Okay I might have to impress someone soon with some 80s tag team trivia. Any good names to look into that aren’t the immediate contenders? Love having you as a resource. It’s awesome the shit you find and share
Oh jesus. Do you want good ones or bad ones? Specific territories? The 80s were kind of the hey day of tags in the territories so there's a lot of ways you could go, and you know I could ramble about this shit all day haha. I'll do some "research" next time I'm on the crapper and see if I can find something really obscure but let me think of shit I've seen recently on that territory twitch.
This is actually early 90s so it's kind of cheating, but the last WCW US tag champs were the Barbarian and Dick Slater if I recall. Really odd pairing.
Umm let's see.. AWA had a kind of obscure one, a young Scott Hall and Curt Hennig were actually babyface tag champs at one point. They lost the belts in the shittiest way possible, on a count out because of some fucky rule or contract stipulation. Can't remember the specifics even though I read it like a week ago haha.
The Funks briefly went to work for Vince in the 80s (when Vince insisted on Dory being referred to as "Hoss") and were on one of the early mania cards. Terry left and went home pretty quickly so Vince did Vince shit created a new Funk... Jimmy Jack Funk. Jimmy Jack was a greasy jobber from Florida in a lone ranger mask. He sucked and they lost their push so pretty soon Dory went home and the only "Funk" left in the WWF for the better part of the 80s was a jobber fake.
Umm let's try Memphis. A lot of people know that Sting got his start teaming with the Ultimate Warrior. However, in my experience most people think they started in watts' UWF as the blade runners. They actually started in another Memphis promotion... the CWA as "the Freedom Fighters" Flash and Justice.
Here's another decent Sting one... His first 2 championship runs actually came as a heel and I'm not positive but they might have been the only time in his career he ever won a belt as a heel. These reigns did come as a tag team in the UWF, but not with Warrior surprisingly. Hellwig had quickly decided he knew better than all the dumb hicks in Memphis by this point and gone home to flex and spend way too much time thinking about "queerin" for a supposedly straight dude, so Sting won the tag belts with Hot Stuff Eddie Gilbert instead.
Ummm let's see one more... This isnt tag but it's actually kinda interesting. The last AWA champion was Larry Zbyszko, thats a pretty obscure fact on its own... But the last challenger to that title is arguably even more interesting as he went on to become one of the best workers of the next 20 years.. none other than a very young Jerry Lynn. U
If you want something more specific like a particular promotion or wrestler I can check through some of the books and interviews and stuff I have saved.
Always happy to share stuff from one of my long standing nerdy hobbies. Even when I'm not actively watching wrestling I still listen to old wrestling podcasts and read articles from sites like ring the damn bell and wrestlecrap that focus on the old stuff. Actually I should have linked you to rtdb before, it's obviously amateur run but there's years worth of stories and rumors on there. Brian Damage does a really good job with it, the wrestling with sin articles are a great source of wrestling insanity and tragedy and I'm a big fan of all the random trivia articles. Hell even the listicles are pretty good.
https://ringthedamnbell.wordpress.com/