's
Keiji Mutoh held the
IWGP Heavyweight Championship heading into Wrestle Kingdom III Wrestle Kingdom III featured eleven
professional wrestling matches that involved different wrestlers from pre-existing scripted feuds and
storylines. Wrestlers portrayed
villains,
heroes, or
less distinguishable characters in the scripted events that built tension and culminated in a wrestling match or series of matches. Wrestle Kingdom III was main evented by
Keiji Mutoh defending the
IWGP Heavyweight Championship against
Hiroshi Tanahashi. On April 27, 2008, Mutoh defeated
Shinsuke Nakamura to win the IWGP Heavyweight Championship for the first time in eight years and four months. Mutoh, who was part of NJPW's "golden age" in the 1990s, was now representing
All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW). Over the following months, NJPW wrestlers attempted to defeat Mutoh to bring the title back to NJPW. After Mutoh had defeated Nakamura in a rematch on October 13 to make his fourth successful title defense, there were no more NJPW challengers left in sight to challenge the outsider. Meanwhile, Hiroshi Tanahashi, after a poor outing in the
2008 G1 Climax, had chosen to travel to the United States to train and work for the
Orlando, Florida-based
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) promotion. In November, NJPW president Naoki Sugabayashi, desperate to bring the IWGP Heavyweight Championship back to his company, traveled to Orlando to talk Tanahashi into coming back and challenging Mutoh. Tanahashi ended up canceling his scheduled TNA bookings and returned to Japan to accept the match with Mutoh at Wrestle Kingdom III. The
IWGP Tag Team Championship was scheduled to be defended in a three-way match involving defending champions
The Most Violent Players (
Togi Makabe and
Toru Yano),
Tencozy (
Hiroyoshi Tenzan and
Satoshi Kojima) and the TNA tag team
Team 3D (
Brother Devon and
Brother Ray). This would have marked the first three-way match for the IWGP Tag Team Championship in history. However, when Tenzan suffered a
retinal detachment, he and Kojima were pulled out of the match and it was turned into a
hardcore match. ==Event==