Super World Sports

Here's the first part of Part Two of the SWS series, which goes up to the 1991.04.02 Wrestle Dream in Kobe show. The source I've been consulting only tells much of the rest of the story in 1991 through the lens of the reformation of Ryuhara-gun, Tenryu's tag team with Ashura Hara, so that will be its own post, preceded by an extended Hara biography up to that point. SWS Part Two: Black Ship Docks (1/2) ROAD TO WRESTLEFEST 1991 The first SWS show with loaned WWF talent was (according to Cagematch) their eighth event, which took place on December 6, 1990, at the Welfare Hall in Himeji. The WWF representatives were the tag teams of Ted DiBiase and Greg Valent…

The grand finale of my SWS narrative is here. Part Three: Black Ship Sinks SWS TAG TEAM TITLES As 1992 began, SWS looked to have finally gotten on track. They kicked the year off with a 1992.01.04 show at the Shizuoka Industrial Hall, where a “mostly non-paying” audience of 4,230 saw the start of a round-robin tournament to crown the first SWS tag team champions. Cagematch does not recognize every tournament match as such, so I’ve had to guess which teams were actually participating: 1. Ryuharagun (Genichiro Tenryu & Ashura Hara) (Revolution) 2. Natural Powers (Haku & Yoshiaki Yatsu) (WWF/Dojo Geki) 3. Shunji & Geor…

Finally, I have completed (part two of) Part Two of my SWS narrative. (Also, check footnotes for a bonus tangent following up on Koji Kitao and his infamous UWFi tenure.) SWS Part Two: Black Ship Docks (2/2) HIGHWAY TO HARA The Igapro article I am drawing from is not specific as to when this took place, but what we do know is that, at some point after SWS’s formation, there was a discussion amongst the journalists who reported on Tenryu about what could be done to revitalize his career, after the bashing of Weekly Pro and the internal politics had sapped his momentum. The idea was pitched to bring back Ryuharagun, and the journalists, chief among them …

KOJI KITAO BEFORE SWS I rushed Part One and let some things slip through the cracks – perhaps I was wanting to prove that I’m not going to be a one-hit wonder after finishing the Jumbo bio, or maybe I was just really proud of my dumb “Two Princes” joke in the biography section – so I’m really going to take it slow writing Part Two. There is one big thing I missed at the end of that post that I need to address now. On November 1, 1990, SWS announced a new signing: the controversial retired yokozuna Koji Kitao, through Revolution. And in researching his pre-SWS career, I fell into a sumo history rabbit hole that fascinated me. So Kitao is going to get the extende…

I have completed the first of what I’ve planned to be a three-part series about SWS, but for this post I’m doing an experiment. You’ll notice numbers besides certain names. I have planned for this SWS narrative to span three posts, but at least this first one will feature wrestler biographies at the bottom. I learn a lot of cool things in my research efforts that don’t fit into the broader narratives that I’m trying to tell, and I want to create an outlet for those while also making this thread more accessible for those new to retro puro, who may not know a lot of these names. If it seems like I’m condescending to you guys, think about it from the perspective of a more ca…