Yusuf Turk

[KinchStalker]

Yusuf Turk (ユセフ・トルコ)

Profession: Wrestler, Referee, Executive
Real name: Yusuf Omar
Professional names: Killer Mike Yusuf, Yusuf Turk
Life: 5/23/1931-10/18/2013
Born: Toyohara (now Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk), Sakhalin
Career: 1954-1973
Height/Weight: 173cm/90kg (5’8”/198lbs.)
Signature moves: surfboard stretch, flying knee drop
Promotions: Japan Wrestling Association, New Japan Pro-Wrestling
Titles: none

One of puroresu’s earliest comic wrestlers and then a referee and booker, Yusuf Turk was an important figure in the ascension of Antonio Inoki, even if his relationship with the promotion he helped found was a turbulent one.

The half-Japanese son of a Turkish trader, Yusuf Omar was born in Toyohara, then the capital of the southern, Japanese-held half of Russia’s largest island, Sakhalin. In 1938, the family moved to Shibuya’s Ōyama-chō district in Tokyo, where Japan’s largest mosque, the Tokyo Camii, was built the same year. One presumes that Omar had some athletic background in boxing, as his first step towards what would become a career in combat sports, legit or not, was on juken shows, events which pitted judoka against boxers of foreign descent. This tradition went back decades (as early as 1909), but had been dormant for some time when it was revived after the war by future Japan Womens Pro Wrestling (1967-1972) president Morie Nakamura. Other participants in these shows included the son of the Tokyo Camii’s imam, who would compete as Straight Roy and later became known as television personality Roy James, and Masahiko Kimura. The juken revival led to Toshio Yamaguchi's Osaka match against former rikishi Umeyuki Kiyomigawa on July 28, 1953, after which the two of them petitioned local yakuza boss Shojiro Matsuyama to support what became the All Japan Pro Wrestling Association. In February 1954, Omar worked the AJPWA’s first show as Killer Mike Yusuf. (A show program from that April claimed that he had a 20-2 boxing record, and had fought in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Egypt, and India.) By July, though, he had switched sides to the JWA. In a 2012 interview with G Spirits magazine, Yusuf said he had left the AJPWA because "he got fed up with what was being said about him", but did not elaborate.

Rikidozan renamed him Yusuf Turk in reference to his heritage. His ring name is more accurately transliterated as “Yusuf Toruko”, or Yusuf Turkey, but I have decided to simply use Turk, as that is what Haruo Yamaguchi does in his Crowbar Press book on Rikidozan and the JWA. Hisashi Shinma, who worked out at the JWA’s Japan Pro Wrestling Center in the mid-fifties, claimed that Turk would train his neck by hanging dumbbells on his headgear. In 1956, Turk entered the light heavyweight bracket of the Unified Japan Championship Tournament, and defeated Hideo Higashi in the first round in 40:15. Ultimately, though, Turk is most remembered as a wrestler for early examples of comedic puroresu. Many years later, when Antonio Inoki sought to insult Giant Baba in a caustic Gong interview, he did so by invoking the “comic show wrestling” that Turk had practiced. While Rikidozan was in Hawaii in the summer of 1958, he wrote a letter to referee Kyushuzan in which he alleged that “a reckless undercard wrestler of Turkish descent” had threatened to make his Korean origins public. Despite these tensions, Turk continued to wrestle for the JWA while doubling as a referee. He also made strides into film and television acting.

Turk in the 1959 Nikkatsu film University Rampage.

Records indicate that Turk pivoted fully into refereeing after Rikidozan’s death, with only a few subsequent matches noted in the second half of 1964. When Oki Shikina was arrested for firearm possession in 1965, Turk got promoted to a head referee. He can be seen officiating the main event of the JWA’s first Budokan show in December 1966, the brutal and timeless clash between Giant Baba and Fritz von Erich. But his most famous incident from this period did not take place in the ring, but in a hotel lobby. In January 1968, the Great Togo returned to Japan for what would be a disastrous tenure as the IWE’s talent booker, and in doing so broke a promise he had made never to work in the country again when the JWA paid him off after Rikidozan died. Physical retaliation was chosen, but Turk (and undercard wrestler Gantetsu Matsuoka) took the initiative and ambushed Togo. According to one account, Turk asked Michiaki Yoshimura to punch him afterwards in order to make it look like Togo had fought back, but instead had to strike himself in the face before he turned himself in to the police. As Turk had hoped would happen, the police did not take him into custody, and only warned him that he should leave his fighting to the ring. As Togo’s reputation plummeted for losing a fight to a referee, Turk was put under indefinite suspension…as far as the public was concerned. In reality, JWA president Junzo Yoshinosato had sent Turk on vacation with a round-the-world ticket.

Antonio Inoki wins the 11^th World Big League on May 16, 1969, after a final match which Turk refereed and booked.

In early 1969, as Togo sought to form his own Japanese promotion with Lou Thesz’s backing, Kokichi Endo maneuvered to negotiate a second television deal with NET TV. As the plans for what would become World Pro Wrestling were set into motion, the JWA needed to raise the stock of a top star to carry the program, as Giant Baba (and, at first, Seiji Sakaguchi) would be Nippon Television exclusives. Turk was among those who lobbied heavily for Antonio Inoki to win the 11^th World Big League tournament that spring, and the tournament was booked to bring Inoki, Baba, Bobo Brazil, and Chris Markoff to a four-way tie at the end. Turk officiated the second tiebreaker match, where Inoki debuted the octopus stretch to defeat Chris Markoff. Three days later, Inoki sat at the press conference to announce World Pro Wrestling. In 2012, during a talk with joshi pioneer Sadako Inagari and historian Etsuji Koizumi, Turk indicated that he had booked that final match, and deemed it his masterpiece. Due to this, and the central role that referees played in booking matches in early puroresu, it is generally presumed that Turk had a major role in laying out Inoki's late-JWA singles matches, and it is known that he booked matches in early NJPW.

Over the two years to come, this two-TV setup would divide the JWA into factions around Baba and Inoki, and Turk fell squarely into the latter camp. So much so that, after Inoki wrestled his final match for the company on December 7, 1971, Turk led him to take a different exit out of the building and saved him from a planned ambush in the locker room. Inoki checked himself into a hospital for protection at Turk’s suggestion, and when he got out, Turk was at the center of plans to form New Japan Pro-Wrestling. Mortgaging his home to raise capital, Turk was the company’s second largest shareholder upon its formation. In the ring, he was a referee and booker. It has long been reported that Turk ultimately left NJPW over a dispute with Hisashi Shinma. However, a 2019 G Spirits interview with Shinma and Naoki Otsuka claims that the issue was more complex. According to Shinma, Turk and Inoki had developed some friction over the booking of an October title defense against Red Pimpernel, and Turk had then taken offense that he had not been made involved in the ultimately aborted JWA merger. Otsuka claims that it had ultimately been NET TV that wanted Turk out for his suspected yakuza ties. Whatever the case, Turk announced his departure in February 1973.

Turk accompanies Abdullah the Butcher in his shocking NJPW debut on May 8, 1981.

It would be several years before he returned to pro wrestling. Turk sold real estate in Hawaii and ran an electrical company, but he would enter what Wikipedia calls “special shareholder activities” while using making connections in the political and business spheres. Turk had been friends with mangaka Ikki Kajiwara since the Rikidozan era, when Turk was among the JWA talent who appeared in a 26-episode television adaptation of Kajiwara’s licensed manga Champion Futoshi. It is known that the two at one point planned to start their own wrestling promotion, Dai Nippon Puroresu (Big Japan Pro Wrestling), with a Fuji TV deal, and with top sumo wrestlers Takamiyama and Chiyonofuji as aces. Former JWA official Shigeo Kado wrote in 1985 that these plans dated from autumn 1978, while Turk claimed in 2002 that they did not attempt them until 1983.¹ Whatever the case, it was this connection that sowed seeds for Turk’s reconciliation with New Japan, even if it would also lead to another estrangement. On February 27, 1980, Turk refereed his first NJPW match in seven years: Inoki’s different styles fight against Kyokushin karateka Willie Williams, which had its roots in a tie-in with Kajiwara’s late-70s series Shikakui Jungle. Turk would then help facilitate the start of 1981’s infamous Pullout War, in which Hisashi Shinma sought to destroy his competition once and for all through swiping top AJPW talent. Turk got him in touch with its biggest heel. Abdullah the Butcher had asked for a raise but did not receive a response. Abdullah made a pitch through Turk to Shinma, and the rest is history. Long-forgotten plans would follow for a different styles fight between Inoki and a man Turk represented named Hashim Muhammad, who appeared at Inoki’s January 1982 match against the Butcher.

Turk’s association with Kajiwara, in whose Kajiwara Productions company he held an executive position, would eventually put an end to this period with New Japan. In 1982, Kajiwara attempted to hold Inoki and Shinma hostage in a hotel room over what could have been a dispute over either unpaid Tiger Mask royalties, or Inoki having founded his own karate dojo. This was one of several Kajiwara incidents that came to light when he assaulted Monthly Shonen Magazine editor-in-chief Toshikazu Iijima the following year, all of which compounded to destroy the author’s reputation in his final years. Just one month after the Iijima incident, Kajiwara and Turk were arrested for attempting to extort the ghostwriter of an Abdullah the Butcher book from the previous year. Turk appears to have continued involvement with Kajiwara afterward, as he can be seen in footage of the July 31, 1984 AJPW show where Mitsuharu Misawa first appeared as Tiger Mask’s second incarnation. (Notice him in this screenshot as Jumbo Tsuruta makes his entrance.)

On February 22, 1989, Turk was given a retirement ceremony at New Japan’s Special Fight in Kokugikan, at which Toyonobori made what may have been his final public appearance as a guest. The following year, when Inoki sought to make a political trip to Iraq before the Gulf War began, it was Turk who pulled strings to get him on a Turkish charter flight to a country no others would fly to. Before his 2013 death from heart issues, the elderly Turk had been seen refereeing for Satoru Sayama’s Real Japan Pro Wrestling, as well as pitching a truly bizarre freelance show in 2010.

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES

Spoiler

1. Kado and Turk’s accounts also differ sharply on whose support Kajiwara and Turk had expected, and it is on this basis that I am more skeptical of Turk’s account than I am of Kado’s. Kado reported that former JWA wrestler-executive Michiaki Yoshimura would have returned to the business in a backstage role, while Turk made a truly astonishing claim that he was going to get Inoki, Jumbo Tsuruta, Tiger Mask, and others to join.