Real World Tag League Teams 1977-2000

[JerryvonKramer]

I've always liked some of the continuities and traditions on the RWTL. So I've put together this spreadsheet. I've only included 2000 to show that Tenryu comes back after the exodus.

 

 

Now some fun stats:

 

Tournament appearances (to 2000):

Total tournaments: 24

Baba: 19

Dory: 16

Hansen: 18

Jumbo: 15

Misawa: 13

Kawada: 12

Abdullah: 12

Ace: 11

Tenryu: 10

Taue: 10

Kobashi: 10

 

Most tournaments won as same team:

Funks: 3

Misawa and Kobashi: 3

 

Most tournaments won (singles):

Jumbo: 5 (2 with Baba, 2 with Tenryu, 1 with Yatsu)

Kobashi: 5 (3 with Misawa, 2 with Akiyama)

Hansen: 4 (1 with Brody, 1 with DiBiase, 1 with Gordy, 1 with Tenryu)

Misawa: 4 (3 with Kobashi, 1 with Kawada) - also streak for most tournaments won in a row: 4

 

Most different partners:

Hansen: 12

Baba: 9

Ace: 8

Misawa: 7

Dory: 6

Tenryu: 6

 

Most appearances as same team:

Funks: 10

Baba and Jumbo: 6

Kawada and Taue: 6

 

Biggest gap between appearances:

 

Ternryu: 11 years (1989-2000)

Kimura: 7 years (1977-1984)

Abdullah: 7 years (1980-1987) - Abdullah would beat this when he appeared in the 2007 tournament 13 years after his last appearance in 1995.

Slater: 6 years (1982-1988)

Snuka: 6 years (1981-1987)

 

One thing I'd love to know is if there was an in-story reasoning given for the various teams and short-term alliances made. Why did Baba tag with Hansen in 93-4 for example? What was the reason that Jumbo started tagging with Yatsu? What triggered Hansen to tag with Vader? etc. etc.

[NintendoLogic]

Odd couple tag teams were generally injury replacements. The 1993 RWTL began with Ted DiBiase as Hansen's partner, but Baba took Ted's place after the latter suffered the neck injury that ended his career. By the same token, Taue partnered with Hansen in the 1999 RWTL because his regular partner Kawada was injured. Jumbo and Yatsu were paired together because they had both wrestled in the Olympics (in fact, their team was called the Olympians).

[ohtani's jacket]

Jumbo and Yatsu were called Gorin Konbi, which directly translated means Olympic Combination. In Japanese, the kanji used for the Olympics is "Gorin", which stands for five rings. As NintendoLogic mentioned, they were partnered together because they had both competed at the Olympics (Jumbo at Munich and Yatsu at Montreal), hence why they wore the black jackets with the Olympic symbol and moto. Jumbo needed a new partner after his tag team with Tenryu broke up. I believe they tried to stick him with Wajima at first and then he had a run with Tiger Mask. After Japan Pro Wrestling dissolved, Yatsu joined All Japan and began tagging with Jumbo straight away. 

[ohtani's jacket]

BTW, check this out:

 

[JerryvonKramer]

That's awesome. I recently bought a set of all the Real World Tag Leagues from 1977 to 1996 with a plan of watching them in order. I think I will likely track down footage 1997 to 2000 just for completeness. Even though I've seen many of these matches before, I have never seen them "in context" so to speak.

 

I also love the fun of some of the complete randomness and combinations. For example, what the hell sort of match is this! 

Tiger Mask II & Jimmy Snuka vs. Dick Slater & Tommy Rich (12/10/88)

Why does Bossman turn up in 1993?

 

Even if many of the matches suck, I am hoping it will be fun.

[PeteF3]

Boss Man had left the WWF sometime in the late summer/early fall of '93 (according to Jim Cornette, because he felt that the imminent federal indictment of Vince might reflect badly on him as former law enforcement). All-Japan needed a replacement partner for Doc with Gordy out permanently. I think they had designs on making him a regular foreigner but then WCW offered him a contract and that was that. Style-wise Boss Man fit in really well with AJPW while he was there and he and Doc had a couple of pretty awesome matches as a team.

Even showapuroresu.com which has a rundown of all the big tournaments from the rise of the JWA through 1988 (the Showa Era ended with Hirohito's death in the first week of January '89) doesn't seem to know why Tiger Mask and Snuka were matched up, just noting it as "unique." It also notes (thanks deepl.com for the translation): "Fans who knew the team in its prime were saddened by the poor performance of the Slater team, which would have been the favorite to win ten years ago." Slater got to the 1980 Champions Carnival finals but I wasn't aware that Tommy Rich was that highly regarded at the time.

[NintendoLogic]

13 hours ago, ohtani's jacket said:

BTW, check this out:

 

The graphic for Bart Gunn mentions that he's the guy who knocked out Steve Williams. As much as a disaster as the Brawl for All was, it gave Bart a new lease on life in Japan.

[El-P]

For sure, Bart Gunn wasn't going anywhere in WWF, at this time or another, whereas Mike Barton got a nice few years in both AJPW and NJPW in a time where Japan's wrestling was going into a crisis.

[JerryvonKramer]

What was the crisis?

 

Also, what were the circumstances behind Misawa tagging with Akiyama rather than Kobashi and of all people why did Kobashi pick the Patriot as his new partner?

Finally, why did Terry stop coming to the tournament while Dory kept going into the 90s with different partners?

 

[El-P]

Misawa and the crew leaving AJPW with almost nothing to work with, Inoki gaining power again in NJPW and pushing his atrocious MMA fetish, which killed Hashimoto and got him to leave, putting the titles on godawful guys like Fujita & Yasuda, fucking Nagata up by having him do MMA fights, all leading up to a revived Mutoh also leaving for good and taking over AJPW eventually. The early 00's were a complete mess and apart from NOAH becoming the new reference for all things Japanese pro-wrestling, including junior division (with Marufuji and KENTA changing the entire game from within, their influence is still evident to this day), things looked really bleak (not to mention the FMW road to hell, joshi puroresu having dissolved in a myriad of smaller promotions).

[joeg]

I don't know if "crisis" is the right word. Chaos maybe. NJPW, AJPW and Zero One were drawing well until 2004ish. NOAH and Hustle were drawing well until 2006ish. BJW, Toryumon/Dragon Gate, DDT, Osaka Pro, etc were all profitable on a smaller scale until 2012ish. People point at the exodus and Inoki's dabbling in MMA as why Japanese wrestling tanked, but that's over simplifying it. The warning signs were there in the 90s when TV networks moved wrestling out of primetime. Then the exodus. Then Inoki dabbling in MMA hurt wrestling's legitimacy. Then the yakuza got their hooks into FMW, Zero One, and NJPW. Then Hashimoto died. Then Inoki's hot shot booking killed the IWGP title. Then Mutoh, Tenryu, Chono, and Kobashi all started to have serious health issues and work a reduced schedule. Then Misawa died. Then there was nobody to really take the place of Mutoh, Kobashi, Tenryu, Hashimoto, Misawa, etc. because none of the 3rd generation wrestlers that debuted in the mid/late 90s and were pushed in the early 2000s really ever got over because all of their TV matches either happened after midnight or on channels buried deep in a satellite subscription. To me it was 15 years of everything that could go wrong going wrong that lead to puroresu falling on hard times not just Misawa bolting from AJPW and CroCop murdering Nagata. 

[Robert S]

If you look at it deeper, than maybe the mid 90ies are a better starting point for the crisis that Japanese pro wrestling eventually ended up being in:

- the aforementioned bad timeslots started at that point, I think

- AJW started to have problems in 96 (partly due to external factors with the Matsunaga brothers losing a lot of money in the real estate market)

- AJPW got stuck in a Misawa vs. Kobashi vs. Kawada cycle with matches that were built on further and further escalation that on the one hand had its natural limit and on the other hand was done on borrowed time. Underneath, besides Akiyama, no one came up that could follow them in that style.

- NJPW was depending more and more on bringing in outsiders to pop houses. To some degree that always was a New Japan thing, but the way they did it really escalated by the late 90ies. There are only so many interpromotional feuds you can run, and to diminishing returns. Where do you go after UWF, WAR and UWFi (if All Japan is not available)? Same for bringing in shooters. The cagematch search for "Antonio Inoki" and "differerent style" in NJPW leads to 6 results from 1/1/70 and 12/31/89 (you get 6 more hits if you include non-Inoki results). Searching for "different style" matches in NJPW from 1/1/90 to 12/31/99 gives you 43 results.

- I suppose Japan at that point heavily began to feel the effects of the territory system in the US. The total number of wrestlers in the US shrank and most heavyweights that could go were either bound to WWF or WCW. The remaining gaijin stars got older and older and could not be replaced. The only bigger, younger wrestlers that did a tour or two were guys between jobs or talent that did not make it in WWF and/or WCW or were having drug problems. In the 80ies, Japan tours were so lucrative that US wrestlers adjusted their US schedule to them, by the mid 90ies, the contracts with WCW and especially WWF did not allow you to do both (there were exceptions like Vader and the NJPW-WCW deal, obviously).

[El-P]

1 hour ago, Robert S said:

If you look at it deeper, than maybe the mid 90ies are a better starting point for the crisis that Japanese pro wrestling eventually ended up being in:

97. The end of times. I blame the Sasaki push..

[joeg]

Oh and one more thing @El-P Kaz Fujita could have been great as a top guy. He was a blue chip athlete with personality who could sell and who's work was believable. That the title only got defended once every 4 months and vacated 4 times in 5 years isn't on Fujita. That's on Inoki. If Inoki hadn't run off Hashimoto without him really passing the torch; and if Fujita had gone back to NJPW full time when his MMA record was 8-1 had a traditional title chase followed by a traditional lengthy title run, with a passing of the torch from Hash to Fujita or Hash to Sasaki to Fujita I doubt NJPW's business would have dipped. But that didn't happen. 

[El-P]

Fujita was a terrible worker who's stuff looked awful. He was also sloppy as fuck and pretty dangerous. That's from memory, maybe I'd watch some of the stuff now and enjoy it, but back then, the Fujita stuff was painfull to watch, especially at that time when shoot-style was basically a dying thing (Takada not going back to pro-wrestling and kickstarting the super hot Pride, which some considers as shoot pro-wrestling of sort, really was the last nail in the coffin along with RINGS turning into more and more of a legit shoot promotion).

Inoki's MMA fetish definitely hurt NJPW for a long time. It's interesting that Tanahashi basically rebuilt NJPW from an ideological standpoint that was totally opposite, as he went back to the style of the 90's and the Musketeers, Mutoh (who said "Fuck that shit" and went over AJ for this very reason, the smart guy that he was) being his most obvious influence.

[JerryvonKramer]

One thing that struck me looking at RWTL results into the 2000s was the dramatic drop off in Gaijin talent. Compare the names from the 70s and early 80s and then look who’s coming in during the 2000s.

 

From Race, Bockwinkel, Abby, Sheik, Dibiase, Funks etc to literally Mike Rotunda winning the RWTL in 2000!!

Aside from the Dudley Boys coming in for 2006, there’s a chronic lack of Gaijin star power in AJPW and looking over NOAH cards it seems there were even fewer Gaijin stars there for the decade.

 

[WingedEagle]

53 minutes ago, JerryvonKramer said:

One thing that struck me looking at RWTL results into the 2000s was the dramatic drop off in Gaijin talent. Compare the names from the 70s and early 80s and then look who’s coming in during the 2000s.

 

From Race, Bockwinkel, Abby, Sheik, Dibiase, Funks etc to literally Mike Rotunda winning the RWTL in 2000!!

Aside from the Dudley Boys coming in for 2006, there’s a chronic lack of Gaijin star power in AJPW and looking over NOAH cards it seems there were even fewer Gaijin stars there for the decade.

 

I'd imagine at a certain point most top domestic talent priced themselves out of the Japanese market with the way things were going here in the late 90s/early aughts.

[ohtani's jacket]

6 hours ago, JerryvonKramer said:

One thing that struck me looking at RWTL results into the 2000s was the dramatic drop off in Gaijin talent. Compare the names from the 70s and early 80s and then look who’s coming in during the 2000s.

 

From Race, Bockwinkel, Abby, Sheik, Dibiase, Funks etc to literally Mike Rotunda winning the RWTL in 2000!!

Aside from the Dudley Boys coming in for 2006, there’s a chronic lack of Gaijin star power in AJPW and looking over NOAH cards it seems there were even fewer Gaijin stars there for the decade.

 

Baba was aware of the decline of the territories by the late 80s. If I'm not mistaken, AJPW, NJPW and SWS were all courting the TV and SWS won out in the end. NJPW then struck up a working relationship with WCW leaving Baba with the foreigners who had no where else to go. 

[joeg]

I think there's a much bigger dip in the domestic talent than the ganjin talent after the split. The foreign talent in the RWTL was still solid in the early 00s- Dr. Death, Jamal, Rosey, Dudleys, LA Park, Mike Awesome, Kea, Road Warriors, Akebono, Justin Credible, Abby, Joe Doering, Matt Bloom, etc. Its a big step down from Stan Hansen, Bruiser Brody, Jimmy Snuka, the Funks, etc. No longer hall of fame caliber but still solid. But the drop off on the domestic talent side went from Omori and Takayama being dead last in 98 to Anjo and Nagai being middle of the pack 5 years later. That's not even solid or respectable. 

[jdw]

Cool chart. 

Couple of corrections:

1981 - Brody & Snuka won (you have both Dory and Snuka's bolded)

1982 - Funks won (no bolding)

1987 - bolding can be removed from Hansen & Gordy as you have Jumbo already covered

1988 - Hansen & Gordy need bolding

Couple of suggestions:

* switch Brody for Snuka

Brody won with both Snuka and Hansen, while Snuka was a non-factor without Brody. He was only in 3 of them anyway, while Brody was in 1981-84 and 1987.

* probably could be good to include Yatsu and Akiyama

Yatsu would show the two years with Choshu and the three years with Jumbo, where he was a player in all of the years. Akiyama would show 1992-99 activity, and he was in the last match of the year in 1992 and 1996-99, winning twice.

Probably these switches:

Snuka --> Brody

Slater --> Yatsu (moved to Japanese side)

Bock --> Jun (moved to Japanese side)

Bock wasn't a factor except when paired with Race, whereas Race was for the most part always treated with a respectful finish. Comp their respective finishes in 1985 when Race was stuck with Barr while Bock had Hennig. It's kind of painful to look at their respective finishes.

Slater wasn't a factor either.