As far as I’m concerned, this title has been mostly a disaster up until this point. My tastes aren’t welcoming to a CZW vs. anyone feud, so Zandig’s dominance of the BJW Death Match Heavyweight Championship was a slog. But CZW is gone now and the company needs a new champion (and a new title belt). BJW spent their time without the Death Match Champion headlining a few shows with their short-lived BJW Heavyweight Championship (a very indirect precursor to the Strong Championship). But the Death Match title was always the real headliner, so they crowned a new champ in Kintaro Kanemura when he beat Shadow WX in March of 2003.
Kanemura held the title for five months before losing it to Ryuji Ito. Ito held it for a record 16 months before losing it to Abdullah Kobayashi. When I say record, I mean it was over four times longer than any previous title reign. To this day, no single reign has come close. Kobayashi lost the belt to Takashi Sasaki after 100 days. Takashi held it for five and a half months before Ito won it back. Ito vacated the title after only four days as champion due to an injury. Sasaki won the vacant title by beating Jaki Numazawa in December of ‘06. Eight months later, a bunch of smaller Japanese wrestling companies got together for a show in which all of their titles would be on the line. Numazawa got a rematch against Sasaki in the main event. By this point, the title belt had been shattered to look more hardcore. Up until this point it had looked like this.
August 26, 2007 – Tokyo, Japan
Jaki Numazawa def. Takashi Sasaki {BJW Death Match Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Pro-Wrestling Summit In Ariake: King’s Festival! All Title Matches. Halfway through this match, I wrote out this shtick going back and forth between the pros and cons of what I’d seen so far. But then the cons started morphing into pros. The main con was that neither guy was selling through the first ten minutes of the match. But that’s not really the case. Both guys were playing tough for the first ten minutes as they got slammed and suplexed onto the broken glass left behind by light tubes. And then ten minutes in they both collapsed, unable to stand strong in the face of the punishment they’d endured. From there, the match looked very different. Numazawa was almost never on his feet, just barely surviving Sasaki’s assault. This was an example of a match where yes, there were a lot of light tubes broken, but there was no time spent retrieving any other weapons from the floor or taking time to set up spots that wouldn’t factor into the match’s progression. This was a hard hitting match that happened to have a lot of light tube shots. I can dig it. Numazawa blocked an attempt at a piledriver onto a light tube and then strung together a few moves before bouncing off a tube attached to the ropes to hit a lariat for the win at 19:50. Do people know about this match? It rules. Numazawa held the title for four months before losing it to Ito. ****
May 4, 2008 – Koshigaya, Saitama
Shadow WX def. Ryuji Ito {BJW Death Match Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Katsura Special 14. Ito bleeds right away, seemingly because of WX’s fingernails gouging his forehead. This match had the flaws that the last match eschewed. There was a chunk of meandering around the building in the first few minutes so that Ito could climb up the wall of the building to hit a splash through a table. On the bright side, that kept WX from regaining control for a while. This also had some match-ending psychology that I don’t understand. WX hit Ito with a superplex off of a 10-foot scaffold, spit a fireball in his face and then hit a lariat, and hit a suplex through a light tube board, all of which Ito kicked out. But then WX hit a spinning suplex onto the mat and that did the trick at 20:43. But why? Why did the regular move do what all the ultraviolet moves didn’t? There wasn’t anything to indicate earlier in the match that Ito was more susceptible to that kind of thing. In fact, WX put Ito in a crossface earlier on and just let go because the regular wrestling move wasn’t getting the job done. I don’t get it. The match certainly wasn’t boring, I’ll say that. But this wasn’t my jam. WX lost the title to Yuko Miyamoto seven months later. **¾
May 4, 2010 – Yokohama, Kanagawa
Ryuji Ito def. Yuko Miyamoto {BJW Death Match Heavyweight Championship Cage Match}
From the 15th Anniversary Show. I am thankful for the cage because it kept them from going to the floor and wandering around. I thought the two spots off of the cage were neat, and was thankful that one of them, Ito’s frog splash, gave Ito the win at 20:44. I am not thankful that Miyamoto’s moonsault off the cage was basically no-sold by Ito. I am not thankful that 18 minutes of this match were filled with meaningless light tube shots. I automatically assume there are going to be no innovative or even interesting spots in a match, or stories told, if I see that there are light tubes involved. It’s such a crutch to get the crowd to react without delivering any substance to a match. Boo. Booooo! **½
December 18, 2011 – Yokohama, Kanagawa
Abdullah Kobayashi def. Ryuji Ito {BJW Death Match Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Death Vegas. So I guess Kobayashi is a little death match goblin spawn of the Butcher. He eats glass, you see. I liked his weird, trolly vibe, but I despised this match. Not only was it boring, structured to get cheers only as new weapons were introduced rather than doing anything resembling a wrestling match, but it was extremely gory for the sake of it. At one point, Ito jammed a cookie cutter into Kobayashi’s forehead. I pretty much tuned out after that. Also, I get that they’re doing it to have the visual of a cinderblock breaking on someone’s back, but smashing one block over another doesn’t look painful. It just looks like you’re dumb. Kobayashi hit a diving elbowdrop for the win at 22:00. A diving elbowdrop is somehow more devastating than a cradle piledriver on top of a bunch of cinderblocks. What a dumb match. ½*
January 2 ,2013 – Tokyo, Japan
Shuji Ishikawa def. Abdullah Kobayashi {BJW Death Match Heavyweight Championship Match}
From Wrestling Wars. Ishikawa is an actual good wrestler. There are Ishikawa matches that I adore. I thought having him in there instead of Ito would make this night and day compared to the last match. And while Ishikawa’s innate skill as a professional wrestler was on display here (he made sure that most of the things that happened had consequences, be they immediate or delayed), a good chunk of the match was setting up plunder piles or doing things to make sure both guys were bleeding a lot. It’s a death match, so I expect the blood, but the meandering to get to the next spot just kills me every time. Luckily, Ishikawa brings a brutality that has nothing to do with light tubes, so the match had more zhuzh than it would have without him. He hit a Superfly Splash for the win at 19:37. ***¼
Ishikawa held the title for a good long while, and during his reign they switched the belt to the one that is still in use today. So that’s where I’ll break and we can come back to see if the rest of the decade had any quality violence on display.
From Diamond Ring Kensuke Office Changes. They emphasize that Nakajima beat Dragon Gate wrestler Kenichiro Arai 
From Dynamite 131. This is a qualifying match for the Owen Hart Foundation tournament. Joe debuted at ROH Supercard of Honor, saving Jonathan Gresham from Jay Lethal (whose soul searching apparently led him to turn heel) & Sonjay Dutt after the main event. And now that ROH and AEW are the same thing, that seems worth mentioning. Caster’s pre-match rap was cute. This was real squashy, with Joe needing only two minutes to put Caster down with the Muscle Buster at 2:52. Lethal & Dutt pop up on the big screens and Lethal says he’d been trying to get a hold of Joe during his difficult soul searching time, and Joe never picked up. They have a present for Joe next week. N/A
From Dynamite 132. Jay Lethal & Sonjay Dutt were in the front row cheering on Joe. Sarcastically, probably, as they brawled with Joe at ROH Supercard of Honor XV. 
From Rampage 39. 
From Dynamite 137. 
From Dynamite 138. This is a 
From Double or Nothing. 
From PWF York Cougar Football Fundraiser. I didn't know that this match happened until over a month after the fact. This started out as a non-title match, but we'll get to why I've listed it as a title match in a moment. FTR have Mick Foley in their corner while their opponents have Bill Behrens. I’ve never actually seen Behrens do an on-camera gig before. He's holding a tennis racket, presumably as an Umaga to Jim Cornette. But it's confusing because there was actually a tennis player named Bill Behrens. They announce this match as having a 20-minute time limit. Only 11 minutes in, they say there are three minutes remaining. Until then, this was as run-of-the-mill as a modern FTR match gets. But the announcement snapped everyone out of their heat-on-Wheeler funk and forced them to go for desperate pins. They announce ten seconds remaining a couple of times, but no one can get the roll up pin they're looking for. The 20-minute time limit expires at 1
From NXT UK 183. McGuinness started by essentially saying that Fraser is going to pee or poo himself during the match. Unnecessary. Had Shawn Michaels been game to have a good match against Vader, this is what it would have looked like. Actually, a more appropriate and modern analogue is Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins from SummerSlam. Much like that match, Frazer used quick strikes and avoided his larger opponent’s signature big move to stay alive. Here it was the powerbomb whereas there it was suplexes. Here, Frazer also successfully damaged WALTER’s knee, which slowed the big man down and made it hard for WALTER to hit the powerbomb. Unfortunately for Frazer, WALTER was able to bide his time and clothesline Frazer’s legs out from under him. An inevitable powerbomb followed and won the match for WALTER at 14:02. I hate to say this because I’m happy that he’s healthier, but the way WALTER has slimmed down has taken some of the magic away from his aura. At least for me it has. That said, dude can clearly still go as well as ever in the ring. ****
From NXT 659. Strong was feeling it here, which is thanks in large part to the crowd being maniacally loud from the get go I’m sure. His whole game was fast and devastating stick and move attacks. That worked pretty well, as WALTER was dazed from time to time. But as with all good WALTER matches (which is pretty much all WALTER matches), everything WALTER does is devastating here so it takes very little for him to take back control. And eventually he did just that and hit the powerbomb for the win at 9:46 (shown of 12:18). After the match, WALTER gets on the microphone and says that his name is Gunther now. I did not think WALTER would be a victim of the renaming curse this far into his run. What will they rename Strong?! ***¾
From NXT UK 185. Andy Shepherd helpfully announces from inside the ring that the reason for the stipulation is that the feud has gotten so violent that it wouldn’t be safe to have fans around. Devlin says during the match that it’s because he thinks Dragunov could only muster the energy to win if he had the crowd behind him. I like that explanation a lot more. The only real reason I could think of to do this without fans is that there was a scheduling conflict with one of the wrestlers for the regular TV taping date and they needed to get this thing filmed. We just had such a long stretch of empty arena NXT UK episodes that I can’t imagine anyone was dying to get another taste of it. This aired the day after Adam Cole vs. Orange Cassidy in a match that was also no disqualification and falls count anywhere, and this served up everything I felt was missing from that match. Now you might say, “Brad, Cassidy is not the same kind of character as Devlin or Dragunov, how could you expect the same level of violence or intensity?” To that I say, when Cassidy started his match by breaking his own sunglasses and rapidly punching Cole, he was indicating that level of violence and/or intensity. And instead the match was mostly wacky. Anyway, this was not wacky. It was stiff and intense and featured weapons that made sense and spots the didn’t take forever to set up. Dragunov got in trouble when his eye injury acted up. Devlin took control and beat the crap out of him. I wasn’t wild about how meek Dragunov was when Devlin was zip tying his hands, but I did like that in the end it turned out to be an error on Devlin’s part anyway because Dragunov’s finisher requires no hands. And indeed, a bound Dragunov jumped off the steel steps (which had been brought into the ring) and hit the Torpedo Moskau on Devlin for the win at 21:43. NXT UK is still sneaking in these dope matches that no one is watching. Y’all should watch them. ****¼ 
From AAA Triplemania Regia. FTR come out with Vickie Guerrero. This was supposed to be explained at an earlier AAA taping but FTR and Guerrero all missed them. AAA is notorious for having this kind of luck/being incompetent lately. FTR is also wearing Eddie Guerrero tribute tights, with American flags on one side and flames on the other, I suppose to pay homage to his Gringos Locos and Latino Heat gimmicks. This match mostly sucked, but one cool spot saw FTR tie Pentagon’s mask to the ropes and force him to unmask with his hands over his face to stop them from climbing the ladder. That would have been a very meaningful moment to lead up to the Lucha Brothers winning the titles back, but unfortunately instead it led into nothing. He just got his mask back and the match continued on in its lame, derivative way. At one point, Pentagon was the only man standing, but instead of climbing the ladder he grabbed a table from the floor. So the titles mean enough to him that he’d unmask to stop his opponents from winning, but not enough for him to get the titles when he had a clear path to do it? Vickie powered Pentagon, causing him to voluntarily jump through the table and Harwood grabbed the belts at 12:12. This was abysmal. *
From AEW Full Gear. Silver was hamming it up a lot more here than he was the year before in New York. That said, this had stronger just-a-match vibes than the aforementioned match. After Silver ripped out Cassidy’s pockets, Cassidy turned up the heat and these guys put on a middle of the row undercard match. Not bad by any means, but nothing memorable either. Cassidy hit the Beach Break rather out of nowhere for the win at 9:42. **¾ 
From the second Honor Reigns Supreme. The commentators sold this as Gresham getting a big shot against a top ROH guy after being an also-ran in the Television Championship division for a while. This was terrific. Both guys did a fantastic job selling their respective targeted limbs, and Gresham in particular played the role of the tenacious underdog perfectly. He didn’t just watch to see where Lethal would have trouble executing his finisher because of the damage he’d done to the former ROH Champion’s arm, he pressed the assault whenever he could, taking out the arm to make sure the Lethal Injection would never come. But what he couldn’t do was stop Lethal from battering his knee and ultimately winning with a Figure 4 Leglock at 17:54. ****¼ 
From the second Masters of the Craft. Columbus has way more Gresham fans than Concord did. That’s a neat little advancement to the plot, innit? They both went after the same limbs that earned them dividends in their previous match. And then they went ahead and built an incredible match out of that story. At first it seemed as though Lethal wasn’t going to be able to get Gresham’s leg to give out. But about halfway through the match, Gresham’s knee was in trouble. Gresham was able to escape the leglock this time by using the momentum of Lethal pulling him away from the ropes to shift to an armbar. But Gresham’s focus on the arm bit him in the ass. Lethal went for the Lethal Injection and collapsed again, but when Gresham went for a roll up after that Lethal cut back on it for the win at 18:27. This is one of the best American examples that I've seen of a match building on the match that came before. Rather than try to outdo the maneuvers from their first meeting for the sake of a big crowd reaction, they adjust their game plans in logical ways that, to me, were just as exciting. I think this match is slept on, by virtue of the fact that I’ve never heard anything about it before watching it. ****½ 
From ROH Wrestling 364. In real life, 
From Death Before Dishonor XVII. Gresham and Lethal had been teaming, but Gresham grew frustrated and started heeling. Ultimately, he turned on Lethal. It took them a little while to get there, but once they got into a groove this was exactly what I wanted from this match. It was back to their old tricks, with Lethal targeting the leg to set up for the Figure 4 Leglock and Gresham targeting the arm to block the Lethal Injection and set up for his Octopus. In the end, Lethal tried the cutback trick that worked for him in Columbus, but Gresham countered to a pin and then put on the gnarliest Octopus for his first win over Lethal at 17:20. This is the best kind of wrestling series. And none of it felt stale because it was a year after they’d wrestled last and because they found ways to energize the old tropes. And that’s not to mention Gresham busting out what I can only describe as a sumo-style assault. Gresham and Lethal make up after the match. ****
From ROH Wrestling 500. During the pandemic, ROH made the most of their empty arena shows by kicking them off with a tournament to crown a champion for the revived Pure Championship. Gresham won the tournament, and this was his fourth defense of the title. Lethal and Gresham were still allies here. In an interesting move, the other match on this milestone episode was two other partners fighting in Jay and Mark Briscoe. They cut to a commercial break about six minutes in, though the action didn’t get beyond (admittedly fast-moving) mat wrestling until the 10-minute mark. That had me thinking this was going to go long, but things took a different turn. Both guys had abused the other’s shoulders, and Lethal used that to his advantage best. He forced Gresham to use his first rope break to stop a pin, and his second to escape a crab. Then, he used the failed Lethal Injection to bait Gresham into a crossface, forcing the champ to use his final rope break. But he made the mistake of giving Gresham a breather and was quickly caught in a head scissor takedown giving Gresham the winning pin at 14:06 (shown of 16:40). For an empty arena match, this held my attention. It was totally different than their previous matches while still using a couple elements from the rivalry to elevate it just a bit. Not essential viewing, but if you’re working your way through their series you shouldn’t skip it. ***¼ 
