Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi wrestled as the Golden Lovers, one of the most unique and interesting teams in Japanese history.
Playing on the perceived idea of a gay relationship between the two, they began a comedy wrestling tag team in DDT called the Golden Lovers.
This eventually led to huge matches in companies like Ring of Honor and New Japan Pro Wrestling. Both men eventually went their separate ways and became tow of the biggest stars in the world.
They both became IWGP Heavyweight Champions while Omega also boasted a number of world titles, most notably the AEW Championship.
Speaking with Monthly Puroresu, Kenny Omega detailed the origins of the Golden Lovers tag team and how they came up with some of their most famous moves.
We came up with the idea, let’s try to convince Takagi-san for us to be a tag team instead. And both of us thought Takagi-san is never going to go for it.
So we went and presented him with the idea that “Hey, if you give us a chance to be a tag team, instead of continuing this one-on-one feud together, we promise that we will show you something that you’ve never seen before in tag-team wrestling. And we’ll revolutionize what tag team wrestling means.”
My career on the line that we can make it happen.” And Takagi-san said “You’re not putting your career on the line! Shut up! Don’t go that far. If you really that passionate about it. Sure.
We’ll give it a shot, test it and see if it’s okay.” I remember we came up with a couple double teams and we had real good natural chemistry together and it felt good and it was on a random house show.
A show away from Tokyo. And we thought, “Well, we might be onto something. But we don’t have that one thing that is really going to convince DDT to stick with this.”
Ibushi being Ibushi, he’s got all these strange hookups and he has like secret dojos that he trains in. He said: “Come to the secret dojo and we’ll work on something.”
That’s where we came up with some of our more famous double-team maneuvers; that’s when we came up with “The Golden Shower” which is a double 450 off the top rope. I think it was less impressive that we were able to do a double 450 but that when we did it, we naturally jumped at the same height we naturally had.
We naturally had the same spin speed, the way that we talk as the exact same. It just looked too pretty. And when we saw the video of us sitting on like a training dummy and us hitting it from multiple angles and distances, we thought, “Oh my God, this is what we need to bring to the table.” This is what it is.
Kenny Omega could reunite with Kota Ibushi soon in AEW, which could see a Golden Lovers reunion inside a Blood and Guts match against the Blackpool Combat Club.