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MORE ON YUJI NAGATA COMING TO AEW

All Elite Wrestling announced during tonight’s episode of Dynamite that New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Yuji Nagata will challenge Jon Moxley for the IWGP United States Heavyweight Championship on the May 12 episode of Dynamite.

The match will be Moxley’s fourth defense of the title, having defeated Juice Robinson, Minoru Suzuki and KENTA since winning the title from Lance Archer on the first night of Wrestle Kingdom 14 on January 4, 2020.

It will not be the first time a New Japan star has appeared on AEW programming, as KENTA teamed with Kenny Omega against Archer and Moxley in a Falls Count Anywhere match on the February 10 episode of Dynamite.

It will also not be the first time Nagata has wrestled on TNT. In the 1990s, New Japan sent Nagata on excursion to World Championship Wrestling and he faced the likes of Chris Jericho and Dean Malenko on Monday Nitro.

While Nagata might only be known as an older member of the New Japan roster to newer fans, he was one of the company’s biggest stars in the 2000s.

In a time often disregarded for Antonio Inoki’s failed attempts to fuse wrestling with mixed martial arts, Nagata held the IWGP Heavyweight Championship for 392 days from April 2002 to May 2003 and made a then-record ten defenses of the title.

Among his other accolades, Nagata has won the G1 Climax (2001), All Japan Pro Wrestling’s Champion Carnival tournament (2011) and Pro Wrestling NOAH’s GHC Heavyweight Championship (2014). He has also won Tokyo Sports’ Match of the Year Award twice for his bouts against Kazuyuki Fujita in 2001 and Yoshihiro Takayama in 2002.

With DDT Pro-Wrestling’s Konosuke Takeshita traveling to America to wrestle on AEW’s The House Always Wins house show and two episodes of Dark: Elevation this month and Nagata now set to face Moxley on Dynamite next month, one has to begin feeling optimistic about the plausibility of international travel for wrestlers.

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