Jumbo Tsuruta Bio

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

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…

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…

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART NINE I still have three pages left, but the final section thus far seems to just be a conclusion summarizing the book and citing the interviewees, so I don’t feel too bad about ending things here. Thus concludes my posts culled from the Jumbo biography, and I can rest over Easter weekend. For reasons which should be obvious to anyone familiar with Tsuruta’s career arc, this is going to be light on wrestling tidbits and heavy on biographical information. 1. Tsuruta was hospitalized on October 31, 1992, the same day his second son was born. After the October Giant Series had ended, his liver functions spiked to thirty times that of normal huma…

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART EIGHT Finally, I have finished the penultimate, nearly-100 page chapter of the Jumbo bio, about the Tsuruta-gun/Choseidaigun era. A lot of this chapter is match recaps (as well as stuff about the sorta-theory of the book that Jumbo was "the strongest wrestler" - as in, most innately gifted), and as this is some of the most extensively discussed wrestling in IWC history there’s not much that something like that can really add. Before we start, I do want to confirm that I’m also putting stuff together for an SWS post, but I want to get the story straight on the circumstances behind all the departures. 1.) It’s probably best if I get the backgr…

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART SEVEN Finally, I have completed transcription of chapter 9, about the Tsuruta/Tenryu feud. It starts with the broad strokes of Tenryu’s early wrestling career, but I think he deserves a bit more from me in this post than that. Tenryu’s autobiography is one of the books that I’ve considered doing a transcription of after the Jumbo bio (though a 2019 Four Pillars bio will probably be my next project if I do this again), but I’d like to add a couple tidbits about his pre-puroresu life. Would any of you be interested in a detour post about SWS? I don’t know if the story of that company has been played out in English-language circles. 1.) Ge…

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART SIX Here we go with chapter 8. 1.) There’s a linguistic note that I think is worth making about JPW’s name, as Japan Pro Wrestling sounds more generic than it originally came off when divorced from context. See, their name was *literally* Japan in katakana (ジャパン), rather than the Nihon (日本) that AJPW and NJPW had in their Japanese names. 2.) Choshu claims that Akio Nojima never directly tried to court him towards All Japan, though the biography maintains that All Japan was first to approach him. However, like Tsuruta his decision to join New Japan was perhaps influenced by his stomach, as he was treated by NET TV’s athletic director and…

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART FIVE I have finished transcription of chapter 7. This is one of the lighter chapters on new information overall, as it spends a lot of time recapping matches, but there is still some stuff worth sharing. The next chapter will be about the Ishingun period. 1. Jumbo’s switch to black trunks, first seen in the 1982.06.08 Flair match, was the decision of one of the television producers. To make the subtext explicit, this was to recall Rikidōzan, just as the change of his signature moves was to recall Thesz. In this way, Jumbo made a symbolic break from the shadow of the Funks and Amarillo, which his moves and starred trunks had evoked. 2. A…

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART FOUR Somehow, after taking a break on Monday, I managed to crank out all 50 pages of chapter six by 3am Friday morning. This won’t be as dense in factoids as the previous one, because much of this chapter is dedicated to a discussion that, while interesting and definitely important in an understanding of Jumbo’s reception, contains relatively few tidbits that I can really package in the format I have done up to this point. There is some juicy stuff in this chapter, but much of it is packed in the back 15 or so pages. So, about Jumbo’s reception. The bio states that, as early as a Gong article in June 1978, Tsuruta’s aptitude as the future of…

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…