Fathers, failures, and Hirooki Goto

Featured image by @saya_midori

Hirooki Goto was 44 when his father passed away. It happened on February 2nd, 2024, exactly 2,913 days since Goto last challenged for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. Goto would publicly announce his father’s passing in a short tweet posted on February 4th.

“I thought I was ready,” he wrote, but no one ever truly is.

One can only imagine the effect this had on Goto. He hasn’t shied away from discussing his father’s death in public, often folding it into his pro wrestling endeavors through most of 2024. As for its personal effect on Goto, one can only imagine the depth of sadness, the regrets, the reflections on his own role as a father to three children. As Goto himself said, there’s really no preparing for such a happening, no matter what one tells themselves.

Much of Goto’s 2024 lives in the specter of the event. He dedicated his seventh run in the annual New Japan Cup to the memory of his late father, an act that made Goto a sentimental favorite through the tournament. If there was any occasion that might be tipped in Hirooki Goto’s favor, it would be the New Japan Cup. He’s the record holder for most wins in the tournament’s history, with victories in 2009, 2010, and 2012.

As Goto progressed through the tournament, he would often dedicate victories to his father or otherwise draw upon his memory for strength. Goto successfully made it through three rounds, defeating Chase Owens, David Finlay, and SANADA to qualify for the finals against Yota Tsuji. On March 20th, 2024, Goto would fall in the finals of the New Japan Cup to Tsuji, another in a long, familiar line of losses for him.

The truth is, I had no reason to believe in Hirooki Goto.

My knowledge and fandom of pro wrestling narrowed a lot in the mid-2010s. The fall of the puroresu.tv forums and the loss of platforms like Megaupload meant that I typically consumed only the most easily accessible wrestling of the time. I watched a lot of WWE programming with only the occasional dips in the pool for indie favorites as well as hyped matches coming out of Japan. By the time I became a regular New Japan viewer in 2017, the company was already moving into the tail end of the Bushiroad boom, and Hirooki Goto was already firmly a loser.

Goto challenged for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship eight times in his career between 2007 and 2016. He was turned away each time, with the big breakthrough always postponed until some new hot star comes along to take the spotlight. In 2012, Okada’s Rainmaker shock and meteoric rise cut off the momentum Goto had spent the late 2000s and early 2010s building. It’s Okada himself who deals the most humiliating blow to Goto on February 11, 2016, a match Goto describes as “the worst match of [his] career.” defeating a Goto who had undergone something of a spiritual and visual transformation in an attempt to win the title. Clad in white and covered in body paint, Goto gets put down with a damning finality by Okada, a perception made even worse when he would go on to join Okada’s CHAOS faction, cementing his subservient position to the golden boy of the company.

“I wanted to make a change,” said Goto in a 2025 interview, “but didn’t have any ideas beyond that.”

A firm glass ceiling had been placed over Goto’s prospects after that 2016 loss. Despite making it to the finals of the G1 that year, it became clear that his star had fully been eclipsed by the rise of the likes of Kenny Omega and Tetusya Naito. Goto would finish out the 2010s as a loyal member of CHAOS, never really daring to reach for the stars again lest he be humbled once more. The stink of failure lingered on the man, enough so that it was easy for a relatively new fan like myself to overlook him in the years that followed.

I was nine when my father passed away. It happened on June 23, 2005, after several months of battling lung cancer. It took me many years to understand that I wasn’t ready, it seems that no one every truly is. The death of a father is the kind of thing that looms large over a life, especially when it happens in childhood. I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades living through the effects both big and small of losing my father. If I ever stop for long enough to really think about it, there’s a million things in my life now I can tie back to that moment. I’ve spent a lot of time weaving it into the story I tell about myself, in basically every creative field that I’ve ever taken on.

What death so often leaves the living with is doubt. I was a child when I knew my father, which sometimes makes me think I didn’t really know him at all. How much does one reveal to a child after all? There’s a warmth in the memory, one that runs deep enough to feel true, something that speaks to the essence of a thing or a person, but how much of that is colored by childhood nostalgia and naivete?

But beyond that, there’s the passive questions that leap forward in my mind every now and then. Anybody that’s lost a parent probably has the same thoughts now and then. What would they think of me now? What fights did we never have? Would they be proud of me?

So when Hirooki Goto won the New Japan Rumble and took a photo with his #1 contendership certificate by his father’s final resting place, it tapped into a reality of my own life that I consider inextricable from my own identity. It became easy to overlook Goto’s past failures, because suddenly his pain was my own.

Hirooki Goto was a grown man when his father passed away.

Even then, the doubt. I’m fairly certain that Hirooki Goto’s father wouldn’t have loved him more just because he became IWGP Heavyweight Champion, an accomplishment in a predetermined sport. But one tends to pour themselves into the things they care most about. For someone in a field as competitive and high pressure as pro wrestling, a career path that requires full dedication of body, mind, and soul, it’d be easy to feel a sense of oneness with one’s craft. Goto’s body is the tool of his trade, every lariat an expression of his being, every kick a piece of self. If that’s the case–if that’s the feeling–then the failure to capture gold is nothing short than the failure to achieve one’s full self.

Goto himself expresses that great regret in a tweet from January 26th. In it he recounts a dream where he was able to speak to his late father once again. In that brief respite from death, Goto’s able to show his father the #1 contender’s certificate and the IWGP World Title itself. Even in dreams, Goto’s mind turns only to what might have been.

“In my dream my father was laughing…but when I woke up, I was crying.”

I know what it’s like to have the dead visit my dreams. My own preoccupy themselves with the practicalities of the moment, my mind working so hard to justify the impossible that it forgets to indulge in the moment. When I dream of my father, there’s a reason he’s with me again. A false death, a freak supernatural miracle, any number of things that my subconscious has conjured over the years. No great wisdom is shared, no knowledge from the afterlife. When I wake, there’s no real catharsis from any of it, just a quiet acknowledgement of the absurdity of it all. Not painful, more a mild irritation that nags at the heart for a moment or two.

It was easy to cling to Goto’s dreams–I wanted them for my own.

New Japan in 2025 is not the same New Japan that spurned Hirooki Goto eight times in a row. Like the man himself, the company has been humbled. The new decade has not been kind to the company. A barrage of unfortunate circumstances ranging from the COVID pandemic, the rise of AEW as another major economic force within the industry, and a general creative downturn have left New Japan in a prolonged state of transition. Over the course of the last five years, the main event scene that defined much of their 2010s success has been completely gutted–Omega, Okada, and Ospreay on to greener pastures in AEW, while the likes of Naito and Tanahashi fall prey to the debilitating physical effects of pro wrestling.

The company’s response to these challenges has been mixed. There’s been an effort to push a fresh crop of young talent, even going so far as to officially brand a new set of Three Musketeers in Yota Tsuji, Ren Narita, and Shota Umino. Meanwhile, long time upper midcard stalwart Zack Sabre Jr. finally got a long overdue turn in the sun as the 2024 G1 Champion and then IWGP World Heavyweight Champion not long after that.

It’s Zack who stands in the way of the miracle in Osaka.

Zack puts in one of his finest performances here as well. It’s a different tone from the foreign invader he’s played in the Philippines or Mexico. He’s not actively antagonizing the crowd, flashing his backside or flipping off the audience members. No, Zack plays a more subtle villain here, and helps to elevate the tension of the moment. What we give up in clear heel chicanery, we gain in added tension. Zack’s approach feels laser focused here–something that can rarely be said about him even in the best of times–and there’s a confidence to his control work that makes him feel like a constant threat to shut Goto down. It’s actually a wonder how well Zack’s able to make his cut offs feel cheap without cheating. Those nasty little neck twists build up momentum for a potential attack until he finds a much richer opening in attacking Goto’s arm. Zack sticks to that arm too, so much so that one imagines the match might reward him for it. It’s a natural enough story to tell that faced with an emotional crowd and a sentimental favorite, Zack Sabre Jr. locks in as he rarely does and is able to snuff out the dream.

But armwork is no match for the hopes of a fatherless son.

Goto’s arm selling is wonderful. He feels limited and it costs him at multiple points of the match–some of his lariats don’t land flush, his elbows are weakened, he’s unable to go right into covers because he’s dealing with the pain. The weight of the pain makes the comebacks only that more thrilling. When the lariats finally land like thunder, it’s riotous. Even when Zack returns to the limb, Goto responds with pure determination. With an arm down, he uses his head instead, literally headbutting Zack down into submission to soften him up for the final string of offense. There’s such tension in the finishing stretch, enough that one can truly live and die by Goto’s performance. At one point, a lariat sent me leaping up out of my chair so violently that I knocked the headphones off my head and to the floor.

When Goto gets the three-count, it’s joyous. How special too that he gets to celebrate with his children in the ring, a story about fatherhood looking forward to the future instead of solemnly upon the past. It’s the kind of emotional heights that only pro wrestling can capture in a way that feels so raw, honest, and out of this world.

In defeating Zack Sabre Jr, for the briefest moment, it felt like Hirooki Goto defeated something grander. It’s a rare privilege to find catharsis from one’s grief, and Goto achieves that here. He did it for himself, but for so many others like him in the world watching. I know for certain I wasn’t alone in that feeling. A pair of GTRs isn’t much in the grand scheme of thing, but for just a bit they feel powerful enough to silence questions, and allow pride to take over instead. Certainty snatched from the depths of doubt, redemption nine years to the day from his grand humiliation in Osaka, a father’s memory honored.

One must imagine Goto’s father would be proud of him.

In fact, I’m sure of it.