The 50 Greatest Wrestlers Of The Last 50 Years: Who Is #12?

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#12 Jumbo Tsuruta

A natural athlete and one of the largest Japanese wrestlers of all-time, Jumbo Tsuruta would revolutionize professional wrestling in route to becoming one of the biggest stars of the 1980s and 90s. Tsuruta took puroresu and transformed it from a clone of American wrestling to a completely different entity, one that would keep professional wrestling on the forefront of sport in Japan in a way that wrestling in North America would fade away from. Born Tomomi Tsuruta, the 6’6″ 300lb Tsuruta excelled in many sports in high school, including basketball, sumo wrestling and swimming. How good of an athlete was he? While studying at Chuo University he took up amateur wrestling on a whim and would go on to win national championships in freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling. His success as an amateur led to a trip to the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, where he represented Japan in Greco-Roman wrestling, a mere 18 months after picking up the sport. Unlike most wrestlers, who seek out professional wrestling, professional wrestling worked hard to get Tsuruta. Giant Baba tirelessly recruited him and was able to sign him on October 31, 1972, just ten days after he had officially founded All-Japan Pro Wrestling. While Baba had stars coming over from the Japan Wrestling Association, signing the top prospect in all of wrestling was an important step forward for the fledgling company, as Tsuruta would became a pillar for AJPW during a terrific boom period. At the time, the Funk brothers were responsible for training new recruits for AJPW, and when Baba would sign a new talent they would move to Texas to train with the Funks and work in their Amarillo promotion. For all intents and purposes, Tsuruta was the fastest learner in professional wrestling history. A wrestler receiving a world title shot during their first year in the industry is pretty much unheard of; even men like Kurt Angle had to wait two years before receiving a WWF World Heavyweight Championship shot. Tsuruta would get his first world title shot just eight weeks after beginning his training. Eight weeks! After eight weeks of pro wrestling training most students barely know how to run the ropes and lock-up, but Tsuruta was already a title contender. After beginning his training with the Funks in March of 1973, he would go on to challenge Terry Funk for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship in May at a show in Albuquerque, New Mexico, losing a 2 out of 3 falls match that went a whopping 52 minutes. Since AJPW and New Japan Pro Wrestling both had working agreements with different promoters in North America, there were a lot of young Japanese wrestlers touring around the continent and gaining some seasoning. Nearly all of the Japanese wrestlers were portrayed as sneaky, underhanded heels who tried to cheat the American wrestlers out of their victories. Wrestling has always been warped with a plain narrative of stereotypes, and even today that still holds true in a lot of cases. The early-70s were no different, and since the most famous moment Japan ever did involving the US was a sneak attack (Pearl Harbor), many Japanese wrestlers were forced to play the role of a villain from a bygone era. Tsuruta proved to be an exception to the rule, as he began to get over as a babyface with American fans. As Terry Funk told the Wrestling Observer “He was the only Japanese wrestler that I knew that was really well accepted as a good guy here in America. All of the fans really liked him…He worked for me in Amarillo and when I was booking in Florida and when I was in Mid-Atlantic, he was accepted very well in each place as a babyface. That’s at a time when all the Japanese were working as heels over here.” Thanks to his size, athleticism and hard working style, Tsuruta would enjoy a fair amount of success in America, his biggest victory coming over Billy Robinson in a match for the NWA United National Title in a match in Florida in 1977. Late in 1973 he would return to Japan and immediately got a push as a top name. He was paired with Baba and they formed the top babyface tag team in Japan. Their second match as a duo was a 60-minute classic against the Funks on live television, which immediately established the young Tsuruta as a household name in Japan. In February of 1975, Baba and Tsuruta would travel to Texas to challenge the Funks for the NWA International Tag Team Championships, defeating the Funks and bringing the titles with them back to Japan, where they would remain for the remainder of their existence. The rest of the 1970s saw Tsuruta mainly take a backseat behind Baba as the number two babyface in the promotion. They would continue to team up and defend the NWA International Tag Team Championships, eventually ending up with six title reigns, and defending them against the likes of Kintaro Ohki and Kim Duk, Abdullah the Butcher and Ray Candy, and Tiger Jeet Singh and Umanosuke Ueda.

By the early 1980s, Baba began to reel back his role in the company and began to push Tsuruta as the top babyface star. In 1980 he became the first wrestler other than Baba or Abdullah the Butcher to win the prestigious Champion Carnival, defeating Dick Slater in the finals of a tournament that saw top names compete in it, like Ted DiBiase and Abdullah the Butcher. While Baba was the still the most prominent name and the biggest star in the company, Tsuruta took over for him as AJPW’s ace, a guy who would challenge imported champions and would often have the best match of the show. Before the 1980s, wrestling in Japan, otherwise known as puroresu, was not all that different from wrestling in the United States. The pacing, structure of matches and style was very similar to the rest of the territories in wrestling; it is no surprise that AJPW was under the NWA banner and recognized the NWA World Heavyweight Championship as the one true world title. Today, puroresu is notably different from its American counterpart, in fact, puroresu has impacted American wrestling over the last 25 years much more than American wrestling has impacted puroresu. Around 1980 a certain wave of new, innovative wrestlers began to come of age in Japan. Up until that point, it nearly mirrored American wrestling; which makes sense when you research the history of wrestling in Japan. Teams of wrestlers from North America and Europe had been touring Japan for decades to minimal acclaim, but it was not until a native star, Rikidozan (Rikidozan was actually …

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