Before Kota Ibushi and Kenny Omega united as the Golden Lovers, they were singles competitors in DDT Pro Wrestling.
Ibushi and Omega had a hardcore rules two out of three falls bout in 2008, which was won by Ibushi. The plan was for them to have another singles bout, where they were asked to top the first bout according to Omega, but they pitched the idea to team instead of battle.
"That’s when I started to get hungry again," Omega told Monthly Puroreso when reflecting on the 2008 DDT Pro match against Ibushi. "I was like 'Oh my God, we did this! I did this! I was a part of this!' At that point there was no plan to ever bring me back. I emailed Nakazawa and said 'Hey, is there any interest to maybe bring me back? I’d really love to come back?' Then I waited a month and try to do it again. Wait a month, try to do it again, and finally he said 'Oh, it sounds like they’re going to bring you back. They’ve got an idea.' So I went back, not knowing what I was going to do. And they had said 'Hey, we’ve got this cool idea. We think that we need to have the rematch between you and Ibushi. Let’s try to make it bigger and make it better. Let’s try to one up the last match that you did.' The plan there was for me to lose again, and then that would have been my second trip and I would’ve been able to hopefully have another great match with Ibushi, and then I would have gone home and that would have been it. As we built kind of towards the second matchup, I’d spent a lot more time with Ibushi. Hanging out and we became real good friends and we thought 'Hey, what if we changed the narrative a little bit?' Instead of another rematch of our singles match, as we didn’t think we could top it.”
Instead of trying to top their first match, Omega and Ibushi pitched the idea to team together.
"Anyway, we came up with the idea, let’s try to convince Takagi-san [DDT Pro President Sanshiro Takagi] for us to be a tag team instead. Both of us thought Takagi-san is never going to go for it. So we went and presented him with the idea that 'Hey, if you give us a chance to be a tag team, instead of continuing this one-on-one feud together, we promise that we will show you something that you’ve never seen before in tag-team wrestling. And we’ll revolutionize what tag team wrestling means.' Ibushi was like 'I’d put my career on the line that we can make it happen.' Takagi-san said, 'You’re not putting your career on the line! Shut up! Don’t go that far. If you really that passionate about it. Sure. We’ll give it a shot, test it and see if it’s okay.' I remember we came up with a couple double teams and we had real good natural chemistry together and it felt good and it was on a random house show. A show away from Tokyo. And we thought, 'Well, we might be onto something. But we don’t have that one thing that is really going to convince DDT to stick with this,'" recalled Omega.
He continued, explaining how they came up with various double team moves as the Golden Lovers.
"Ibushi being Ibushi, he’s got all these strange hookups and he has like secret dojos that he trains in. He said, 'Come to the secret dojo and we’ll work on something.' That’s where we came up with some of our more famous double-team maneuvers; that’s when we came up with The Golden Shower which is a double 450 off the top rope. I think it was less impressive that we were able to do a double 450 but that when we did it, we naturally jumped at the same height we naturally had. We naturally had the same spin speed, the way that we talk as the exact same. It just looked too pretty, and when we saw the video of us sitting on like a training dummy and us hitting it from multiple angles and distances, we thought, 'Oh my God, this is what we need to bring to the table.' This is what it is," said Omega.
Ibushi & Omega would go on to win the KO-D Tag Team Championships on two occasions. The duo have not teamed since December 2018. Omega left NJPW in January 2019 to be part of the start of AEW.
The duo reunited in Japan in September 2022 when Omega visited for a promotional tour. Ibushi is currently out of action with a shoulder injury while Omega is set to compete at NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 17 against Will Ospreay.
