– he obviously got pushed and pushed hard due to being Riki Choshu's "boy" for the early portion of his career (to the point of more or less being a "clone" of Choshu to some extent early on).
– I think he truly came into his own sometime around '99 and especially 2000, when he grew the stache/goatee out along with the mullet and biker jacket (although his most iconic look is probably when he cut his hair short and started wearing more colorful tights, like in the pic).
– It's funny that he was being positioned as NJPW's new "Ace" figure in the late early 00's, especially after the promotion fired Shinya Hashimoto and Keiji Mutoh chose to leave for AJPW, only for Sasaki to leave in 2002, when he and Choshu had a dispute with the rest of NJPW management. Sasaki would then have a dispute with Choshu, when they started World Japan, with Choshu leaving Sasaki in debt.
– Even though Sasaki was treated as an "outsider" whenever he came back to NJPW, he was actually one of the most consistent main event guys they had during that "Dark Age" period. Had solid matches against the likes of Nagata, young Tanahashi, Tenzan, Nakanishi.
– Became one half of the greatest "power couple" in Japanese pro wrestling (and maybe wrestling overall) when he married Akira Hokuto (easily one of the best wrestlers to have ever lived, who gifted the Northern Lights Bomb to Sasaki). It's said their romance got the heavyweight during NJPW's "Collision in Korea" event in 1995, with their "lovemaking" apparently being so loud it woke up most people in the hotel room.
– Sasaki is one of the men to have a good chuck of time with the IWGP Heavy, holding it 5 times for a combined 11 defenses and 547 combined days.
– Sasaki trained three key talents in the form of Katsuhiko Nakajima (who he and Hokuto virtually adopted), Kento Miyahara (probably Sasaki's most successful pupil, in terms of being THE top guy of a promotion) and Masa Kitamiya (who was also trained by Masa Saito).
– Sasaki's involvement in the death of Hiromitsu Gompei is obviously a dark shadow over his career (and over Japanese wrestling as a whole), where it was reported that Gompei died due to Sasaki's stiff succession of German Suplexes he gave him in the Dojo. This also ties into the fact that Sasaki, under the instruction of Riki Choshu, the booker of NJPW in the 90's, has been long rumored to be one of the bigger "Dojo bullies/teachers", with Tanahashi not referring to him by name but talking about wanting to do away with that style of teaching, as well as Togi Makabe directly calling Sasaki out for his bullying, when Makabe was a "young lion".
by MrPuroresu42