10 Japanese Wrestlers Who Were Totally Wasted In America
5. Tetsuya Naito
As part of No Limit with Yujiro Takahashi, Tetsuya Naito was involved in a cross-promotion feud between TNA and New Japan with the Motor City Machine Guns for the IWGP Junior Tag Titles. This would eventually lead to Naito and Takahashi being sent to TNA as part of their excursion where the creatives in charge, you guessed it, completely wasted them.
Shoved into a short-lived evil foreigner alliance with Kiyoshi and Sheik Abdul Bashir, No Limit was booked in the same way hundreds of foreigners were before them, as if somehow American audiences wouldn’t be able to deal with someone who didn’t look like them. Their final act was a defeat to Kevin Nash in a two-on-one handicap match that nicely sums up their time in the company.
It’s easy to look at Naito now and laugh at TNA for missing something special, but the truth was even if he’d remained a tag-team wrestler, TNA wasted him. Ramming all the foreigners together is such old-fashioned booking that to see it happening in 2009 was kind of sad. Naito (and Takahashi for that matter) had a whole lot more to give.