Kazuchika Okada has no love for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling or Impact Wrestling.
Whether part of an angle, his true feelings or possibly both, Okada didn’t mince his words when speaking about the promotion during a backstage interview after the fourth night of the Road to Destruction tour.
Impact’s current World Champion Alex Shelley will team with Chris Sabin and Josh Alexander to challenge Kazuchika Okada, Hiroshi Tanahashi and Tomohiro Ishii for the NEVER Openweight 6 Man Tag Team Championships at Destruction in Ryogoku on October 9th.
“Impact Wrestling? Give me a break! There is not a promotion that I hate more in this world but I was a pretty big Motor City fan back in the day. A little while back, we face them in a three-way match so I know how good they are,” he told the media, praising Sabin and Shelley.
Okada went on to slam Impact’s former branding as TNA.
“Being the face of NJPW I can say that I hate, actually, I don’t give a damn about Impact! What I really hated was TNA!” he said.
Okada wrestled in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling from 2010 to 2011. The way TNA booked and treated Okada during his excursion there, including having him dress-up like Kato from The Green Hornet, was one of the reasons NJPW and TNA’s relationship tanked at that time. Part of a wrestler’s training as a Young Lion in NJPW is to be sent to another promotion, referred to as an “excursion”, to reinvent themselves, their persona and learn all they can from the talent there before coming back to NJPW.
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