70s Joshi on Wednesday: Enter Monster Ripper! Kumano! Beauty Pair!

10. 1979.01.04 - Jackie Sato & Maki Ueda vs. Mami Kumano & Monster Ripper

K: This is the last match Beauty Pair ever had a tag team. It is also the debut of Monster Ripper, aka Rhonda Sing or Bertha Faye in her unfortunate WWF gimmick. Rhonda grew up in Calgary and was a big fan of Stampede Wrestling growing up. She had contacted Stampede about being trained but was turned down (the Harts didn’t train women at the time). A trip to Hawaii in 1978 re-ignited her ambitions when she saw AJW for the first time, as she recalls in an interview in SLAM Magazine in 2001:

“I was actually in Hawaii on vacation and zapping through the channels, I stumbled on Japanese women’s wrestling. They were hitting each other with chairs and everything! It was an all-girl company, and I thought it was the coolest thing. It sparked my interest. This was definitely what I wanted to do” https://slamwrestling.net/index.php/2001/01/09/slam-wrestling-canadian-hall-of-fame-rhonda-sing-monster-ripper/

 A friend later gave her a wrestling magazine which contained contact details for Mildred Burke’s training facility in California. AJW’s scouts soon noticed her and asked to bring her over to Japan to be their new foreign monster heel.

The match starts with Mami Kumano squaring off with Jackie Sato, a pairing the Korakuen faithful would have seen very times by this point. The immediately establish Monster as the Immovable Object when Mami throws Jackie into her, and Jackie just bounces off her like she hit a brick wall. So the crowd is especially fearful when Monster tags in, I like how she does the Irish Whip here, it just looks really rough and forceful. They actually get the crowded even more heated (and they were hot from the start) just by how violent those Irish Whips look and how Jackie is selling them like she’s being launched out of control. Monster brings an extra dynamic to things because while Mami is getting heat with her cheating, Monster is like a big raging beast on a rampage creating a sense of terror in the fans of Beauty Pair that their favourites might get seriously injured in this. Mami doesn’t have the physical credibility to pull that off.

The 1st fall is fantastic stuff. The 2nd fall struggles a bit to keep the momentum going. Monster’s lack of offense gets a bit more apparent here as she’s in the ring longer, and just doing her big body blocks gets a bit repetitive. Mami shows how she’s contributing to things the most in this moment where she gets in and builds the heat right back up again dragging Jackie out of the ring from the outside, and later when Maki is in for the save I noticed how Mami fed on the apron so Maki could knock her off for a nice pop. The crowd are really into Beauty Pair when they start working together to fight off the heels, so by the end of the 2nd fall the heat has really been built back up again for Jackie to unload some cool throws and big backdrops to pull things back.

They don’t give things a chance to die down in the 3rd fall like they did in the 2nd. Jackie grabs Mami right from the start and hits her with a couple of proto-slingblades. Monster unfortunately looks a bit lost in this part for a moment, just kinda wandering around the ring before she clocks what she’s supposed to do and goes to save her partner. Mami helps though, coming into the ring with a trashcan, hitting everyone including the referee to keep the carnage hot. There’s another moment here where Monster looks like she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do and you can very clearly see Mami pat her on the back, point and say something before Monster picks up her opponent and puts her in a bearhug. While outside of kayfabe that may literally have been what was happening, this time it didn’t detract from the match so much as it still works to see Mami as the brains of this team and Monster is, well she’s just a monster. Plus this set up allows Mami to go and deploy her signature hanging off the apron move, which kicks us into the super-hot finishing stretch where Beauty Pair’s teamwork just dissipates (in part due to Jackie getting attacked on the outside by what appeared to be a member of Silver Pair) and they are overwhelmed by the repeated double-teaming and lose to a horrified crowd.

This was brilliant stuff. Hot crowd, well-structured, tragic story, the only downside really is someone in literally her first match ever looking a big green.

****

MD: We’re no longer in Hawaii. This was if not the debut for Rhonda Sing as Monster Ripper here, it’s very close to the debut and she’s debuted as a force. She was billed as Chinese-Canadian, 17 years old, 120 kg and trained by that old World Champion Mildred Burke. From what we’ve seen of Mami so far, she was definitely a force to be reckoned with, but the crowd buzzes way more the first few times they see Ripper in there. She’s treated as this amazing obstacle that the Beauty Pair somehow have to surmount. Kumano is definitely directing traffic, and quite good at it. She tossed Sato into Ripper to start and when she’d see Ripper throwing some odd looking stomps (like a bear just flailing), she’d quickly come in to control the violence. In later years, I always attributed the heels getting to do whatever they wanted to the refs being afraid of them and their superior numbers but here there’s more of a tecnico/rudo feel where the ref might halfheartedly try to stop the heel double team but he’ll drop everything to ensure that the other Beauty Pair member doesn’t get in the ring. At this point, it felt like they were playing by a different set of norms.

The answer to the question of how they could deal with Ripper was that they couldn’t. They could get an advantage on Kumano though. They just couldn’t keep it because Rhonda would come in and slowly walk over to stop whatever they were doing, to the point of just sitting on Sato a few times to win the first fall. And when Sato even got close to getting an edge on her in the ropes, Kumano would walk over to whack her in the head with a wrench. Because of course she would. However, the Beauty Pair were tag team specialists (maybe in the first generation of them with the High Flyers and…. Well, probably not the Jet Set) and they eventually cracked the code: double teams. All it took was a ducked clothesline to take Kumano out long enough to isolate Ripper. Once she was out of the way they could fight a fair fight against Kumano. That meant Sato’s insane belly to back suplexs where she flipped Kumano right onto her face over and over again. They really got to shine at the start of the third fall, with Sato’s slingblades and Ueda’s big splash but Kumano came in with a bucket and took out the ref and everyone else. That let Kumano do her signature dangling hangman’s choke and really things devolved into chaos from there. It went back and forth with a huge double suplex and Sato fireman’s carry drop on Ripper and Kumano hitting her Calf Branding-esque meteora for a near-fall. They finally ended it with Jackie being pulled off the apron and attacked by interlopers while the Black Pair (as this was the current incarnation of that multifaceted group) hit a brutal finisher, Kumano hanging up Ueda in the tree of woe and pulling her up while Ripper leapfrogged over her to squash Ueda in the corner. Hell of a thing. Anyway, I’m not sure Sing entirely knew what she was doing in there but she was used smartly and the big comeback spots were built to matter and pop the crowd big. Overall, it was one of the most effective debuts for a monster I’ve seen in a while.