The 10 Most Unlikely IWGP Heavyweight Champions Ever

One of the most prestigious titles in wrestling, the IWGP Heavyweight Championship is the top title in New Japan Pro Wrestling. Boasting only 71 champions to date, New Japan is very particular about who gets to hold it, only giving the title to the top guys they trust the most to best represent the company. As a result, icons like Tatsumi Fujinami, Riki Choshu, Great Muta, Shinya Hashimoto, Hiroshi Tanahashi, and Kazuchika Okada have all held the belt.

Which isn’t to say that only the top homegrown stars of NJPW can capture the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. In the title’s 33 years of history, there have been numerous unlikely candidates in addition to the elite, as well as at least one member of The Elite. Let’s take a look at some of the more left-field choices in IWGP Heavyweight Championship history.

10 Scott Norton

IWGP Heavyweight Champion Scott Norton with nWo Japan

It may surprise some Western pro wrestling fans to find out that Scott “Flash” Norton held the IWGP Heavyweight Title, but it’s even more shocking that Norton held it twice. While in WCW he was an underrated member of the nWo compared to the famous ex-WWE guys in the group, in NJPW he was a gaijin monster heel in the vein of Big Van Vader and Giant Bernard.

Norton even defended the title on Monday Nitro a couple of times, squashing titans like Van Hammer and Lodi.

9 Salman Hashimikov

While Big Van Vader was the first gaijin champ in the title’s history, Salman Hashimikov was the man who defeated Vader for the title in 1989, becoming the fifth ever champion and the first actual Russian to win a pro wrestling title outside of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps chosen because of his amateur wrestling background -- NJPW founder Antonio Inoki loves a shooter more than anything -- Hashimikov’s wrestling career was short-lived, lasting about five years.

8 Kazuyuki Fujita

Speaking of shooters, here’s Kazuyuki Fujita, one of the first men to benefit from Inokiism, the NJPW period where Antonio Inoki started to push legitimate fighters over his more traditional pro wrestling talent. Nicknamed “Ol’ Ironhead,” for his uniquely hard skull, Fujita was considered a promising student of the NJPW Dojo in his younger days, but really took off with the company in the early 2000s, when he adopted a shoot style to his in-ring repertoire.

As a result, he was booked to beat Scott Norton during Norton’s second run with the IWGP Championship in about seven minutes and racked up successful defenses against Yuji Nagata and Don Frye during his 270-day run until he had to vacate due to injury.

7 Nobuhiko Takada

Trained by the NJPW dojo, Nobuhiko Takada would leave the promotion to start his own promotion, Union of Wrestling Forces International, which would become a (kayfabe) thorn NJPW’s side, spawning a highly popular invasion storyline.

In 1996, at the January 4th Tokyo Dome show, the invading Takada took the IWGP Heavyweight Title from Keiji Mutoh, holding it for nearly four months. Takada would drop the title to NJPW’s Shinya Hashimoto in an NJPW vs. UWF-I rematch at the Tokyo Dome in what would become one of the greatest title matches in NJPW history.

6 EVIL

It just happened, but it’s impossible to deny that EVIL’s ascent to becoming the top heel in NJPW in 2020 came from out of left field. Fans were expecting yet another Kazuchika Okada victory in the New Japan Cup to set up a rematch against Tetsuya Naito, but EVIL got the W over the Rainmaker.

He then turned heel on his Los Ingobernables de Japon stablemate Naito to join Bullet Club. Even more surprising is that EVIL took the title from Naito, crowning the former IWGP Tag Team Champ as the man to beat in New Japan.

5 Tadao Yasuda

A former sumo wrestler, Tadao Yasuda retired from the sport in 1992, transitioning to pro wrestling the following year. A perennial undercarder throughout the 1990s, Yasuda improved his station in NJPW thanks to a couple of successful MMA wins in the early 2000s, defeating Masaaki Satake at Pride 13 and Jerome Le Banner at Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye 2001.

Antonio Inoki loved to push guys who had momentum in “real” fights, so Yasuda ended up defeating Yuji Nagata in a tournament for the vacant IWGP Belt in 2002.

4 Tetsuya Naito

The leader of Los Ingobernables de Japon, Tetsuya Naito is now one of the most popular wrestlers in NJPW. But before that, he was “The Stardust Genius,” an up-and-comer being pushed as a top babyface, and fans were not having it, Roman Reigns style. Naito was so unpopular that fans voted to bump his challenge for Okada’s IWGP Title at Wrestle Kingdom 8 to second-to-last in favor of an Intercontinental Title match.

Naito would go on excursion to Mexico and return as a heel, winning over fans with his new attitude. He’d eventually become a two-time IWGP Heavyweight Champion, but before his reinvention, it was inconceivable that Naito would be a top champ.

3 Bob Sapp

For many NJPW fans, Bob Sapp’s title reign is the nadir of the promotion’s history. A former college football star whose NFL career fizzled, Sapp found new life as an MMA fighter, kickboxer, and pro wrestler in Japan in the early 2000s.

His success outside of wrestling would lead to a run with the IWGP Heavyweight Title, winning it from Kensuke Sasaki in 2004. He’d have one successful title defense against Shinsuke Nakamura before being forced to vacate the title, as a legitimate MMA loss against Kazuyuki Fujita killed his credibility.

2 Manabu Nakanishi

Debuting for NJPW in 1992, Manabu Nakanishi’s career was often hampered by circumstance. Aside from winning the G1 Climax in 1999, Nakanishi had the misfortune of coming into his own in the Inokiism era, during which he found no success in MMA or kickboxing.

By the time the smoke of that era cleared, younger talents like Hiroshi Tanahashi were on the rise, causing Nakanishi to be left in the dust. However, Manabu Nakanishi managed to capture the IWGP Heavyweight Title once, winning it from Tanahashi only to lose it back 45 days later.

1 Kenny Omega

The coronation of Kenny Omega as IWGP Heavyweight Champ feels like an anomaly if you look at it from a certain perspective. He’s not only a gaijin but a gaijin who came into prominence for Japanese fans in DDT Pro Wrestling.

Many Japanese wrestlers who didn’t come up through the NJPW dojo rarely get to hold the Heavyweight Title, so a foreigner who mostly worked in the Junior Heavyweight divisions reaching the top of the NJPW mountain feels super unlikely.

NEXT: NJPW: The 5 Best (& 5 Most Disappointing) IWGP Heavyweight Title Matches