NEVER Openweight Champion
| NEVER Openweight Championship | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The NEVER Openweight Championship belt
(October 2012 — present) |
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| Details | |||||||||||||||||||
| Promotion | New Japan Pro-Wrestling | ||||||||||||||||||
| Date established | October 5, 2012 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Current champion(s) | Hirooki Goto | ||||||||||||||||||
| Date won | January 4, 2017 | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Statistics | |
|---|---|
| First champion(s) | Masato Tanaka |
| Most reigns | Tomohiro Ishii (4 reigns) |
| Longest reign | Masato Tanaka (314 days) |
| Shortest reign | Evil (10 days) |
| Oldest winner | Yuji Nagata (48 years, 9 days) |
| Youngest winner | Evil (29 years, 281 days) |
| Heaviest champion | Togi Makabe (110 kg (240 lb)) |
| Lightest champion | Masato Tanaka (93 kg (205 lb)) |
The NEVER Openweight Championship is a professional wrestling championship owned by the New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) promotion. NEVER is an acronym of the terms "New Blood", "Evolution", "Valiantly", "Eternal", and "Radical" and was a NJPW-promoted series of events, which featured younger up-and-coming talent and outside wrestlers not signed to the promotion. The project was officially announced on July 12, 2010, and held its first event on August 24, 2010. On October 5, 2012, NJPW announced that NEVER was going to get its own championship, the NEVER Openweight Championship, the promotion's sixth active title.
The title was originally scheduled to be defended exclusively at NEVER events, but this plan was quickly changed and since its foundation, the title has been defended on the undercards of NJPW events. The original concept of having younger workers wrestle for the title has also not been realized with the first seven holders of the title having been in their thirties or forties. The eighth champion, Evil, is the youngest holder in the championship's history, having won the title at 29 years and 281 days. Though named an "openweight" championship, NJPW has also categorized the title as one of the promotion's four heavyweight titles, alongside the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, the IWGP Intercontinental Championship and the IWGP Tag Team Championship. Together, the NEVER Openweight, IWGP Heavyweight and IWGP Intercontinental Championships also form what has unofficially been called the "New Japan Triple Crown" (新日本トリプルクラウン Shin Nihon Toripuru Kuraun?). The title's openweight nature means that both heavyweight and junior heavyweight wrestlers are eligible to challenge for it.
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