Once again we have Jumbo versus Tenryu for the Triple Crown Championship. However, unlike their past matches, this time Tenryu is the champion. In their previous match, one of the greatest of all time, Tenryu finally got the big pin on his long time mentor and then rival. I really enjoyed this match, although it was obvious from the opening that the crowd was not as hot as their last match, and the dynamic between the two had changed a bit with Tenryu finally having defeated Jumbo. I would consider their last match, nearly perfect in every regard. So even if the atmosphere of this encounter is not quite at the same level, it is by no means anything short of excellent still.
I think a very strong case can be made that from the mid 80's through say 1990 or 1991, that Tenryu was easily in the top five wrestlers in the world. And I would argue that Jumbo was the very best (sorry Ric Flair and Keiichi Yamada). There was a point in the mid 80's, about a year after Riki Choshu and his army invaded All Japan, that Jumbo went on offense attacking Choshu's ribs after one match, and then again before the next, that Jumbo's character and personality seemed to take on a new dimension. He eventually evolved into the surely veteran that we saw in the early 90's, but for the remainder of the 80's, he had an edge to him, that in my view made him the best in the world.
So any match up between two of the top 5 wrestlers is going to be excellent, and this match up certainly showed it. Each wrester tried to hit big moves to the start the match, Jumbo with his knee and Tenryu with the enzuigiri, but the other was able to avoid. There was still a clear amount of disdain between the two and that was evident throughout the match. Jumbo may have shown a bit of new found respect for Tenryu, but still the two men tore into each other with a definite amount of hatred.
What I loved about this match, as I do many All Japan matches, is the struggle. Throughout the match, Tenryu kept trying to hit his big power bomb for the finish. Yet each time, Jumbo would struggle to avoid getting hit with it. As I watched, I kept expecting Tenryu to wear him down enough to finally get the move. Yet Jumbo kept battling out, and as the match progressed, the crowd kept getting hotter and hotter. After numerous attempts, Tenryu seems to FINALLY get Jumbo up, only for Jumbo to pull over sort of a poor mans hurricanrana and shockingly get the pinfall.
So in the last Triple Crown match of the 80's, Jumbo wins back the title and is the new champion. This will set the stage for perhaps the greatest decade of title matches in history.
