Bull Nakano

Bull Nakano
Bull Nakano
Born	January 8, 1968 (age 56); Kawaguchi, Saitama
Professional wrestling career
Ring name(s)	Bull Nakano; Keiko Nakano; (kanji) bù rù naka no
Billed height	168 cm (5 ft 07 in)
Billed weight	95 kg (209 lb)
Trained by	All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling
Debut	1983
Retired	1997

Keiko Nakano (born January 8, 1968) is a professional golfer and former professional wrestler. Better known by her ringname Bull Nakano, as a wrestler she was a famous heel, both in Japan and North America, and is the only person to have held both the WWF Women's Championship and WWWA World Heavyweight Championship.

Career

At the age of 15, Keiko Nakano began her career as a professional wrestler in her homeland of Japan. She trained and performed with the All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling organization (AJW), and quickly became one of the greatest heels in the history of Japanese women's pro wrestling.

After winning the AJW Junior Championship under her real name, her identity was changed to Bull Nakano and she teamed with the legendary Dump Matsumoto to feud with the popular Crush Gals (Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka). With Matsumoto as her partner, Nakano won the WWWA World Tag Team Championship. She later won the title a second and third time, with Condor Saito and Grizzly Iwamoto as successive partners.

Nakano briefly wrestled for the World Wrestling Federation in 1986, teaming again with Dump Matsumoto as the Devils of Japan. After Matsumoto's retirement, Nakano became the default top heel, forming her own faction, Prison Gate Party, which consisted of several luminaries, most notably Aja Kong and Bison Kimura, who would later separate from Nakano, after she had won the WWWA title, to form Jungle Jack. In 1990, Nakano won a tournament to win the vacant WWWA World Heavyweight Championship, and went on to hold the title for nearly three years, before dropping it to Aja Kong.

Nakano also traveled to Mexico, in 1992, where she won a battle royal to become the first CMLL World Women's Champion. She then made her way to the United States and competed for the World Wrestling Federation once again. Debuting as an associate of Luna Vachon, Nakano dominated the WWF Women's champion, Alundra Blayze, in a series of matches and won the WWF Women's Championship on November 20, 1994 in Tokyo, Japan at the record-setting Big Egg Wrestling Universe show held at the Tokyo Egg Dome. This made Bull Nakano the only person to have held both the WWWA Championship and the WWF Women's Championship, both of which claim a historic lineage, dating back to 1937 and 1956 respectively. Furthermore, she was also the first female of Asian descent to win the WWF/WWE Women's Championship.

Nakano held the title for five months, until losing the title back to Blayze on April 3, 1995 in Poughkeepsie, New York. The WWF had planned on bringing in Bertha Faye to feud with Nakano while Blayze got a nose and breast job, but Nakano was found in possession of cocaine and quickly fired from the company.^[1]

Later in 1995 Nakano compete at the WCW World War 3 pay-per-view event and teamed with Akira Hokuto against the team of Cutie Suzuki and Mayumi Ozaki in which Nakano and Hokuto won, they also compete against the same team the next night on WCW Monday Nitro, which they also won.

Nakano returned to Japan, where she continued to compete in AJW, then went back to the United States in 1996 to feud with Blayze, now going by her original ring name, Madusa, in World Championship Wrestling. That was the last time Bull Nakano was seen on North American television. She continued to wrestle in Japan, but ended her wrestling career without having the traditional retirement ceremony in 1997 to pursue a career in professional golf. Nakano is also studying linguistics at a university..

Post-Retirement

In the years following her retirement, Nakano began to diet and gradually lose much of the weight she had to maintain to stay in her role as one of AJW's monster heels, going from a peak of 250 pounds down to 143 pounds. In 1998, Nakano released a book about her weight loss called Bull Nakano no Diet Nikki: 19-gou Size no Watashi ga 9-gou Size ni (Translated: Bull Nakano's Diet Journal: How I went from a Size 19 to a Size 9).

In January 2006, Nakano, still pursuing her pro golf career, joined the Duramed Futures Tour on the Ladies Professional Golf Association. She is currently based in Orlando, Florida, U.S.. ^[2]