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Marty Scurll (2018)

140 Pts.



Marty Scurll wasn’t exactly the most active member of the New Japan roster this year, wrestling just 34 matches, but he did have an impact, especially in the junior heavyweight division. He walked into the Dome to start the year as the junior champion, having beaten his longtime rival Will Ospreay for the championship at Power Struggle the previous November. Ospreay would quickly have his revenge at the Dome however, pinning Marty to win a 4-way match (also involving KUSHIDA & Hiromu Takahashi) for the title. It would take Marty nearly 3 months to get another shot at Ospreay and the title at Sakura Genesis, where he would once again be defeated in a match that drew rave reviews.

The first few months of Marty’s year were also filled with the BULLET CLUB civil war between Kenny Omega and Cody, with Marty finding himself somewhat humorously aligned with Cody despite never even really showing he wanted to choose a side in the first place. But at Wrestling Dontaku in May this conflict would be mostly put aside; Kenny and Cody would still have a match against each other a few months later at the G1 Special in San Francisco event, but the rest of the unit would make peace with each other and leave together, at least for now. Marty also captured his second championship in New Japan at Dontaku, teaming up with the Young Bucks to take the NEVER Openweight 6-man titles from his BULLET CLUB mates Bad Luck Fale & the Guerrillas of Destiny. At the time the Tongans seemed strangely okay with this, but in hindsight one wonders if it was another factor behind what would happen next with the BC.

In the meantime Marty had a Best of the Super Juniors to get through, and put up a decent 4-3 record (the same record he had put up in 2017, however). After BOSJ, Marty went to San Francisco to compete alongside the rest of the BULLET CLUB. At the end of the previously mentioned Kenny-Cody match the Tongans would make their move, attacking BC leader Omega and ultimately laying out the rest of the unit. Marty would end up firmly in the camp of the BULLET CLUB Elite side of the faction, alongside the reconciled Kenny and Cody. On August 12th at the G1 finals an impromptu defense of the NEVER 6-man titles saw the Bucks & Marty lose the belts to the newly christened BULLET CLUB OGs, in this case the team of the Guerillas of Destiny and newcomer Taiji Ishimori.

Marty would wrestle just three matches in the rest of the year in New Japan, two of them coming in a 4-man tournament to name a new IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Champion after Hiromu Takahashi’s tragic injury. The Villain managed to defeat his old rival Ospreay on 9/30 in Long Beach, but in the finals fell to KUSHIDA at King of Pro Wrestling and was unable to regain the junior title. Around this same time the BC Elite announced that they were dropping the “BULLET CLUB” from their name, going just by the Elite instead and essentially surrendering the faction to the OGs. This meant that Scurll’s year-and-a-half long stint in the BC, which kicked off with one of the most memorable angles in recent ROH memory when he, the Bucks and Omega (via video message) conspired to have him replace Adam Cole in the unit, was now over with little more than a whimper.

As 2018 comes to a close Marty now finds himself in a strange position- many of his friends in the Elite (Cody, the Bucks & Hangman Page) are setting up shop in an entirely new promotion, no one knows what the future of the other members (Kenny obviously but also even Yujiro Takahashi & Chase Owens) will be, and Marty actually already started a new faction in ROH called Villain Enterprises (with new additions Brody King & PCO). What does this mean for his future in NJPW? Will Villain Enterprises come to New Japan together? Will Marty continue teaming with the Elite guys, if they even still wrestle in New Japan, even though some of them represent a different promotion in the US? It’s a complicated situation, and one that at press time no one really know the answers to.