Terry Funk vs. Jumbo Tsuruta was the Greatest Match of All Time
Terry Funk vs. Jumbo Tsuruta was the Greatest Match of All Time
As far as I know at least.
A man’s voice echoes, then drums. The rhythm is steady but powerful, filling the cavernous space in Kuramae Kokugikan, even as the two competitors begin their championship bout. When the drums pause, a chorus of chanting from the performers. The drummers, wherever they are, receive a polite applause from those in attendance when they finish their initial performance. They wouldn’t stay gone for good though. As the match ebbed and flowed, so too did the drumming return, underscoring the wrestling and matching the shifting rhythms of Jumbo Tsuruta and Terry Funk’s bodies.
Musical accompaniment is not entirely unheard of in professional wrestling. In recent years, there’s “Wild Thing” looping beneath both Anarchy in the Arena matches in AEW, which likely takes its cues from something like New Jack wrestling to Ice Cube & Dr. Dre’s “Natural Born Killaz.” Look a little further, and one finds Kana and Meiko Satomura wrestling to the sounds of a shamisen, or Jeff Jarrett and Dutch Mantell being accompanied by a Walter Mays-led orchestra.
The drums present for Jumbo vs. Funk don’t quite have that same sense of premeditation though. There’s something more organic to how they intensify with the action, especially in the third fall. They’re more audible manifestations of the match’s effect on the audience, perhaps similar to a vuvuzela at a football game or the riotous noisemaking of a New Year’s celebration. It matches one’s heartbeat as the thrill of the match esclates. The drums never overtake or insit upon themselves, they only ever respond.
They’d mean nothing without Jumbo Tsuruta and Terry Funk.
At this point, Jumbo Tsuruta and Terry Funk are familiar rivals. Jumbo’s spent a good number of his first three years as a professional wrestler working against Terry Funk. For the most part, this took the form of Jumbo teaming with Giant Baba against Terry and older brother Dory Jr. It’s such an important rivalry to the young Tsuruta’s career that he even won his first ever professional wrestling championship by defeating The Funks in San Antonio, Texas for the NWA International Tag Team Championships a little less than two years into his career. It’s no exaggeration to say that working with the Funks helped lay the groundwork for Jumbo’s credibility as a top star in All Japan in the decades to come.
As for Terry Funk, he’s six months into his only reign as the NWA World Heavyweight Champion. The footage I’ve seen from this reign—mostly limited to clipped highlights pulled from archival footage owned by the WWE or silent film reels from around the North American territories—paints a picture of Funk as an incredibly versatile top heel champion. Against Jack Brisco, the man he took the title from, Funk plays this level headed athlete with an arrogant streak bubbling up underneath. In Florida against Dusty Rhodes, he’s a much more ruthless antagonist, throwing chairs about and calling in hired guns to go after the American Dream.
Here in Japan, where he’s mostly a highly respected babyface, Funk as the champion still presents primarily as the antagonist of this match. He’s the well-established veteran at the top of the world for the young and promising Jumbo to overcome. Nothing he does in the match ever stands out as too cruel or dastardly, but his role as the NWA World Champion places the burden of the elevating the competition squarely on his shoulders. For the traveling champion, the local hero is always the key attraction. The champion merely faciliatates the challenger’s shine before just overtaking with enough credibility to remain on top.
Funk pulls that off masterfully in this bout, structuring everything to put over Jumbo as the bright wunderkind that he is.
The first fall is the most instrumental in this narrative point. The early moments paint a very simple picture: Funk has to work extra hard to stifle the challenger’s power. Funk attempts to do this by controlling Jumbo’s arm. His time on top in this fall doesn’t last long, but the glimpses of Funk as a grappler working on top we get are excellent. The way he grinds his forearm into Jumbo’s arm or even into the challenger’s face is the kind of gritty meanness I love from mat workers. Unfortunately for Funk, the younger man is always able to escape through pure brute strength. He fully lifts Funk onto his shoulders to escape an early arm hold, and later on is able to power out of a double arm stretch through sheer force of will.
The latter plays as a very literal reversal of the match’s dynamics as Jumbo becomes the controlling force of the match. He does so by grabbing onto Funk’s arm and not letting go. It’s a classic narrative beat found in a lot of these more technically-minded matches from the 70s and beforehand. The match becomes a simple question of problem solving: can Funk find a way to get out of Jumbo’s literal grasp?
The answer is yes and no.
Funk tries so many different fun and interesting ways to escape the arm hold. Most notably perhaps is that Jumbo’s control is frustrating enough to the champ that Funk’s the first to start throwing real heavy blows: big chops to try and force a break that the challenger eventually learns to dodge and use against the champion. Then Funk tries to escape through momentum and space, rushing out of the ring, only to find the challenger extremely dogged in his persistence of holding onto the arm. The attempts alone are enough to keep the match dynamic and engaging, but even better are the brief moments of hope when Funk does escape Jumbo’s clutches for the briefest of moments, only to be launched crashing back to the canvas with some truly beautiful overhead armdrags.
Funk eventually does escape by finally shooting Jumbo off, and he tries to follow up pushing the pace and running the ropes. Unfortunately, the young challenger keeps up with the pace, not only matching Funk’s agility and speed, but catching the champion with a leaping sunset flip to get the three count and the win in the first fall. It’s a wonderful moment, Funk thinks he’s finally gotten out of the young man’s control only to trip his way into losing the fall anyway. Pretty masterful meat and potatoes storytelling to paint Jumbo as a credible threat.
The second falls sees Funk insist upon himself more as the champion. It’s here that his more antagonistic qualities really come to the fore. He starts the fall by slapping at Jumbo, clearly trying to rattle the cool-headed challenger’s approach to the match. Funk charges in too with short headbutts when engaging in a Greco-Roman knuckle lock, clearly trying to rattle the younger man.
It ends up working as the more aggressive approach allows Funk to open a target on Jumbo’s body: the neck.
It’s a very focused effort from Terry here. He splashes his body onto the back of Jumbo’s neck, nails a piledriver, all working to soften up the champion. Jumbo has a very signature way of selling bump damage, a few twitches down on the mat like his spine is seizing up. He’d come to use that physicality regularly through his career—especially as bigger and harder bumps became a key aspect of All Japan’s in-house style—but here so early on in his career, it’s hard not to connect that to Funk’s on famed seizure-like selling. After all, Funk played a big role in training Jumbo, it’s only natural that some of his signature physicality would transfer onto the younger man.
The damage from Funk’s attack forces Jumbo to try and rush headlong into the offensive. When he tries to grab a Cobra Twist, Funk’s able to reverse the hold into a rolling cradle on the mat to get the pinfall and tie up the score.
The final fall, on the surface, plays out as the most unstructured. We’re at the peak of the escalation now as both men take turns dropping each other with bigger moves in their desperation to finally get the win. In a lesser match, that would honestly suffice to put a satisfying end to things, but even in this more all out section of action, there’s so much substance to be found.
For one, Funk remains antagonistic in his approach to Jumbo. At one point as Jumbo tries to ground the champion, Funk just grabs the challenger by the hair and gives him a big punch right to the nose. It’s the kind of nasty aggression that draws a subtle line of morality between the two in the final rush of action. For another, all the neck work that Funk spent the second fall focusing on finally bears fruit. Jumbo nails a German suplex on the champion but the impact clearly rocks him as well, possibly reaggravating the damage sustained in the second fall. It’s enough of a shock that he fails to capitalize on the German in time, and it plays a major role in his final downfall as well.
The finish is a beautiful thing. Funk catches Jumbo running off the ropes and hot shots him throat and neck first into the top rope. The whiplash on an already damaged neck gives Funk the three-count and the victory.
Of all the moves executed in that final fall, it might not be the most flashy or impactful of them all. It might even wrankle the modern fan’s senses a bit, it’s very rare after all to see anyone drop a fall just from crashing into the ropes. And yet, this is a finish that has only grown more beautiful with time—something that neither Jumbo nor Terry could have predicted in 1976.
Jumbo and Terry don’t know it, but in choosing this finish, they capture a snapshot of hurts yet to come. There’s such power in being able to foreshadow without intention, plant without planning to sow. It’s a real-time act of creation, made all the richer the farther one gets from it. It’s the first in a series of major losses he will face due to rushing headlong towards an opponent who then sends him crashing into the ropes. It perhaps most famously happens years and years later in June 1989, and then again in June 1990. With this loss, Jumbo catches a glimpse of devastating failures to come, an early lesson to let cooler heads prevail and to think before rushing in.
On this night and many nights to come, Jumbo loses.
The bell rings, the drums bang on.
IS IT BETTER THAN 6/3/94? In 1994 and the time since, Mitsuharu Misawa vs. Toshiaki Kawada has been hailed as perhaps the greatest match of all time. I, obviously, don’t believe that about that match, and I don’t believe it was true on 6/3/94 either. To be fair, I don’t believe that about Funk vs. Jumbo either, but there’s something to be said about just how powerful it is even all these years later. Just based on my own viewings and the records I keep, this NWA Title match—the only one we have in full from Funk’s reign—may just be the best match in pro wrestling history up to that point. That’s not an open and shut case, but I don’t think it’s an outrageous claim either. A GOAT overtaken wins over a GOAT-that-never-was any day.
Rating: ****3/4
Have you seen Jim Breaks vs Adrian Street or Billy Catanzaro vs Gilbert Cesca?
Great review, Funk in the 70's was awesome.
I would be remiss not to point out the OTHER significant hotshot in Jumbo's career: the one that set up the Rick Martel crossbody and cost him the AWA title.