10 Japanese Wrestlers Who Were Totally Wasted In America

Complaining about bringing over the Ace of New Japan to face off against AJ Styles might seem churlish. Yet it wasn't the event it would be today. At Final Resolution 2006 Hiroshi Tanahashi and AJ went at it for eleven minutes and failed to capture the magic you'd expect from those two men.

However, that wasn’t TNA's worst crime when it came to wasting Tanahashi. It was on his second excursion in 2008 that that happened. Placed in a tag-team with Volador Jr., those two incredibly athletic men were dropped straight into the mid-card, to the extent that you can bet most people don’t even remember it. They lost a four-way ladder match to become number one contenders for the Tag Titles, and that's about it.

Tanahashi’s final act in Impact was to come fourth in a ten-man X Division seeding match at Turning Point before he was called back to NJPW to face Keiji Mutoh for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship. With Tanahashi having since been credited for dragging New Japan out of the bad years, you have to wonder what he could have done with even a few months of main event programs in TNA.