70s Joshi on Wednesday: Nancy! Tomi! Kumano! Ripper!

37. 1979.07.XX - 03 Mami Kumano & Monster Ripper vs. Nancy Kumi & Tomi Aoyama (2/3 Falls)

MD: Almost 40 matches in, I’m wondering if we haven’t questioned the fact that there are so many makeshift teams enough. Obviously the footage is only a small percentage of the matches that were taking place, especially if you believe the numbers they mention on commentary about how many matches wrestlers would wrestle per year. But we rarely see the set teams actually team with each other. It’s much more likely we see one member of the Young Pair or Golden Pair or Queen Angels team with each other than with their own partner. It’s a little strange. Here we have a member of the Golden Pair (Nancy) team with a member of the Queen Angels in Tomi. I’m not sure if they were in front of the same crowds all the time and needed to keep things fresh or what.

Kumi hasn’t exactly impressed so far and comedically, here, she dodges Ripper once and then tags out to Tomi. Then Tomi dodges her repeatedly but doesn’t tag Nancy back in. The plan was to frustrate Ripper enough that she’d tag Mami in and then swarm Mami. Problem was that Kumano was a monster herself and caught Tomi immediately. Ah well. Good try Golden Angels. The rest of the first fall was a mauling after that except for one great moment where Tomi was able to bound onto the middle of the ropes and leap backwards in a spot that would absolutely be impressive today. It only got them so far before the Black Army took back over and Ripper set her up for Kumano’s driving seated senton off the top.

Second fall was more of the same with Ripper and Kumano immediately catching Tomi with their double bearhug squish. From there Ripper did her lifting choke and Kumano did her dangling choke on both Nancy and then Tomi. Nancy was able to turn the tide by reversing a whip and ducking out of the way to cause Kumano to crash into Ripper and knock her off the apron. From there they unloaded 2 on 1 on Kumano. Nancy had repeated Northern lights liftup flapjacks until she dropped her back with a suplex and Tomi hit some great dropkicks and then a vader bomb off the top for the pin. Third fall was pretty quick with Ripper reasserting herself and a Kumano getting a chair only for it to be turned back around on her. Ripper no sold it though, and made short work of Nancy with a spinning torture rack into a toss. This went about as you might have expected it but had some fun moments while it lasted.

K: I’ve seen Matt’s write-up before doing mine so I’ll bounce of his a bit. I don’t know any of this for a fact, but from my knowledge of the scene/era this is what I think the logic of the tag team booking was, but first, I’ll lay out the terrain.

70s AJW was a very isolationist promotion. Not out of choice, but for the simple reality that there was no other women’s wrestling in Japan except them. They did bring in wrestlers from abroad for runs like Monster Ripper, but they could never be scaled up to something like a US territory where loads of guys were constantly being cycled through the system to keep things fresh. AJW also had a fairly small roster, certainly if you’re just counting the wrestlers capable of delivering in big matches. All that means they had a very limited number of match ups which could draw well for their big shows.

AJW was also very much a tag team promotion. Look at any of these shows where we have multiple matches and you’ll see the majority of matches were tag team matches. Their most popular act ever till that point was a tag team, Jackie Sato never drew anywhere near as well on her own as Beauty Pair did.

Put those together and I think it makes sense that you’d regularly see makeshift teams on the regular TV tapings. When we see Named Team vs. Named Team matches, those happen at the biggest events of the year.

Now to the match itself. Nancy & Tomi start the match by winding Monster up by making it look like they’re going to go toe-to-toe with her but dodge at the last second and she screams in anger. Let’s see if their “annoy the Monster” strategy will pay off! Well, Monster seems to collect herself, tags Mami Kumano in, who quickly beats Tomi up and then tags Monster back in to get some revenge. So no it didn’t. This was quick hell-dominated fall, the highlight was Tomi doing a boomerang hip attack off the top rope as part of a brief comeback before she gets put down by Mami Kumano.

Tomi gets the highlight of the second fall as well. She hits Mami Kumano with 4 dropkicks in a row. A criticism I generally have with these kinds of spots is they usually look like video game animations in that each individual strike looks the same. This is more how the person takes the dropkick, they usually get into the exact same position each time. But Tomi does the dropkicks so fast that Mami doesn’t have time to do that, by the time of the 4th dropkick she’s barely even halfway up before she gets dropkicked in the head back done. It looked really urgent and ferocious looking and gave this segment the ‘desperate to level the score’ vibe it warranted. Good stuff.

There’s been a theme in Monster Ripper’s matches though that whenever babyfaces make her mad, it just results in her killing them. Well we got that again here in the 3rd fall, where Monster goes bananas whacking people in the head with a steel chair. And that was the end of that really, she just wins. There may have been some editing here, but that certainly felt like a short ⅔ falls match. More about getting Monster Ripper over as possibly unstoppable for her title challenge against Jackie than having a ‘good match’ here I think. But it was still pretty good.

**3/4