70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Ripper!

20. 1979.01.XX3 - 02 Jackie Sato vs. Monster Ripper

K: Big match up. It’s non-title as Jackie will be defending her title vs Maki Ueda at the big show on 2/27/79 but it’s still probably the biggest singles match we’ve covered so far that wasn’t clipped up. We get the very slightest of shines at the start where Jackie ducks under Monster’s legs and goes to take the back. It’s enough to establish to the audience that Jackie’s coming in here with some kind of gameplan. But she’s gonna need a lot more than that, as Monster overpowers her in a matter of seconds, and for the next few minutes this resembles a John Cena vs. The Big Show match, to make a bizarre comparison to most of you but it’s what this reminded me of. Monster’s just throwing Jackie around and squashing her when it goes to ground. It’s not very exciting, and Monster does have a  couple of awkward hesitations, but it’s mostly ok. The crowd is behind Jackie and she’s showing a lot of charisma to try make this into something.

We get a lot of interference from the heels again, which is more of a hindrance most of the time as it’s breaking up the flow of the match and most of the time it didn’t look like Monster needed much help anyway so I didn’t see the point. The one interference which did add a bit was when one of the heels seized an opportunity to grab Jackie by the legs and pull her over the ropes so Monster could beat down on her, as that did look brutal. The rest were just people running in, throwing a kick and running away.
It does go somewhere though in that Jackie starts looking increasingly pissed off. She gets her comeback going by throwing the referee into Monster and a bit later actually tries to choke Monster in the corner like she’s Mami Kumano. At this point, it builds and builds until eventually Jackie has completely lost it and starts hitting Monster with a can, and when the referee tries to intervene, she bashes his head in too and starts throwing him around and gets herself disqualified. It’s good we had a match with a disqualification, if only to teach us that DQs do happen in AJW, you need to REALLY push it.

The way this match was laid out was all fine and made sense and I thought Jackie had a good performance. But overall it’s still a bit lacklustre and the interference just didn’t really achieve what it was going for which spoiling the flow of the match. I know these two will have much better matches than this though, and it’s worth remembering that Monster is still literally in her 1st month of wrestling here.

**1/2

MD: We’d seen Ripper against two people and against one with frequent interference. For anyone to really be able to stand against her at all was going to be impressive. They were building to the retirement match between Jackie and Maki on commentary, with the Queen Angels guesting. Jackie also came out to music (I think a first in the footage) and we’re hearing more and more screams of her names from young women than in previous matches. Things are developing over time. I think there was some indication that they were going to such lengths because they couldn’t win the titles, but I’m not sure if that’s the case or not.

Jackie tried to outwrestle Ripper early, slipping between her legs and using go-behinds and hammerlocks, but Ripper had an answer for everything. She had the size and strength that she could just reach back and slap on a headlock. Lots of that, and front facelocks, and chokes and choke lifts. She hit vertical splashes from every angle and had a pretty nice spinning rear bearhug that people should steal.

Mid-match, out of desperation, Jackie caught the ref on a whip and whipped him into Ripper, then kicked her into the ref. She followed that by hefting Ripper onto her shoulders and slamming her once or twice and choking her in the corner with the tag rope. When you look at real babyface stars through the years, whether it’s Carpentier or Hogan or whoever, there’s quite often an inclination to cheat or bully or to give back all that they had gotten and more and Sato had that in spades here. She came off like a huge star in the back half of this and some of that is because just how dirty she got and how proactive she was with all of it. To be fair, Kumano was rushing in to counter almost every advantage, but it almost didn’t have emotional weight because Jackie was a freight train. Ripper brought a wrench in the ring but Jackie was very quick to use it. Things built to pure chaos with all the aligned wrestlers on the outside, before boiling over with Jackie just unloading on the ref until she got DQed. It was maybe a little odd on some level, but this was the first time that she really came off as a star to me.