70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Williams!

56. 1979.09.21 - 03 Jackie Sato vs. Vicki Williams

K: I’ll be a bit theoretical like this. For a match to work, it almost always has to have some structure going on in order for it to have any value. This distinguishes it from an angle, which can just be one thing happening because that’s its only purpose. This feels more like an angle than a match because it’s really just one thing happening. Vicki Williams jumps Jackie at the start and chokes her and gets helped out with blatant interference from the other Americans on the outside and the biased American referee just lets it all go. Jackie doesn’t put up any real fight against it, it’s hardly a spirited performance from her. So I’m only a few minutes into it and I’m already thinking “ok you’ve made your point, the Americans are cheating and their referee is crooked” and just want this to wrap up quickly.

Unfortunately they didn’t. This just goes on very monotonously until Jackie finally gets tired of the crooked ref constantly slow counting her and attacks him to get DQed. There was no need for this match to go any more than 5 minutes.

*1/2

MD: As a one time thought experiment this was pretty interesting. Jackie had to face not just Vicki, not just all of the American contingent on the outside, but also a biased referee who would let Williams put her in illegal holds, would break Jackie’s mostly legal holds, and would count far faster for Williams than Jackie. It’s something we’ve seen a hundred times but here it was fresh and new and shocking to the announcers and the crowd.

And that was probably a good thing as there wasn’t a whole lot else interesting with the match. Williams used a bunch of chokes. She had one nice drop into a body scissors. Jackie had some really good comebacks especially after the image of her getting choke in the ropes in front of the whole American team and they had a clear way for Williams to get back on top as Jackie was arguing with the heel ref, but it never really added up to much overall. That was especially true with the non finish. Instead of the ref getting some meaningful comeuppance, Jackie tossed him after a slow count and he DQed her. I assume this will be a story moving forward with the American vs Japanese tournament and therefore it made sense to introduce and not pay it off, but we’ll see.