WEW Heavyweight Championship
The WEW Heavyweight Championship was a professional wrestling championship, originally created in Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling as the WEW Singles Championship, later being renamed as the WEW World Heavyweight Championship. After FMW closed in 2002, the title became the WEW Heavyweight Championship in the World Entertainment Wrestling promotion, although carrying a new lineage.
History
In May 1995, Atsushi Onita went into retirement and sold Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling to ring announcer Shoichi Arai. Under Arai, the company underwent changes that would phase out the deathmatch style that popularized FMW in the early 90s. Arai enlisted Kodo Fuyuki to bring in a more "sports entertainment" look and feel for the promotion. In 1999, this resulted in the creation of the World Entertainment Wrestling governing body for new championship titles. Fuyuki had originally intended to rename the entire promotion to complete the reorientation from hardcore to entertainment wrestling, but this plan was stopped by Arai. Eventually, both sides agreed on a new set of titles to replace the old FMW titles. As a result, from 1999 until the end of FMW in 2002, the WEW Singles Championship was the promotion's main singles title.Later, Fuyuki founded his own promotion where the title was taken over, renamed WEW Heavyweight Championship and given a new lineage. The last champion for a long time was Kintaro Kanemura, who won the title in August 2002. When WEW folded in May 2003, the title was also declared vacant, before being reactivated in September 2006 at Kanemura's Apache Pro-Wrestling Army.
In 2018, two years after Apache Army closed its doors, the title was revived in Pro-Wrestling A-Team, an offshoot founded by Tomohiko Hashimoto.