To get ready for tomorrow’s Dragon Gate’s big show, I thought I would talk about the main event taking place on that show and the importance of it as a whole involving PAC facing Ben-K. The name of this show is the Kobe Pro-Wrestling Festival 2019 and it’s also the twentieth anniversary of Dragon Gate as a whole. Twenty years this company has been around and it’s amazing that it’s still growing strong after all this time. We have a lot of matches booked for this event along with several title matches and Ultimo Dragon coming home to wrestle in the Dragon Gate ring. What I will be talking about is the Open the Dream Gate Championship match between the champion PAC and his opponent, Ben-K.
So, how did this match happen? Well, before I get into all of that, let me talk about the history leading up to it. Ben K was apart of the faction R.E.D and PAC would join them during his return on October 2nd, 2018 and would establish himself as a heel this time rather than a babyface like they all knew and loved. On December 4th, 2018 two months after his return to Dragon Gate, he would defeat Masato Yoshino to win the Open the Dream Gate Championship. PAC would hold it for 229 days right now and has had three successful title defenses with it against Kzy, Shun Skywalker, and Dragon Kid. During the Dead or Alive show on May 6th, 2019 after R.E.D lost the DoA Cage Match, they had to remove one member of their unit and they would ultimately decide to vote out Ben-K as they beat him down.
Because of this betrayal and beatdown, Ben-K swore to get revenge on R.E.D and there was only one way he could do it and that was to enter the King of League Tournament. He competed in the C Block of the tournament and would actually be undefeated during it when he defeated block members, YAMATO, Kaito Ishida, Takashi Yoshida, Kagetora, and Genki Horiguchi. He would advance to the semi-finals as he took on the winner of A Block, Kzy and he defeated him in a great match to advance to the final round. During the finals on the June 8th, 2019 show, he would take on the leader of R.E.D, Eita and defeat him in the process to get that goal off his list as he was the winner of the King of Gate Tournament, meaning he earned the opportunity to fight the Open the Dream Gate Champion the next day. However, Ben-K decided to use his challenge against PAC at the Kobe Festival for the twenty-year anniversary of Dragon Gate, one of the biggest shows of the year.
So what makes this match important? Well, it’s on one of their biggest shows of the year for starters and another reason is to build the future of Dragon Gate. To me, this is the right time to crown a new ace of Dragon Gate since it’s been quite some time since they’ve actually done that since I believe YAMATO. Ben-K is a star in the making and if you wanna build with a future talent and the kid is only twenty-seven years old with three years of in-ring experience, but he has the look, the ability, and has greatness written all over him and a win over PAC would help complete this story and have a new main eventer in your hands. PAC’s reign as champion has been rather mixed but if he somehow does win, I hope it goes up from here but the right choice would be for Ben to capitalize on the victory, finishing the story with R.E.D, and to have PAC go do more since he won’t have the belt holding him back at certain places. The match will determine the direction Dragon Gate wants to go moving forward and it could be the ultimate decision along with a great show on top of it.
I hope this article helped you get interested in the show and more hyped up for the main event. I’m excited about it and I will be covering on here during the week after it airs live. If you want to watch the show, go to DragonGate.live and subscribe to it as it’s only 1500 yen to watch it live and for the first time, it’ll have English commentary for this show as well. If you’re wanting to find something to watch on a Sunday, this show would be your best bet.
