Ibushi’s shoulder injury had him considering retirement.
It was at GCW/Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport 9 in March 2023 that Kota Ibushi made his return to in-ring competition. He had been out of action since October 2021 when he suffered a shoulder injury in the finals of the NJPW G1 Climax tournament.
Ibushi has wrestled in a total of seven matches this year and his latest was for AEW on the 11/15 episode of Dynamite. Ibushi is signed to the company.
To start off 2024, he’ll be competing for Pro Wrestling NOAH for the first time since 2012. He is scheduled to wrestle Naomichi Marufuji at ‘The New Year 2024’. NOAH’s official website conducted an interview with Kota and he brought up his 2021 shoulder injury and shared that he thought about retirement. Ibushi knows his career could come to an end at any moment. He added that when the demand is no longer there, that’s a sign that it’s over.
(I thought about retiring because) of my shoulder injury. Like in the old days, like everyone wants, there are parts of us that can’t move (like we used to). I have to use different techniques there. Of course, with my career, I can change things by doing different things, but if someone says, ‘That’s not what we want to see,’ then that’s it. That’s the end for me. So in my case, it wouldn’t be strange if it ended tomorrow. It wouldn’t be surprising if it ended in the next match. It could be a year from now, or it could be 10 years from now. I don’t know. When the demand is gone, it’s over.
Circling back to the upcoming match against Marufuji, Ibushi commented on the past attempts at making the match happen.
Those bouts fell through due to injuries and Ibushi regrets not being able to make those happen earlier in his career.
It kind of fell through due to Marufuji’s injury (Ibushi said about past attempts at matches with Marufuji). I think it was the following year, when Marufuji and I were going to have a singles match in DDT. But this time, I had a dislocation on my side that had not healed yet. We both missed one singles match each. We didn’t overlap. In the end, we passed 12 years without meeting each other. During those 12 years, we both experienced a lot. Personally, I have no unfinished business. The only thing I wish I had done was to have worked with Marufuji at that time. I am the type of person who never has regrets, but Marufuji is the only person I can think about for a moment and wonder what would have happened if I had done it back then. I don’t want to call it regret, but it is regret, after all… I thought we would never cross paths again, but now that we are both in our 40s, I think we can see something new in each other.
Ibushi versus Marufuji is being billed as the main event for The New Year 2024. The headlining match for the 2023 installment of the show was The Great Muta (Keiji Muto) versus WWE’s Shinsuke Nakamura. That match won the Best Bout award in the 2023 Tokyo Sports Awards.
