More Than Just Hardcore by Terry Funk

Author:Terry Funk [Hardcore, More Than Just]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-01-26T00:11:45+00:00

CHAPTER 18

1983: The Wrestling War Begins

As I ended my full-time Japanese career in August 1983, the industry there had changed a lot. On my first tour there, in 1971, it had been me, Dominic DeNucci, Bruno Sammartino, Jerry Kozak, Mike Paidousis and Junior. That was the crew, along with Baba and his boys. We had TV, but the houses weren’t always great, and it was a struggle.

By the early 1980s, business had grown and grown and was just phenomenal by 1983. It’s a funny thing. When business is going strong, the strong points infect the rest of the promotion, and it gets healthy all the way through.

Baba had some great talent and was about to steal Inoki’s thunder a bit by buying the rights to the TV cartoon character Tiger Mask and giving the gimmick to a young wrestler named Mitsuharu Misawa. Baba really ingratiated himself to the creator of Tiger Mask and capitalized on the relationship he had cultivated to get that license.

The new Tiger Mask created interest, but I don’t know that Misawa was the best choice to be the new Tiger Mask. Misawa might have been better just as Misawa, all those years, and he was (and is) a great performer, but Misawa was Baba’s protege. Baba felt like the gimmick would be an instant success.

Misawa wrestled in a style that was very reminiscent of Jumbo Tsuruta. He was brought along slowly and taught the heritage of his wrestling. I truly think that his training and education were the reasons he was so successful in the long-term. He was taught to respect his business and take it seriously, and wrestling was his life.

Hell, Tiger Mask wasn’t the only character who existed in both the wrestling and cartoon worlds at that time. Years before, a popular cartoon magazine strip debuted called “Terry Boy.” In the story, Terry Boy wrestled, and he looked awfully familiar, but I never saw a nickel from it. He even became a TV cartoon. Ol’ Terry Boy did all right!

Meanwhile, in the States, the wrestling business was shaping up to change more than ever before.

Up to the 1980s, the NWA was the power in pro wrestling. In 1983, Vincent K. McMahon decided to challenge the territorial boundaries and try to establish his World Wrestling Federation as a national promotion.

The NWA was not strong enough to stop Vince McMahon Jr. from expanding his company into a nationwide promotion. They hated him in the 1980s, and I’m sure some still do today, but any one of them who thought he could pull it off would have done the same thing. Everybody knew that opportunity was going to come.

Hell, Vince wasn’t even the first person who tried it. In the mid-1970s, Eddie Einhorn stared a group called the International Wrestling Association which included Pedro Martinez.

Einhorn was a sports guy who helped create the NCAA tournament and the “Final Four,” a great concept. This was before cable came out, and he put the promoters in the position of trying to keep a national program from taking over.

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