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The G.O.A.T. 100 #81 | Zack Sabre Jr.
- Peter Edge
- 6 hours ago
- 14 min read
Welcome to the G.O.A.T. 100 where we will count down with PWM wrestling historian Peter Edge the 100 greatest wrestlers of all time, based on many different stats and criteria. A new wrestler will be added on Mondays and Thursdays every week. Here is a link to an introduction essay with Peter explaining his GOAT100 concept. At the bottom of the article you can find the GOAT 100 Portal with links to all profiles so far published, as well as a visual key... Enjoy learning more about the history of our great hobby!
One of the greatest eccentricities of pro-wrestling is that wrestlers have an ownership over their on-screen presentation like no other art. On the indie scene, you can have a wrestler come out to the ring to any song they like. I’ve seen wrestlers come out to "Simply The Best", "Backstreet's Back" and Cascada’s "Everytime We Touch". One wrestler in their canon was injured from being at a “shagging convention”. It can be the wild west when it comes to character presentation.
Zack Sabre Jr. is one of the more fun examples of that. One aspect of presentation you can get as crazy with as you like is the names you give your signature moves, especially if you have as many as Sabre. There is a fantastic perverse enjoyment to hearing Shinpei Nogami say the following:
Article 50 (Cross armbreaker)
Barry from Eastenders (Grounded abdominal stretch)
Cremation Lily (Double omoplata / Figure-four stump puller combination)
Clarky Cat (Bad Balloon Remix) (Stretch Muffler / Armlock combination)
How About These Legs / You Can't Play Conkers In England (Standing armlock cross hold)
Hurrah! Another Year, Surely This One Will Be Better Than The Last; The Inexorable March of Progress Will Lead Us All to Happiness (Double armbar octopus hold)
Hypernormalisation (Back-mounted inverted surfboard)
Orienteering with Napalm Death (Stretch Muffler / Calf slicer combination)
Sabre Driver (you’ve been tangoed special) (Spinning leghook dropped into a sitout scoop slam piledriver)
Selected Technical Works Vol.2 (Indian deathlock / rear naked choke combination)
South Mimms Services (Elevated Fujiwara armbar)
Sunday Rail Engineering Works Replacement Bus Service (Heel hook)
Tesco Meal Deal (Head scissors / hammerlock combination)
Yes! I Am a Long Way From Home (Indian Death Lock / Octopus hold combination)
(I look forward to explaining "Barry from Eastenders" to Sergei in the editing process of this bio.)
My personal favourite is Orienteering with Napalm Death, which comes from a stand up routine from Stewart Lee, a famously grumpy comedian whose look at British life is as fantastically downbeat as a Ken Loach movie – in which he talks about the time when he went to Solihull School, which is in my hometown and we all hated kids that went to Solihull School which was full of weirdo poshos that went to school on a Saturday that went to the supermarket over the road for their lunch while us middle class kids had to make do with a packed lunch…..
Sorry, where was I?
Oh, Stewart Lee’s tale of Orienteering with the members of band of Napalm Death when he was at that posho school taps into the eccentricity of British humour and Zack taps into that culture with how he presents himself as a wrestler and has made waves in Japan with a style of wrestling that is very different from the rest, just like how Stewart made himself different from the more mainstream British comics like Michael McIntyre.
Luke Eatwell made his debut under the Zack Sabre Jr. name that he still uses to this day in April 2004, making waves in the NWA UK: Hammerlock promotion, winning the company’s Junior Heavyweight Title in 2005 with a three year reign with the belt before a vacation of the title in 2008. Zack did the “weekend warrior” gig wrestling up and down the UK doing various promotions, doing regular shots at Real Quality Wrestling, 1PW: UK and Triple X Wrestling out of Coventry in a working men’s club a couple of minutes walk from the Coventry Cathedral that was destroyed by the Blitz in World War 2. Coventry was the city where he had the match with Bryan Danielson in 2008 in the Jolly Beggar that everyone mentioned when looking forward to the match the pair would have 15 years later.
In 1PW, he had a rivalry with Paul Robinson. He would frequently tag with Jimmy Havoc around the promotions and in 1PW, Zack won the tag titles with Marty Scurll.
wXw in Germany would use Sabre regularly with Zack feuding with Tommy End (later known as Aleister Black in WWE) and having matches with Big Van Walter (Gunther) and Sha Samuels. He would be discovered by Pro Wrestling NOAH when wrestling in their European Navigation show dark match in the Coventry SkyDome teaming with Mark Haskins and Dave Moralez against El Ligero, Bubblegum and Luke Phoenix but would only start wrestling for NOAH in July 2011 after further shots in Wolverhampton and Germany on their Europe tours.
Zack’s main places of business in the first half of the 2010’s apart from NOAH were wXw, PROGRESS and Pro Wrestling Guerilla. wXw was where he had his most critical success early in the decade. While wXw’s Cagematch coverage is skewed by the fact that the site is based in Germany, the quality of Zack’s work was there to see. Zack quickly became the best worker in the company, having multiple “notebook” matches per year with the highlights being a pair of matches with Marty Scurll against Adam Cole and Kyle O’Reilly and matches against Davey Richards and Walter.
In PROGRESS, Sabre was on the first Chapter in the company’s history, wrestling Scurll in a qualification match for the main event – a four-way to determine the first PROGRESS Champion which Zack lost, but in the longest match of the card.
In NOAH, Sabre never got a chance to hold the Junior Heavyweight Title, instead being in the division’s tag title scene with Yoshinari Ogawa as his partner with only one notable singles match before 2015, being a ****¼ match with Daisuke Harada.
In Pro Wrestling Guerilla, Zack fitted into the super-indy easily with his first weekend in PWG, Battle of Los Angeles 2014 seeing a super trios match with Kenny Omega and Chuck Taylor against the Superkliq trio of The Young Bucks and Adam Cole, along with a run into the second round of the BOLA tournament. It wouldn’t be a year later before Zack became a regular in the Reseda part of Los Angeles, where he would build yearly resumes to make him a consistent name in Best In-Ring lists from 2015 onwards. Matches against Ricochet, Pentagon Jr. and Scurll – all 3 “notebook”, all three won by Zack – got Sabre into the final of BOLA 2015 against Chris Hero and “Speedball” Mike Bailey in a Three Way Elimination with Zack winning one of Indie wrestling’s majors in 35:54.
March 6th, 2016, saw Zack win the PWG World Title off Roderick Strong with ZSJ holding the belt for 16 months with defences against Scurll, Trent and Kyle O’Reilly before losing the belt to Chuck Taylor in an epic match with Zack putting in one of the best performances in the “heel losing the title” genre you’ll ever see. Zack would wrestle just eight more times for the L.A. outfit with the match against WALTER getting the Meltzer 5-star treatment thanks to the “being there live” tax of Big Dave being a regular Reseda attendee in this time.
At Revolution Pro Wrestling, Zack would have great matches with Scurll and Shinsuke Nakamura, Katsuyori Shibata & A.J. Styles with the New Japan / Rev Pro partnership seeing NJPW wrestlers come to the UK to appear on the UK indie’s shows. Zack impressed so much that New Japan offered a contract.
But New Japan wasn't the only one in for his signature. In March 2016, Sabre Jr. was announced as a participant for WWE’s Cruiserweight Classic, where he got to the final four, which was broadcast live on the WWE Network – where he lost to Gran Metalik in the semi-finals. Originally booked to get to the final, Zack’s reluctance to agree to a contract meant a change of course in booking, and not long after he signed with NJPW.
Zack’s first match in a New Japan ring would be at the 45th anniversary show a year later, in which he faced Shibata in a rematch for the British Heavyweight Title that Shibata had won from him at the York Hall back in the fall of 2016. Sabre Jr.’s win was abetted by Minoru Suzuki and Zack became a member of the Suzuki-gun faction. Sabre would end up moving up to Heavyweight and be in the field for the 2017 G1 Climax where he got to a 5-4 record, with 3 “notebook” matches in his tournament – against the expected suspects in Block A to have a “notebook” match with at this time, in Kota Ibushi, (the other Cruiserweight Classic semi-finalist) Tomohiro Ishii and Hiroshi Tanahashi, the last of whom Sabre beat.
The next year, Zack would win the New Japan Cup, making him the second foreigner to win the major after Giant Bernand (someone that Zack would have had to listen to telling Zack “how to work” had he signed with the Fed and been sent to the Performance Center.)
The IWGP Heavyweight Title match that Zack got as a result as his NJ Cup win, against Kazuchika Okada has the ***** treatment from me, with it being a quarter star shy of the five from Dave Meltzer. But it would be a match in Spain against A-Kid in 2018 that saw Zack get his first of what would be 12, as per writing, five star ratings from Big Dave. A-Kid you might now know as Axiom.
It was during this time that Zack was widely considered among the best technical wrestlers in the world, with the previous lineal WON best technical wrestler of the year, Daniel(son) Bryan, just back in the ring after a lengthy absence because of lack of medical clearance. But while Bryan was back in the ring, he was still working in a WWE ring so was still in third gear while Sabre was going down the highway full throttle.
The last 18 months of the 2010s saw Sabre in no less than 18 matches with a Cagematch rating of 8.00+ with 11 of those coming in the 2018 and 2019 G1s.
A feud with Hiroshi Tanahashi in which he swapped title wins for the British Heavyweight Title was the main feud that Zack would have, in a time when he wasn’t having stories to tell but being the epitome of “wrestling guy having great wrestling matches”.
Zack and Will Ospreay would have something that very much resembled a feud in 2020 with Will dethroning Zack at High Stakes 2020, which would be the final match that RevPro would put on before the Covid-19 pandemic truly hit British shores.
While some British talents struggled with being in Japan during the pandemic, Zack would thrive. He set up residence there and fully learnt the language. In the ring, Sabre and his Suzuki-Gun stablemate Taichi, under the name Dangerous Tekkers, would beat the Golden Aces, Hiroshi Tanahashi and Kota Ibushi, to win the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Titles and the pair would be a featured act in the division defending the belts on consecutive Wrestle Kingdoms, even if they lost the belts on both occasions, to Guerillas of Destiny and Bishamon, respectively.
But one of the big features of professional wrestling in 2020 would be Speaking Out, a social movement against the abuses against women in the wrestling industry. A lot of names mentioned above ended up outed as abusers. Zack – who had got a following over the years from online fans for his unashamedly socially progressive views, to the point that it was NJPW canon that Zack’s bad showing in the 2019 G1 was because he was stressed out that Boris Johnson had become Prime Minister of his home country – was expected to eviscerate the people he had shared a ring and built relationships with backstage with before he became big in Japan. But he didn’t.
Instead, Zack laid low on social media. He was criticised online by quite a few people for not commenting on the tornado that blitzed British wrestling in the summer 2020, but as Revolution Pro owner Andy Quildan said in podcast interview a month later, Zack felt in a position that because he didn’t comment immediately, not knowing what to say, that any comment later would have been seen as way too late. Zack hasn’t posted on Twitter since, other than a retweet splurge promoting soccer players' initiative to give free school meals to schoolchildren.
The 2021 G1 saw Zack go 4-0 in the early going, running through Tetsuya Naito, Kota Ibushi and Shingo Takagi, making them tap-out with a philosophy of having any submission he would apply never last longer than seven seconds, transitioning to a new one until the inevitable tap-out happened. While Sabre Jr. went on to do a “Spursy” (google it – I’m not explaining the term associated with my football team that has caused me many nights of stress and torture) by going from 4-0 to 6-4 and non-qualification for the final match, he was the best wrestler in the tournament that wasn’t Shingo Takagi – who was the 2021 MVP of wrestling in Japan.
March of 2022 saw Zack win his second New Japan Cup. His run to lift the cup saw a belting match with Shingo which for a moment made the audience forget that they still weren’t supposed to make noise orally as a COVID precaution. Zack also had a really great match with his wrestling soulmate runner-up, Will Ospreay – only hindered by the fact that it went 5 minutes longer than needed, typical of the “clap-crowd era” for NJPW.
Zack would once again face Okada for his IWGP Heavyweight Title as his reward for winning the New Japan Cup and once again, Zack would come up short in his bid for glory. But while Zack’s first NJ Cup victory was the booker Gedo telling the audience that Zack was going to be around for a while, the second – along with the previous year's G1 – told them that he was going to be a featured player.
The 2022 G1 saw Zack have “notebook” matches with Naito and Tanahashi before failing to get to the knockout stages in the new format of the G1 that now saw an expanded sudden-death elimination stage.
When the crowds were to be allowed to make noise again instead of clapping, Zack won the newly-invented TV Title at the Tokyo Dome and also had his own stable to lead after Suzuki-gun split in the weeks before Wrestle Kingdom 18.
TMDK were below the likes of Chaos, Bullet Club and LIJ in the pecking order of factions in New Japan but they started getting cheers and as Zack’s reign as TV champ got steam, the crowds really warmed to Zack and co.
The USP of the TV title (in the mould of the old Television Title in WCW, with booker Gedo’s fondness of southern wrasslin’ really at show) was the 15-minute time limit, and Zack would use that to have a lot of good matches in his reign. His G1 in the summer would see Zack as more-or-less a babyface as he got to the knockout stages before losing to eventual finalist Okada in the quarter-finals.
Sabre, unlike his fellow countryman Ospreay, wouldn’t get a chance to beat Okada in what was his final year as a New Japan wrestler – in a 3 year period since the 33rd edition of the G1 that has seen an exodus from NJPW with six of the eight quarter-finalists from this Climax going on to new endeavours away from New Japan.
Zack would lose the TV Title 365 days after he became the inaugural champ, losing surprisingly in my opinion to Hiroshi Tanahashi, instead of one of the Reiwa Musketeers that was coming up through the company (Yota Tsuji, Shota Umino, Ren Narita.)
Part of the USP to the TV Title was that Zack defended it away from NJPW with defences of the belt happening on Ring of Honor's weekly show. Zack would also make regular appearances for Rev Pro with highlights being a 18/2/24 match against Connor Mills, a Zozaya match at the 2025 Anniversary show and a beautiful match against Hechicero at the Anniversary show the year before – which I was fortunate to be at live seeing the llave style of Hechicero mesh so well with Zack’s nu-wave remix of the World of Sport style.
Then Bryan Danielson would finally leave WWE and now the straitjacket was off and the debate back on – of who was the best technical wrestler in the world. With the New Japan and AEW relationship being decent, Sabre and Danielson could get their dream match done.
15 years after their first encounter in that working man’s club in Coventry, Sabre Jr. and Danielson put on a wrestling classic that certainly stood out in an era that saw MJF-ism turn devoted AEW fans off the product at the time. I actually preferred Danielson / Sabre III at New Beginning four months after their WrestleDream match, which was my MOTY for 2024.
Zack used this momentum as his rise up the tiers of the New Japan roster escalated to make more political points. He called Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister at the time a “dickhead” during his WK 18 entrance before winning the TV Title, and appearances in the UK were often met with a “Fuck the Tories” chant, tapping into the desire of the masses to get rid of the ruling Conservative Party (even if the eventual replacements in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party were Torie-lite.)
The trust levels New Japan have in ZSJ was shown when he would get a second reign beating Matt Riddle after NJPW had only realised after when they booked Riddle to win the belt that he was a massive twat.
Reign two was a transition reign with Jeff Cobb beating Zack at Dontaku but there was a reason why Sabre didn’t have that title heading to the G1, he was being braced for the big belt.
Zack would win the G1 with a win over Tsuji in the final and in a break with convention, would have his reward of a shot at the IWGP Heavyweight Championship come early at King of Pro Wrestling instead of Wrestle Kingdom where he would beat Tetsuya Naito to win the IWGP Title
Sabre's main event of Wrestle Kingdom 19 defending the world title against Shota Umino had a negative reaction. FWIW, I didn’t hate the match. I thought it was better than the previous two 1.4 main events. To be fair, Okada vs White was never following the epic Omega vs Ospreay match that preceded it but Jay White stalling so much that Larry Zbyszko would have gone “come on now” soured my taste for the main event of WK 17 and Naito vs Sanada was more mid than a Qatar performance at the 2026 World Cup. I will concede that its 43:44 match length, making it the longest main event in Wrestle Kingdom main event history, was too long though.
One other problem was that Zack as champion saw the line go down when it came to business. Royal Quest III in London didn’t see a boost in business when its home country lad was bringing the IWGP belt to the UK and the Wrestle Kingdom show that Sabre was heading into as the champion did an attendance of 24,000 which was the lowest for January 4th Dome show (pandemic shows aside) since 2012.
The short-term increase in business when Hirooki Goto became IWGP Heavyweight Champion after beating Zack at New Beginning, the first big show after Wrestle Kingdom in ‘25, was a damning indictment on Zack’s box office credentials.
But when Hirooki had to drop the belt because of a role that he would play in the yet to be released Street Fighter movie (yes, he is playing E. Honda) Zack was trusted to be the holder of the grandest prize in NJPW, dissecting Goto to the point that in New Japan storylines, Goto’s absence from the G1 was because of the injuries picked up in the match.
Sabre was less a face but more of a tweener from this point on. He was also a transitional title holder as Konosuke Takeshita beat ZSJ to become champ.
Since that night when Zack dropped the belt at King of Pro Wrestling to Takeshita – who also cashed in his G1 Climax win at KOPW and not Wrestle Kingdom (I hope this isn’t a permanent trend) – Zack has been more in the tag and trios scene with Zack and Ryohei Oiwa winning the World Tag League at the end of ‘25 and then Sabre, along with Oiwa and Hartley Jackson would win the Six-Man Titles on the pre-show by winning a Rambo (NJPW’s version of a Royal Rumble).
Zack’s legacy has yet to be cemented as he’s still yet to hit 40, making him one of the just five under the age of 40 to be on this list, and whether he can become 41st-Best Professional Wrestler like Stewart Lee became the 41st-Best Comedian Ever is something that may or may not happen, but watching Zack wrestle in this decade is an Alternative Wrestling Experience in a Content Provider world … and in a changing New Japan world, it would be silly for the powers that be at NJPW to discard Zack Sabre Jr. like Carpet Remnants as Zack’s Tekkers have made him a talent like no other in the 21st century.
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