one more time. I want to give props to Chelsea Green who was a standout amongst her peers. She came out to the ring carrying a gay pride flag to the confusion of many of my non -wrestling fan friends who I was watching this show with. Chelsea has talked about how she believes it is important to show support for the queer community, I have some mixed feelings about it. I think her heart is in the right place so I’m happy she did it. The comedy spots involving her in the match all landed perfectly, whenever she’s on my screen, I’m certain she will get a laugh out of me. We even got the return of Liv Morgan! Who ended up being in the final three with Jade, and Bayley. What was so exciting was that I believed several of these women had a real chance at winning. Bayley coming out the victor was so exciting. I’ve been a Bayley fan for so long and no one deserves this more than her. The rest of the royal rumble was okay in my opinion, weighed down by a sleeping crowd, a fatal 4 way where we knew who was winning, and a disqualification finish for another match. The men's royal rumble felt a bit like a dud. The winner going in was one of two people: CM Punk or Cody Rhodes. Which is exactly who it came down to. Rhodes ended up winning and is supposed to be facing Roman, but we will see as The Rock hangs over them like a dark cloud.
Every year January ends up being a momentous time in wrestling. Kazuchika Okada announced that his contract with NJPW was ending with 2 weeks notice. Vince McMahon was finally fully removed from WWE by executives of parent company TKO. TNA returned in full force, Nic Nemeth (formerly Dolph Ziggler) and Mustafa Ali are now beginning to tear up the independent wrestling world. I wish I had the time to watch it all. Maybe one day I will be able to, until then. I hope you enjoyed my recap of January 2024 in Professional Wrestling.
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