For nearly 20 years, Rocky Romero has been wrestling on the independent scene.
He’s worked with various promotions and events in Mexico, Ring of Honor, and New Japan; he has captured the CMLL World Super Lightweight Championship on three occasions, the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship and the NWA World Junior Heavyweight Championship.
In the tag team division, he is a former three-time ROH World Tag Team Champion and a record eight-time IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Champion.
The current Roppongi 3K boss sits down with Uproxx to talk about many topics relating to his wrestling career, including having total freedom in NJPW:
"We have all the creativity in New Japan. We really have free reign there. Character-wise you can do whatever you want, you can say whatever you want. There's no restrictions to anything. That's why you've seen those funny, mean videos of Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa cursing up a storm. There's nobody to tell us that we can't. Really, to work for such a big company and have that much freedom, it's unheard of. I didn't have to separate things or compartmentalize and say 'Okay, well I'm going to use this for this.'
It was cool, the music fit into the character, then this, and I just added stuff that was actually me and not just playing a role for somebody like I did in Mexico whatever. It just all came together and then I just kept coming. I was just like I'm going to keep creating stuff until somebody tells me, 'Hey, you should stop doing that, because it's not very good."