KinchStalker

This might not be worth its own post but since I'm using this place to dump the Jumbo knowledge I've acquired, I might as well show you all what I believe to be his first acting credit: a bit part in the final episode of 1976 drama Oretachi no Tabi, in which he plays the boyfriend of a woman who one of the leads tries to chat up.

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART THREE I have finished transcription of chapter five of the Jumbo bio, which spans roughly from 1975 through early 1978. This book eschews a beat-for-beat chronicle of his career in favor of a looser approach, though, so there may be tidbits from this period that pop up a little later. I missed a couple days of work due to a power outage in my area, but when I got a hotel room I made up for lost time, and managed to crunch out the rest of the chapter over the weekend. 1.) The earliest Tsuruta US match in circulation is, of course, the 1975.02.05 NWA International Tag Team title match with Baba against the Funks. The biography states that this match took place in San Antonio instead of Amarillo because Nippon TV refused to broadcast a match where All Japan talent would likely be booed, and San Antonio was, of course, a nearby market where the Funks were loathed enough to make Baba and Jumbo babyfaces at least by function. (Hearing this confirmed really does contextualize contemporaneous JWA/AJPW footage shot in America, from Baba’s matches against Fritz and Kiniski in Los Angeles on to stuff like both US Jumbo/Bockwinkel matches and Baba’s matches against Baron von Raschke and Abdullah the Butcher. It’s really unfortunate because this likely means that, with the exception of the aforementioned Jumbo/Bockwinkel matches, there isn’t much surviving tape out there which documents Tsuruta’s acceptance as a babyface. Which eventually ran out on him, even before the AWA run; refer to how Mid-Atlantic booed him against Tommy Rich in 1982 – inevitable, perhaps, but one does wonder if NTV made a miscalculation from their perspective in filming it.) 2.) There is some interesting info here about the circumstances around the 1975 Open League. a. The tournament was the brainchild of Satoshi Morioka, Baba’s journalist friend who I mentioned in my first post as having been involved in the facilitation of Tsuruta’s scouting and courtship. b. On one level, it was to commemorate three things: the 13th anniversary of Rikidōzan’s death, the third anniversary of AJPW, and the American bicentennial. c. On another, it was a response to Inoki, who was actually still trying behind the scenes to get the singles match with Baba that he’d so badly wanted back in 1971, after winning the World League. Inoki refused to participate in a tournament, so the “Open League” was titled such to stick it to him. [Edit 2021.06.05: There was more drama to this story than the bio revealed, revolving around Inoki's refusal to cancel his match against Billy Robinson to attend the 1975.12.13 Rikidozan memorial show.] d. An interesting tidbit that specifically pertains to the Baba/Jumbo match from the League, which was their first singles match: the side suplex that Jumbo hit in that match was a repeat of when he did the same thing four days earlier, in a Budokan tag match alongside Dory against Baba and the Destroyer. 3.) This chapter goes a bit more than the previous one did into the early backstage culture surrounding Jumbo, due to the sudden death of his mentor and handler Masio Koma. I believe that Meltzer’s obituary cited Koma (alongside Akio Sato) as responsible for whatever basic training Tsuruta received before flying out to Amarillo, but he didn’t go into Koma’s deeper importance. The segment pertaining to him does confirm that Tsuruta was the target of professional jealousy backstage–I was struck by the anecdote that Jumbo was allowed to ride in the special green car, then reserved for Baba and the gaijins, from the beginning–but that Baba used Koma, who he most trusted, to both take some of the heat off of Jumbo and teach him the etiquette that would otherwise have never been instilled in him, due to how much of the hierarchy he leaped over. He suddenly died of kidney failure on March 10, 1976. That evening, Jumbo had the first of his ten-match trial series against Verne Gagne. Maybe I’m looking too hard for things, but I think you can see some real sadness in Jumbo’s face before that match starts. 4.) The Trial Series, which began with the aforementioned Gagne match and ended in January 1979 against Fritz von Erich, was a campaign to help further establish Jumbo as a top singles wrestler. Early in 1976, a fan vote was called to gauge interest, and nearly 80,000 ballots were counted. The top fifteen picks, which were counted regardless of political feasibility, were as follows: Bruno Sammartino, Terry Funk, Billy Robinson, Dory Funk Jr., Verne Gagne, Abdullah the Butcher, Harley Race, Antonio Inoki, Rusher Kimura, Andre the Giant, Kintaro Oki, Dick the Bruiser, Nick Bockwinkel, the Sheik, and Lou Thesz. (Gagne was available because the AWA was opening itself in general to more interpromotional cooperation, not just because of the termination of their deal with the IWE.) 5.) Robinson jumped to All Japan because New Japan had tried to cut his pay, and as a recent divorcee he was too financially vulnerable to accept this. [2021.05.15 addition: According to a 2019 Igapro article, the second of a two-part series on the circumstances around the Inoki/Robinson match, the reason for this pay cut was that NJPW was saving money to make the Ali match happen.] All Baba did was match the original offer. 6.) There’s an interesting little thread about how Jumbo wouldn’t just borrow moves he’d seen others perform – such as in 1975, when Ricky Gibson worked a tour and hit Jumbo with a missile dropkick (when Jumbo adopted the move, famously using it in the Chris Taylor match from December '76, AJPW commentator Takao Kuramochi dubbed it the "Ultra-C Missile Dropkick") – but would also modify techniques he’d already learned if he liked the way that another person did them more. The bio claims that Tsuruta modified his dropkick technique to resemble Gagne’s rather than Brisco’s, and that, in the amount of training that he accepted from Billy Robinson, modified his butterfly suplex technique to more resemble Robinson’s than the one which Dory had taught him: from “big and loose” (Dory apparently liked the broader gesture so that the audience could better understand it) to “fast and strong”. 7.) Jumbo did receive some training from Robinson at Baba’s suggestion – Fuchi was forced to be his practice dummy – but it sounds like he eventually gave up, because he felt it was “dangerous”. I know Meltzer wrote at some point about Robinson’s frustration with Jumbo, who wanted to be the American-style wrestler that Billy probably felt was a waste of Tsuruta’s talent. 8.) In their early years, AJPW had rented a three-bedroom apartment and a kickboxing gym to be their training camp and dojo, but in 1976, they built a five-bedroom training camp with a dojo in the garden. Tsuruta was the owner; he’d had to take out a 50-million yen loan, but the company was to pay it off through rent, and once it was paid off, it was Tsuruta’s to sell. a. Fuchi has reminisced about this period, both in this bio and on his personal blog, and there’s something he recounts Jumbo telling him at this time that breaks my heart in retrospect: “We're still in our twenties, but we've only got twenty years left in our wrestling careers. You should take good care of your body because your life after quitting will be much longer. Don't drink too much alcohol, either.” Fuchi remarked that, even though Tsuruta was only 25, he’d already planned out his life. b. In this era, Jumbo’s three juniors were the “three crows” Fuchi, Onita, and Kazuharu Sonoda. While he would later gain a reputation as a penny-pincher regarding his juniors, at least compared to Tenryu (keep in mind that Jumbo was not a social drinker), he often took these three with him when sponsors took him out to dinner. (This isn’t in the bio, but I have to mention an Onita tidbit about Jumbo which I love; when seniors prepared the chankonabe for the company while out on tour, Jumbo’s recipe wasn’t the fanciest, but it was the only one plentiful enough in meat for everyone, no matter their hierarchical position, to receive some.) 9.) Naturally, the bio cites Jumbo as a pioneer of the “idol wrestler” who attracted a significant female audience. (I’ve read elsewhere that this was paralleled a little bit later by Fujinami’s junior ace run.) I couldn’t tell you if this had any connection to the joshi boom which the Beauty Pair would usher in, but while on one hand I’m not sure that they attracted the same kind of women, on the other hand the timeline does roughly match. (Check out this 1977 cover of Weekly Fight, which features Jumbo and Tenryu carrying Maki and Jackie respectively.) One thing, at least, is certain; for better or worse, if not for Jumbo Tsuruta, we’d never have gotten that woman who got Hiroshi Tanahashi to pin her for a television show. 10.) This builds on the last point, and it’s something I’ve been waiting for: scoops on Jumbo’s musical career. The image of Jumbo playing his Gibson acoustic guitar in his spare time, and writing lyrics on tour, was quite an attractive one; I can’t help but think of this in the context of the Japanese folk-rock boom which had occurred earlier in the decade: your Happy Ends and Yosui Inoues and whatnot. He wasn’t the best singer (honestly, from the later tie-in singles that Atsushi Onita and Mighty Inoue did I'd say both had better voices, though Jumbo was far better than Fujinami), but he did some well-received shows, including a charity concert to support welfare facilities for the disabled. His first single was “Rolling Dreamer”, which came out a year before he began using it as his entrance music. He wrote the lyrics himself. a. Fuchi has a blog post where he reminisces about this period. He mentions that he had a phase trying to learn guitar as well, and if I understand correctly Jumbo was at one point workshopping a cover of “Hotel California” to perform with his junior. b. There’s a bulletin board, deactivated but still up, which either his widow Yasuko or eldest son Yuji set up in the early 2010s to talk to fans about their memories of Jumbo. (We’ll probably get to Yasuko’s story, which I already know, in the next chapter or two.) I've read some of the stuff on there for the video project I'm developing. Anyway, Yasuko was asked about Jumbo’s music, and she responded that Tomomi never sang for her out of shyness. He ended up giving his guitar to a cousin who lost it, which she noted with sadness, since one of her younger two sons would probably have loved to have it. 11.) Jumbo was the first in puro to use entrance music. His first theme was, of course, “Chinese Kung Fu”, a French disco single derivative of “Kung Fu Fighting”. (Here you can watch some French gals dance to it.) It was the idea of AJPW broadcast director Susumu Umegaki, and was first used on October 30, 1975, for Jumbo’s entrance before wrestling Abdullah the Butcher. 12.) However, this use of music wouldn’t really click until February 1977, when Umegaki was inspired to have Mil Mascaras, whose popularity had fallen a bit, enter to “Sky High” by Jigsaw. The importance of Jumbo and Mascaras’ classic August 1977 match is often ascribed to being an early prominent example of the crosspollination between puroresu and lucha libre, but this overlooks the fact that Mascaras had taken booking in Japan for six years prior. (Also, even if Gran Hamada hadn’t come back from training in Mexico yet, Mach Hayato may have. [Subsequent correction: he hadn't.]) The term that the bio uses for this match is “idol showdown”, and its popularity (if you don’t know, it inspired Kobashi to change his dream job from baseball to wrestling, and also got Kawada interested in wrestling) makes more sense when you put it in that context than if you try to see in it the first inklings of lucharesu. [2021.04.19 addition: I have since received some information which suggests that Jumbo was merely the first native wrestler to use music in Japan. I was perusing Mighty Inoue's Japanese Wikipedia page, as one does, and it tells a very interesting story cited from the 2017 IWE biography and from a 2014 Weekly Pro Wrestling article on Inoue's 1974.10.07 shot at Billy Graham's IWA World Heavyweight title. Apparently, during his European excursion Inoue had used Naomi Chiaki's 1970 hit single "Yottsu no Onegai" as entrance music. The TV director was inspired by this story, and got an instrumental cover of "Jesus Christ Superstar" to play for Graham's entrance.] 13.) The chapter ends in early 1978 with the UN title match against Anton Geesink, where we learn some cool tidbits about his involvement in puro. The JWA had actually wanted him since 1964, after he had won in judo at the Tokyo Olympics. They specifically had interest in running a Baba/Geesink program to compete with NHK’s annual New Years Eve singing contest. Alas, Geesink’s signing finally happened due to an alliance between Nippon TV and Saburo Arashida, a promoter who years earlier had arranged the Beatles’ 1966 Japan tour, in an effort to increase stagnant ratings. ------------ One last thing. The bio has not mentioned this story, at least not yet, but I cannot in good conscience omit it: that time in 1975 when NJPW booker Hisashi Shinma attempted to seduce Jumbo to the Inoki side of the Puro. (This is a summary of the story as recounted in this blog post, which cites its own sources at the bottom.) While Inoki was by this point not interested, having recruited the future Riki Choshu, Shinma didn’t want to give up yet. He proposed to Koshiji Miura, who essentially ran NET TV (still wasn’t TV Asahi yet), that he attempt to recruit him. Miura even proposed that, in the event that Tsuruta suffered a career-ending injury, NET would pursue a deal with him as a commentator. One day, Shinma and his intermediary picked up Tsuruta in Inoki’s limo and tried to lure him with the suggestion of an excursion for the WWWF, and then another in Los Angeles, so that NJPW’s involvement would not necessarily be clear. Tsuruta was reportedly attracted to the idea of working MSG, but though they drove him to NET headquarters, and Miura then went into the limo to discuss it further, they never heard back from Jumbo. Around six months later, though, Tokyo Sports president Hiroshi Inoue chewed Shinma out for his aggression. Tsuruta had told Baba what happened; apparently Baba had laughed it off and never tried to make it public, but it somehow got passed along to Inoue. Inoue was pro-New Japan, but he hated anything that threatened to disrupt the order of the larger industry, so he was incensed at Shinma’s audacity.

This analogy delighted me greatly, but man, I wish Jumbo's career had ended on a note like Madadayo (which I maintain is somewhat underrated).

It appears that he did get a positive reputation from his Amarillo trainee work. I should have noted that only one of those losses - the Backlund one - happened in America, and as I mentioned that was a Western States Sports show in El Paso. So it was Dory booking when he lost.

I don't have anything substantive to chime in with - I don't think I've actually seen a single Taker WM match - but this has thus far been a fun read. Kudos.

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART TWO I have finally returned with more tidbits from the Jumbo bio. The following are mostly from chapter 4, which starts with Tsuruta’s return from Amarillo and then spans through 1974. --- 1.) The gown which he wore for his debut (seen here) would also be worn by Tenryu and Hiroshi Wajima for their respective debuts. 2.) During his debut match back in Japan, a Korakuen Hall bout against Moose Morowski, Tsuruta was understandably quite nervous, and his use of chops (both horizontal and brain) flew in the face of the expectations he was meant to fulfill. He gradually transitioned to elbows and forearms, which Dory had taught him, and which lived up to those “American” expectations better. (The bio confirms that this match was broadcast on NTV, but all I’ve seen are a couple fragments which were featured in a posthumous television documentary.) 3.) The poll to decide Jumbo’s ring name was the brainchild of AJPW television producer Akira Hara (no relation to Susumu/Ashura, presumably). Years before, in early 1969, the then-JWA producer pitched the idea to hold a fan poll to name Antonio Inoki’s new finishing maneuver. The process of naming the move that would become known as the Manjigatame lined up with Inoki’s rapid ascent in popularity in 1969. a.) Meltzer didn’t really go into why “jumbo” was chosen so far as I remember, so perhaps I should explain why that was a buzzword in Japan around this time; they had recently rolled out their first Boeing 747. Also, about six months before this poll, Masashi “Jumbo” Ozaki became the first Asian golfer to place in the top 8 of the U.S. Masters tournament. 4.) After Sakaguchi jumped ship from the JWA in March, and NET TV subsequently cancelled their broadcasts, JWA president Yoshinosato consulted with Rikidōzan’s widow, Keiko Momota, and others including NTV president Yozoji Kobayashi and Mitsubishi chairman Ken Okubo (whose company had been a longtime sponsor of NTV’s wrestling broadcast). It was here when the decision was made that the remnants would merge with AJPW, and this was announced on April 27. Baba really only wanted the younger wrestlers, but had been forced to take on all of them, who were as follows: Kintaro Oki, Umanosuke Ueda, the Great Kojika, Gantetsu Matsuoka, Akihisa Takachiho, Mitsu Hirai, Kazuo Sakurada, Mitsuo Hata (later to be known as Rocky), and Masao Ito. 5.) In the middle of September, just a couple weeks before Tsuruta’s return, Baba made the bold decision to have him be his tag partner in the NWA International Tag Team title match against the Funks on the promotion’s 1973.10.09 1st anniversary show. As I told the story when I brought it up in another thread, Ueda, Oki, and Matsuoka all left the company in response. 6.) Jumbo’s repertoire of four suplex variations was unequaled to that point in puro, partially because there was a self-imposed rule not to use other peoples’ signature moves. As for the suplexes, they were as follows. a.) The German suplex, of course attributed to Karl Gotch. Among the puro crop, only Hiro Matsuda and Antonio Inoki, both disciples of Gotch, used it as well. b.) The butterfly suplex, the signature move of Billy Robinson. Known as the “Human Windmill”, this maneuver blew Japanese reporters’ minds, and helped make it possible for Robinson to become the first gaikokujin ace during his tenure for the IWE. The Funks, of course, would swipe the move and then teach it to Jumbo. [2021.03.12 addition: Rusher Kimura was using it before Jumbo as far as puro went, but he did receive some training from Robinson.] c.) The “side suplex”, which we would now call a gutwrench, was the signature move of Horst Hoffman, who competed in the IWE’s 4th IWA World Series tournament in spring 1972. d.) Finally, there was the “front suplex” (editing for clarity; this was the overhead belly-to-belly), which at the very least had not been seen to this point in Japan. This is why some called it the Jumbo Suplex at the time. 7.) As the book puts it, “Tsuruta was a new type of Japanese wrestler who competed purely on technique, not on guts or spirit, which are characteristic of the Japanese.” 8.) Jumbo made a second trip to America from March-April 1974. Among other things, this saw him become only the fourth Japanese wrestler to work MSG. (The previous three – Baba, Yoshinosato, and Mammoth Suzuki – had all done so during their 1961 excursions.) Upon his return to the Amarillo territory at the tail end of this tour, he defeated Bob Backlund in a television match, and also finally defeated Killer Karl Kox, whom he had never managed to beat as a trainee, in Albuquerque. For his final match before returning to Japan, Backlund got his heat back in El Paso. 9.) None of the matches from Jumbo’s expedition were broadcast on Japanese television because the expedition, as it were, was not for television, as local promoters had requested for Tsuruta. 10.) The first singles match between Baba and Jumbo was almost the 1974 Champion Carnival final. However, after Jumbo and Mr. Wrestling went to a time-limit draw in the semifinal, their rematch the following night saw Tsuruta sprain his left ankle after doing a leapfrog. Apparently it had been hurt in the Kox match, and this aggravated the injury, leading to referee stoppage. The book does not disclose whether this was a work, but it’s obviously a reasonable assumption. 11.) Jumbo’s singles win/draw percentage in his second year as a wrestler was an astonishing 90.9%. His only seven losses were against Dory (2), Brisco (2), Mr. Wrestling, Backlund, and Pedro Morales (all 1).

Nothing much of note yet from the Jumbo bio. I've still got twelve pages about Amarillo to transcribe, so hopefully this will pick back up when Tsuruta returns to Japan. However, the blog I've been referencing just put out a piece on the circumstances around Mil Máscaras' first tour in Japan, and I'd like to share this info. Surprisingly, this story starts with the IWE. Shortly after Isao Yoshihara, having been rejected by the NWA, finally made a connection to America through the AWA, the company held a promotional campaign called "Anata ga Puromōtā" ("You Are The Promoter"). This was a fan vote intended to scout out interest in wrestlers who had not yet been booked in Japan. Naturally, this meant that whoever got on did so because of their coverage in the Japanese wrestling journalism scene, and it just so happens that Gong editor-in-chief Kosuke Takeuchi really, really liked Máscaras. This article claims he had been featured in Gong fifty times before he ever worked in the country. Máscaras placed second in this poll, which received almost 40,000 submissions. The other ten, from top to bottom, were as follows: Spiros Arion, the Sheik, Blue Demon, Ernie Ladd, Rocky Johnson, Ray Mendoza, Johnny DeFazio, Igor Vodik, and Baron von Raschke. Arion and Demon were immediately given offers, but alas, JWA booker Mr. Moto then swooped in and took advantage, intercepting Arion and stopping Demon from coming to Japan. Then they made an offer to Máscaras, who had received an offer in 1970 from the AWA, and thus had a real risk of potentially appearing in the IWE. JWA made the better offer, and that was that. When Máscaras arrived in Japan, he was flocked by Gong readers as well as the standard press peeps. This led to private resentment on the part of Arion, who had placed first in the poll but had not received such prior coverage. After this tour, he would never return to Japan. [NOTE 2021.04.24: This was an error on either the part of the article or on DeepL, but this isn't quite true. Arion did work with All Japan in 1974, as part of the Madison Square Garden series which saw AJPW and the WWWF work together. Perhaps it meant Arion never returned to the JWA?] The IWE, meanwhile, would only ever manage to get the Baron.

Okay, here's the DeepL translation excerpt. It...didn't come out great. Quotation is from a classmate-turned-teammate who I have previously alluded to. It is a common belief that Tsuruta applied to join the wrestling team, but was turned down three times. "Actually, it was a little different. The basketball team was against it. Since they had entered the university through basketball, it would ruin the basketball team's reputation if they switched clubs without permission. But Tsuruta said he wanted to join the wrestling team, and I also wanted to join. Jiro Seki, our coach, wanted us to join too. After all, he wanted a heavyweight. So, I showed up at the wrestling club once in a while, but I couldn't move to another club."

That's probably closer to the truth. It's what Meltzer wrote, but he also wrote that Jumbo began his studies in 1970, when in fact it was the previous year. (Four-year bachelor's, after all). I was a bit confused that he would be seen as a quitter if he'd done at least one full year in basketball. The bio does say that Jumbo chose wrestling for his phys-ed course to try to get an inroads to join the team, though.

Nobody had a problem with Jumbo doing it. You're right, saying that he "bucked" the order is misleading, as he was the special case.

Yoshiaki Yatsu started a YouTube channel almost a year ago, and has put out a steady stream of content apparently reminiscing on his time in wrestling. What makes this largely webcam-based show endearing are the public access TV-calibre special effects, most notably a semi-recurring bit where he replaces his prosthesis with a rocket and flies through time and space. I don't know if he's saying much that's of interest (look, screenshotting a vlog with burned-in subtitles to transcribe them via Kanjitomo on a whim is a bit much, even for me), but knowing that this exists is charming.

I hadn't reached this point in the book when I made the first post, and if I edited it in something this big would get lost in the shuffle, but speaking of Choshu: Akio Nojima was apparently trying to court him towards All Japan as well. Besides how weird an alternate history with Choshu as a Baba guy is, it fascinates me that Jumbo, who was groomed for an immediate #2 spot, was originally just one of a batch of four amateur Olympians who Baba was trying to sign. I wonder if the remnants of sumo culture in All Japan would have subsided more quickly had Jumbo not been just the singular special case. Sending him to America to debut was meant to establish that AJPW would be breaking from the shackles of sumo. Something I left out in my JWA coup writeup, which I now regret, is that a lot of what the reforms were meant to do was specifically clean up the ex-sumo baggage weighing down the company. (This gives more context to Ueda's behavior, as he was an ex-sumo fearful of perhaps losing his job or standing. It also explains why the locker room could plausibly have rallied behind Oki when he tried to make his move.) The last Japanese talent to debut in America for seasoning had been Sakaguchi,, who of course was a national judo champion (and runner-up to Geesink in the World Championship). Also, if Baba got all four of these men, would the company have even had room for Tenryu in a few years?

People may have already seen it, but I wrote a lengthy post a month ago about the downfall of the IWE, in the match thread for Fujinami vs. Hara. Thank you all so much for the kind words.

There's an unrelated bit about Ichiro Hatta that I never see brought up in English. But first, I should probably explain who he was for those unaware. Here's an excerpt from the first draft of part one of the project I've been working on: "Hatta lived an fascinating life. In 1929, after he and his classmates were defeated by a wrestling club during a US tour, the judoka became determined to spread amateur wrestling to his native country, and co-founded Japan’s first club in 1931, while studying at Waseda University. He was also working around this time as the secretary of Kanō Jigorō, the founder of judo and the developer of much of the pedagogical model which we now associate with East Asian martial arts. Jigorō once told Hatta that it would take fifty years for him to establish a foothold for amateur wrestling. One of Hatta’s pupils would later remark that, 'by remaining hostile to the judo world of his birthplace, he may have been able to inspire his own fighting spirit and sustain his unyielding determination.' Hatta became the third president of the Japan Amateur Wrestling Association in 1946, and inhabited the chair for the rest of his life. Due to the connections that the Association had made before the war, FILA cleared Japanese wrestlers to return to international competition in 1949, the first sport in which they were so allowed. Three years later, Hatta personally coached bantamweight Shohachi Ishii to postwar Japan’s first Olympic gold medal in Helsinki. In the 1960s, Hatta managed to establish an athletic pipeline with the Soviet Union. In so doing, he also became an early international supporter of sambo, the hybrid martial art which had grown from the Red Army’s CQC protocol into a bonafide combat sport. If anyone reading this did amateur wrestling themselves in the last fifty years, then even you have felt the impact that Hatta made on the sport. For in 1971, FILA accepted his proposal, inspired by sumo, to change the area of a standard wrestling mat from a square to a circle, nine meters in diameter. [later related excerpt] Anton Geesink is perhaps the most important foreigner in the postwar history of judo. In 1961, the Dutchman was the first non-Japanese judoka to win a world championship. The humiliated Kodokan was so determined to reclaim their symbolic dominance on a global stage that they finally acquiesced to the one demand which had kept judo from the sanction of the International Olympic Committee: weight classes. Ichiro Hatta was then able to use his pull to give back to the judo world which he had forsaken some thirty years before, and the sport was approved by the IOC just in time for the Tokyo Olympics." Anyway, his role in facilitating Jumbo's transition into a pro wrestler is well known, as is his responsibility for connecting Ali to Inoki. But just a few years before Jumbo, he had made a more obscure but still substantial contribution. So, in early 1968, the Great Togo was working as the booker for the International Wrestling Enterprise, and in fact was trying to take it over. He was apparently leading a somewhat unaware Lou Thesz along in his plans. (I actually bought a Kindle copy of Hooker solely to get some info on this, but unfortunately to old Aloysius Japan might as well have ended when Rikidozan did. Maybe when he wrote it, he was still salty about the UWFi betraying his ideals to bring over Vader.) I guess this is extraneous, but the story of Thesz's most famous match for the company is so emblematic of the IWE's hard luck that I have to pause to tell it. On January 3, 1968, they counterprogrammed a Giant Baba-Crusher Lisowski title match by booking a venue just across the river, and pitting a JWA defect named the Great Kusatsu against Thesz. Kusatsu was humiliated on national television when, after he appeared to suffer a legitimate concussion from a Thesz backdrop, referee Fred Atkins stopped the match. (Kusatsu held on to his bitterness so hard that he later doomed the IWE further during his tenure as booker, when his harassment of company ace Strong Kobayashi - I've read that in one alleged instance, he forced him to drink his own piss - drove the man to jump ship to New Japan. This led TBS to finally cut the IWE in 1974 from their original TV deal, which had already been cut in half two years earlier, likely due to economic fallout from the Nixon shock.) Anyway, Togo left in February when his plans failed, and the IWE no longer had a booker with enough pull to let them get around their lack of NWA membership. Ichiro Hatta stepped in to save the company by hooking them up with Joint Promotions in the UK. European gaijin might not have had enough allure to overtake the Americans in the eyes of the Japanese fanbase, but this point of crosspollination was an important one. It's why certain guys from the IWE - Mighty Inoue and Isamu Teranishi come to mind - had noticeable European sensibilities in their work; that's where they did their seasoning excursions. And it's why the IWE were the first in the country to book not just Billy Robinson, but freakin' Andre. (If not for Robinson's extensive IWE work, there's a chance he never joins the AWA when Verne made a deal with the IWE in 1970.) To close, my favorite stories about Hatta are that a.) he acted out on a diplomatic trip to North Korea when he raised a fuss during his speech about his Emperor's portrait being consigned to the corner of a room in wherever they were visiting, and got kicked out, and b.) he's the reason Benihana exists. One of the estimated thousand wrestlers he sent on excursions to promote the sport was Hiroaki Aoki, who stayed in New York City to eventually open a tepponyaki restaurant.

Indeed, it just so happens that I previously knew about this (the only *new* info the bio itself told me was the teammate's claim that Jumbo explicitly intended to go pro before the Olympics, and the suplex practicing part) because Fumi mentioned it in a Japanese article on Jumbo. Unfortunately it seems like the site I got it from either no longer has it or lost it in a design update.

I meant the last time Elvis performed in Amarillo. Poor wording on my part.

Ask and you shall receive.

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART ONE NOTE 2022.01.23: This post has been supplanted for the moment by a post on my personal blog. That too is subject to change, as I have since acquired a 1981 Jumbo "autobiography" that I plan to transcribe (hence why I haven't gone past Part One of my blog series on Jumbo yet). It's still a better read than this. At the suggestion of people in the under-the-radar book recommendations thread, I have created this thread to share historical puro knowledge. The nominal purpose here is to disclose tidbits from a 2020 Japanese biography of Jumbo Tsuruta, but as this is tied up in research I've been doing for a bigger project, there will be other sources here. One that comes to mind is the blog here, which periodically posts history pieces distilled from the Japanese wrestling literature scene. Tidbits from the first couple chapters of the Jumbo bio follow. 1. Something I've never seen mentioned in English sources is that Jumbo was a child of divorce. [Note 07.08: With much more experience working with DeepL, I now believe this was a mistranslation. I think what the text actually said was that his mother Tsuneya had two children from a previous marriage.] (His 1996 graduate thesis, which I also have a DeepL translation of, states that his father died of cancer the day after he returned from Munich, having listened to the radio to cheer on his son whilst bedridden. [Note 03.01: This is contradicted by the biography much later on, which states that he died on March 22, 1971.]) 2. A theory proposed by the biography is that Jumbo's drive to become an Olympian was rooted in proving himself against the townsfolk who thought he was weak for not going through with the sumo apprenticeship he had been offered. He'd gone to one of the stables basically on a lark for his summer vacation, but they wanted him for real. However, his brother Tsuneyoshi is skeptical that the reason was this angsty. (For those unaware, Tsuneyoshi inherited the family farm. He still sells grapes at a premium, and has converted the first floor of the house into a museum dedicated to his brother. He and the farm are prominently featured in a television special from shortly before Tenryu's retirement, the context being that Tenryu was visiting Jumbo's grave for the last time. ) 3.) Jumbo went through a little Beatles phase in high school. I find this quite amusing considering a story from a decade later (recounted in a Tenryu column here), when he'd never heard of Elvis Presley, and Tenryu dragged him to see what would be the King's final concert in Amarillo. (This was the night after he won his United National belt back from Billy Robinson in Florida.) 4.) The next few tidbits are corrections of Meltzer's obituary, which in the two decades since has remained the most extensive English-language biographical piece on Tsuruta. 4a.) His Olympic dream did not start when he read an article about the 1968 Olympic wrestling team. It's hard to exaggerate how big a deal the Tokyo Olympics were as a propaganda project for the reconstructed Japan, which had made great infrastructural developments under prime minister Hayato Ikeda (who was succeeded by chief Olympic organizer Eisaku Satō). Tsuruta may have been a farmboy, but this was definitely on his radar. The bio recounts that he was strongly affected by the sight of the Japanese Olympians' red blazers during the opening ceremony. (Here's a picture from when Tsuruta got to wear one of them himself.) 4b.) Jumbo's high school basketball team won the prefectural championship, not nationals. 4c.) The story that the future Mr. Pogo was the captain of the university wrestling team and rejected Jumbo is a mix-up. Tetsuo Sekigawa was a member of the judo team who turned him down, and later on, Tsuruta said he himself abandoned the idea because he felt he was too late to get as far as he needed to go in judo. (Boxing wasn't an option because the Munich Olympics weren't going to hold a heavyweight division.) 4d.) As for Jumbo being rejected by the wrestling team, this also seems to be revisionism to fit a narrative, not "Michael Jordan not making varsity" level but still somewhat framed. It is, however, true that an extensive reconditioning regimen was necessary for him to take up wrestling, which he underwent at the same YMCA location where, in 1966, Inoki first demonstrated the cobra twist. 4e.) The article Meltzer mentions was, in fact, responsible for bringing to Tsuruta's attention the fact that 7 out of the 16 men on it were enlisted in the Japan Self-Defense Force, to whom he would then go for training. 5.) After Munich, the sumo world also tried to scout Tsuruta. The Takasago stable had actually been trying to do so since before the Olympics. One smaller stable even made an offer guaranteeing Tsuruta both living expenses and immediate shares in the stablemaster. 6.) The popular narrative around Tsuruta joining All Japan is that he and Ichiro Hatta met with Giant Baba, and Tsuruta was compelled by Baba's smile when, upon finding that a small housecat had fallen asleep inside his shoe, Baba remarked that the cat "had a face like Tsuruta-kun". This isn't untrue, but it omits the fact that some prior courtship had gone on. One of Baba’s friends in the sports journalism world was Satoshi Morioka, and it just so happened that his brother-in-law, Akio Nojima, was involved in amateur wrestling. He was the president of Olympique Products, which produced the mats and equipment of the Japan Amateur Wrestling Association, and would also produce training gear for All Japan. Nojima had Tsuruta over for dinner a couple times, and courted him towards AJPW. (Morioka also apparently had some involvement in courting Tenryu.) 7.) There is something of a parallel between the Meltzerian "lazy Jumbo" discourse and his native reception, at least as it was at some point. Tsuruta has been called the first "salaryman wrestler" because he was explicit about this being a job for him, right down to his word choice at the press conference announcing his signing. He was apparently the first wrestler to say that he had found employment, as opposed to having taken an initiation or apprenticeship. You don't need to be a Japanese cultural studies major to detect the long shadow of sumo hierarchy there. In fact, one of Jumbo's university wrestling teammates claims that he had intended to become a professional wrestler even before the Olympics, and had even practiced his suplexes on the team mats. If I'm not mistaken the "careerist Jumbo" narrative would later feed into some heat, kayfabe or otherwise, with Choshu. 8.) {Rewritten/expanded point for future readers) Tsuruta was one of four people scouted by Baba and/or courted by Nojima for All Japan. One of these was his biggest amateur wrestling rival, Yorihide Isogai (who had competed in the Mexico City Olympics), who was forced to decline to take over his family business. The Chuo team captain who finally got his friend Jumbo into the club in 1971 was also pitched, but declined. The fourth person, Mitsuo Yoshida, would eventually enter professional wrestling through a different path, and would of course become much better known by another name: Riki Choshu. 9.) It's easy to miss, but part of the reason why Jumbo's suplex-machine style was so revolutionary was that he totally bucked the social order in puro by working that way. Masa Saito and Thunder Sugiyama had been amateur Olympians too, but they never ever used the backdrop in the JWA because the sumo-inherited hierarchy extended to no highspots for the lower guys. (I've read elsewhere that this held in AJPW for the rookies otherwise, at least until Akio Sato opened things up when he was booking in the early 80s. Side note, but as this bio will be sure to get into much later on, Sato deserves way more credit for helping AJPW develop than he gets in the West. And this is despite the fact that he's the best-known AJPW career midcarder over here due to his later Orient Express stint.) It'll take me a while to get enough progress in the book to justify making another post, but I'll justify making a new thread shortly with a condensed version of a three-part blog post from the source mentioned at the beginning about the JWA coup.

Thank you for the compliments. I'm not really up to posting a full translated version - I know my way around DeepL well enough to extract information, but it's not exactly readable for pleasure. Also the book is pretty new so a full translation being out there like that feels ethically dubious. If there is interest, however, I am willing to entertain the idea of making a thread with the facts and information I find through this process. Along the way I'd probably sprinkle in other knowledge I've gathered in my research efforts towards my personal project (if you're interested in what that is I talked about it in my post in the Introduction thread, though it's developed a bit since then).

I can't really call this a 'recommendation' because you'd have to have a lot of free time and be really stubborn to go through with this without reading Japanese, but it would definitely be under-the-radar so far as this board is concerned. For the past week, I've been transcribing (chapter by chapter, and then feeding that text into DeepL) a 2020 Jumbo bio written by former Gong editor Kagehiro Osano. I'm seventy pages in now (of just under 600), and I've received a lot of good info. Very tedious process, sure; the app I'm using only reads up to four characters at a time, and you have to check their accuracy yourself (and, horror of horrors, sometimes you'll still probably need to hunker down and search for a particular kanji yourself online to copy and paste). This makes it really draining when, for instance, you have to transcribe someone speculating for four pages whether Jumbo, Choshu, or Yatsu was the better amateur wrestler. But I will see this through. Still though, any English-language bios besides Hansen's (which I've read) go into All Japan for more than just a couple pages?

I shall do this, for the people. It’s going to take a few hours, since I’m putting on everything that (to my knowledge) isn’t streaming on official channels. Anybody who is interested, please shoot me a PM. (Jetlag, you already have the link in your inbox.) I want to keep some veneer of discretion to all of this.

I've linked to this channel in a couple of my threads in the Matches section, but I've had my eye on a great Japanese YouTube channel for a little bit now. They seem to be less a wrestling channel than an "uploading retro Japanese television that happens to be mostly wrestling", but there's been some great stuff to come out of it. I've already written elsewhere about the 1977 Champion Carnival final and Jumbo/Oki from July 1977, but they have some other interesting stuff that the ol' AJPW Archive did not. Thing is, you have to be quick to get the real gems that this channel has to offer. They have this system where, every few days, they'll upload several NJPW matches for only about twelve hours. I've likely missed some good stuff because I didn't discover the channel earlier, but I've been downloading everything they drop since I figured out what was going on. Haven't gotten around to watching any of it, but I've stockpiled some stuff that isn't on NJPW World or Ditch, and which looks promising or at least interesting: - a Fujinami/Kido vs Chavo/Tony Rocco tag from Oct. 1978 - Choshu vs Kido, from the following month - a Choshu/Fujinami match from Sep. 1983, as well as a Choshu/Hamaguchi vs Maeda/Hoshino tag from the following night - the Choshu/Hamaguchi vs Fujinami/Maeda Tag League draw from that December

FYI a somewhat more complete version of this match than the ten-minute clip you likely saw dropped a few month back. It's still just the latter two-thirds of a thirty-minute draw, and it may not change your opinion, but I figured it was worth mentioning. More satisfying as an introduction to Dynamite for the Japanese audience than as a showcase for Teranishi, but I enjoyed it.

You guys are talking about a different match. Kim Ill is not Kim Duk, but rather Kintaro Oki's Korean name. The match you're referring to took place at the Rikidozan tribute show on December 11, 1975. Compare this retrospective broadcast of the match to the match with Dillon's commentary.