Brody King Describes How He’s Turning His Bucket List Into A Reality With NJPW
Photo Credit: RING OF HONOR / Zia Hiltey
Brody King is living his dream, as he is currently wrestles for both Ring of Honor and New Japan Pro-Wrestling.
King recently spoke with Andrew Thompson of POST Wrestling and discussed his decision to re-sign with ROH and the ability to work for NJPW. He emphasized that he wanted to continue to grow in ROH, a company that is known for producing world-class talents.
“It was definitely a hard decision because you know, wrestling is or was, hopefully again, booming at the moment, and there’s like so many other opportunities, other places you know, places like AEW, WWE, like stuff like that, but I felt like I still had to hone my craft a little bit more,” said King. “And I felt like Ring of Honor was always the place to kind of like really cut your teeth and really become a great professional wrestler. Having that Ring of Honor badge on my back, definitely I felt like I needed to do a singles run like I’m doing now. I needed to really make my name there first.”
The former ROH World Tag Team Champion explained that he’s always wanted to wrestle for NJPW, and he’s enjoying his time on New Japan Strong.
“Working for New Japan has been like a dream of mine since I started wrestling,” said King. “New Japan was always like my goal. So to be, yesterday, they included me on their roster page now, so that’s a really cool feeling. And I got to wrestle great talents like Tama Tonga, I got to wrestle KENTA. Those matches were [on the] bucket list for me. And now they’re a reality. But yeah, hopefully New Japan Strong like, starts to make waves and starts to become more of a bigger show, and we can just keep pumping out the US talent on a different scale.”
As a wrestler who is known for his toughness, King has competed while he’s injured. During the interview, King looked back on how he wrestled with a broken jaw.
“What had happened was I did a show, it was my last show for Santino’s [Bros. Wrestling] before I signed with Ring of Honor, and I was dropping the title there as well. I had a match against Jake Atlas, who’s now signed to NXT, and he did like a wild kick and I didn’t protect myself enough, and it just went right underneath my jaw. And it broke my tooth in half. And it had like a small fracture in my jaw underneath it. Well, I had to get emergency dental surgery to pull the tooth, and as the tooth got pulled, it fully fractured my jaw.”
“So I had to then have emergency jaw surgery the next morning. It was the most agonizing pain in the world. So yeah, the next morning I got jaw surgery, it was two days before Christmas, and the doctor said, ‘Under no circumstances can you wrestle for at least six months.’ And I got my jaw wired shut, I could barely breathe, my cheeks were all puffed out because it was swollen, and I was like, well I got an AAW title match in seven days, and I got a match against Darby Allin in a No Ring Match the day after, so sorry doc, that doesn’t work for me. So yeah, I flew out to Chicago, I drank only Muscle Milk for like three days, it sucked really bad.
I didn’t want it to be like, ‘Oh, Brody had to call out because he got injured and now the title is vacant.’ Hell no, that’s not what I want to be about. That’s not what I want my record to show. I want it to be like, this psychopath stepped in the ring with Sami Callahan in a steel cage with his jaw wired shut. That’s a much better story to me than the latter.”
The full video is available here:
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