Since coming over from the Bullet Club and New Japan in January of last year, AJ Styles has accomplished pretty much everything you can do in WWE. It makes all the fears about how WWE would use him pretty silly in retrospect. Of course, Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows, Styles’ erstwhile Bullet Club and “The Club” stablemates, haven’t fared QUITE as well since splitting away from Styles, but they still went into this year’s WrestleMania as Raw Tag Team Champions, which isn’t nothing!
Anyway, given the WWE success of Styles and, to a lesser extent, Shinsuke Nakamura, it should be a given that WWE will be thinking about signing more New Japan talent in the future. I mean, we lived through several months of teases about WWE attempting to sign Kenny Omega, and we won’t have to deal with that again until … [looks at calender] … oh no, that’s very soon!
Styles recently appeared on the Sam Roberts Wrestling Podcast, because that’s just a thing most wrestlers do from time to time. While he was there, he happened to name-drop a couple of New Japan (and not coincidentally, Bullet Club) roster members he thinks would do very well in WWE. (Transcript via Wrestling Inc.)
“There [are] a lot of guys [in New Japan] that need to be [in WWE]. I rode with Karl Anderson over here, and we were talking about [Bad Luck] Fale and Tama Tonga. Like, I miss those guys so much, just the chemistry we had when we were together, it’s just unbelievable.”
In case you’re not super familiar with either of those names, Bad Luck Fale is the “underboss” and enforcer of the Bullet Club, and has spent his entire pro wrestling career with New Japan. He is a former one-time IWGP Intercontinental Champion, and has also held the NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Team Championship.
Tama Tonga, meanwhile, is a student of the Dudley Boyz and the actual real-life son of freaking Haku. His brother, Tanga Loa, is perhaps best known as Camacho in WWE. The two men are currently in a tag team called the Guerrillas of Destiny, and are both members of the Bullet Club. Tama Tonga has held the CMLL World Tag Team Championship twice, the IWGP Tag Team Championship three times, and was one of Fale’s teammates that captured the NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Team Championship with him. He also recently cut a profanity-laced promo at the G1 Climax kickoff press conference that was pretty, pretty, pret-tay good.
Few in NJPW are better suited to WWE than Fale, who is a legitimate monster compared to the rest of NJPW’s roster, and works a much more grounded and slower-paced style than his peers in the company, largely out of necessity because of his size. If Tonga keeps his signature facepaint, he could get by based on his look alone in WWE, but he’s certainly more than capable of holding his own in the ring. I personally wouldn’t object to WWE bringing in both Guerrillas of Destiny and forming some sort of super-stable with the new and improved badass Usos. Now THAT would be paranoia.
