Mitsuya Nagai

[Grimmas]

Control21 said: 

A well-traveled shoot-style veteran that has been going strong since the 1990s.  Nagai was a product of Maeda's RINGS dojo and became one of the key native mid-carders for RINGS up until he left the promotion in 1997 due to a disagreement with his mentor (Maeda, of course). Nagai was very raw at first, but quickly became a solid pro-wrestler and had some great matches with the likes of Volk Han, Yamamoto, and his dojo partner, Masayuki Naruse. Nagai would later try his hand at kickboxing and would later participate in BattlArts, NJPW, AJPW, NOAH, and GLEAT. He was also a key figure in the early years of post-NOAH split AJPW as an undercard worker. Not the flashiest name, but someone with a lot of longevity. 

Recommended matches -

vs Volk Han 4/24/93

vs Volk Han 12/24/94

vs Nikolai Zouev 12/19/95

vs Yamamoto 3/18/95

vs Naruse 12/16/94

vs Kawada 3/3/2001

vs Kojima 3/24/2002

w/Kakihara vs Shinya Makabe & Yuji Nagata 6/8/2001

w/Dajiro Matsui vs Minoru Tanaka & Masakatsu Funaki 12/30/2021

[Ma Stump Puller]

Definitely depends on how you judge RINGS stuff, because that's about 70/80% of his stock. He hits quite hard and knows how to grapple but other than that there's a lot of featureless material and half-hearted entries. Outside of the Kojima match in that 2002 Champion Carnival match (and I honestly think Yoji Anjo got a better match out of Koji there anyway for the time) he has a sloppy draw with Anjo and a boring match with Barton, with the rest of his AJPW 2002 being featureless tags. He's had maybe one or two properly great matches in the last 20 years. Talented sure, but unless we get access to all of the Futen matches he had he really isn't getting on a top 100 in my mind.

 

 

 

 

 

[Jetlag]

His best work is in FUTEN. He really came into his own there and looked like an absolute monster. The Ono match is an amazing crowbar showing but the 2011 Suruga singles is a genuinely really great match that would look amazing on anyones resume. He's solid in the BatlARTS stuff but doesn't stand out as much. I imagine there could be some fun performances in the mid 2000s.