[1983-08-04-AJPW] Jumbo Tsuruta & Terry Funk vs Tiger Jeet Singh & Umanosuke Ueda

I was watching this alongside a few other matches that feature Tiger Jeet Singh and while they were all at least good, this blew away all my expectations going in. This was one of the first matches of Terry Funk's retirement tour (lol) and the heels come out with their sticks and swords, ready to wail on the Funker like it's the last chance they'll get. Naturally, it starts off incredibly heated and has to take a few minutes to settle down into a proper tag match, though seeing all the chairs and monitors get tossed around was quite fun while it lasted. Terry & Jumbo both get to play the face-in-peril at different points as Singh & Ueda act as the dastardly foreign heel team to great effect. Singh in particular tries the ol' hiding a foreign object from the referee regularly and Terry sells like he did taking a fork swipe from Abdullah or Sheik stabbing him with a pencil. Some won't like how dramatic it can get, but you can't deny how sympathetic it was to those Japanese audiences. The biggest surprise for me was seeing how fired up Jumbo got as a hot tag; in 1983 he's still working the classic NWA/world title match style with Flair and Bockwinkel, but this is a wholly different side of him, lunging at his opponents with high knees and eager to turn the fight into an outside brawl. More chaos ensues, gradually the heels use weapons in plain sight of the referee, and it takes Giant Baba coming out to give Terry & Jumbo their chance at revenge.

If I were doing a MOTY list for 1983, this would certainly make it on there.