70s Joshi on Wednesday: Lucy! Grable!

59. 1979.09.2X2 - 02 Joyce Grable vs. Lucy Kayama (After 9/21, possibly October)

K: The Japan vs. USA series continues with another similar match to what we’d previously covered. I still dislike the structure of these and think they would work better if they didn’t insist on having the heel totally dominate the first few minutes of the match. At least let the Japanese wrestler get a hold in first or something. But nonetheless, this worked a bit better than average. Firstly the crowd was vocal in cheering on Lucy, which mitigated her getting beaten up without putting up much of a fight early on.

One of the memorable moments was Grable draping Kayama’s neck over the top rope, then again over the 2nd rope and sitting on it to choke her while (I think) Leilani Kai punched her from the outside. They made the most out of this as when Kayama’s comeback began, she managed to stay in control for quite a good bit, but then she went for revenge and tried putting Grable into the same choking predicament, but she wasn’t able to pull it off so well (perhaps she’s a lot less experienced in these nasty illegal maneuvers as the Americans) so Grable was able to escape. That was the decisive moment of the match, as Grable was able to take back control and before long won with a very good powerful missile dropkick to get a 3 count. Very low ceiling on this kind of match, but they did alright.

*3/4

MD: We’ve got a Japanese referee here (Yanagi?) so at least this will be clean. I don’t have a great sense of Grable and while a lot of her offense wouldn’t change the world, I really did like her reactions, both on top and when she had to work from underneath. She was jawing with the crowd and the ref and over the top as she’d bite the hand secretly when she had a wristlock. When Lucy did take over and did a drop down body scissors with roll back slams, she sold it as well as she possibly could. I kind of want to track down more of her stuff now.

Otherwise, this was a lot of what you’d expect by that point from Moolah’s camp. Grable controlled for the first five minutes. She had Moolah and Williams/Kai (I think) out with her and they were happy to help cheat and choke and what not. One was wearing a stenciled “American Power” shirt. Lucy had her cheering section and had a way of throwing herself into everything with abandon. She had her big comeback but then got hefted over the top as she went in for a knee by the ropes. Grable had a power advantage and pressed that towards the end to set her up for a second rope missile dropkick. Post-match Kayama took out the ref just for the heck of it. These US vs Japan matches have their ceilings certainly but I thought Grable had about half of what she needed here at least.