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Bad Luck Fale (2018)

160 Pts.



The first half of Bad Luck Fale’s year was devoted mainly to his run with the NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Team Titles alongside Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa. The Tongan trio lost the belts at Wrestle Kingdom 12 to the CHAOS team of Beretta, Tomohiro Ishii, & Toru Yano, but immediately won them back the following night at New Year Dash!! They would go on to hold the belts for 118 days with three successful defenses during the reign.

After losing the titles to Marty Scurll & The Young Bucks in May, Fale took a leave of absence for a few months to lose weight and get into better fighting shape. During his time off, Guerrillas of Destiny and King Haku staged a violent coup against The Elite at G1 Special in San Francisco. They declared that they were the Bullet Club OG’s and they were sick of The Elite and their petty squabbling over leadership of the stable. Since Fale was absent from the show, it was unknown at the time whether or not he would side with the Tongans, but any confusion was quickly put to rest when he declared himself BCOG. The group, which also included Taiji Ishimori and the injured Hikuleo, made every possible effort to cheat and interfere in each other’s matches. Fale’s G1 Climax was loaded with this stuff, causing him to lose six of his nine block matches via disqualification. It subsequently became Fale’s worst G1 ever, not just from a points perspective (this is the first G1 where Fale has not scored at least 10 points) but from a critical perspective as well; the matches were widely panned and Fale’s weight loss did very little to improve his athleticism in the ring. Following the G1 Climax, Fale spent the remainder of the year feuding with The Elite and then CHAOS in tag matches.

It was a down year for Bad Luck Fale because he just did so little, especially compared to last year. 2017 saw Fale reach the finals of the New Japan Cup and wrestle Okada for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. Fale lost in the quarterfinals to Hiroshi Tanahashi in this year’s NJC and his sole title matches were for the lowly 6-man belts. He also wrestled the fewest amount of matches for New Japan since 2013 with 76, although based on his performances in the ring, I wouldn’t call it a tragedy that he didn’t wrestle as much. Most notably Fale was pinned only one time this entire year (a tag loss to Okada & Beretta at Power Struggle), but that was because his other fall losses were via DQ (the G1 losses) or countout (the loss to Tanahashi in NJC).