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Wednesday, April 23, 2025

70s Joshi on Wednesday: Tomi! Williams!

60. 1979.09.2X2 - 03 Tomi Aoyama vs. Vicki Williams (After 9/21, possibly October)

K: Well I agreed way back when we started this over a year ago that I’d do a write-up for every 70s match we had, and I don’t regret it, but boy I’m glad that AJW stopped having Moolah’s girls taking up so much space on the cards pretty soon after this. Who is to blame for this is another article in itself, but the result of her methods is a bunch of wrestlers who almost always just work the same kind of very limited match and everyone else just has to work within it. Things did improve a bit later on with some of them (I’m thinking Judy Martin & Leilani Kai especially), maybe because Moolah herself stopped being a prominent part of the tours.

This is similar to the last match with the twist that the babyface gets way more offense in, so I guess there was booking logic in putting them back to back. At least we have the Queen Angel with the more exciting offense so we get a few fun moves heh, that’s not something I’d usually single out for phrase in a match but you have to take what you get here. Tomi has incredible energy to her. In one of her big outbursts she does a very cool flying kick (not a dropkick she’s almost vertical throughout) which Vicki Williams springs up to in one of the freakiest ways I’ve ever seen I’m not even sure how to describe it. It looks like she’s a puppet and there’s someone pulling her up with strings.

I noticed the fans heckling the ref with the “referee kaere” chants (literally means “Go home referee!”, but it sounds ruder in Japanese). Shiro Abe wasn’t the first to get that thrown at him. This did get better heat than most of these matches, but within a couple of minutes of this hinting that it might even get good they just go to a double countout after a bit of brawling on the outside and that was the end of that. Well actually the end was Tomi getting revenge on the referee by dropkicking him in the back to a big pop. I guess that added to things. This was one of the better Japan vs. USA matches, but I don’t want to see any more of these.

**1/4

MD: Wright (at least I think that’s his name) was the referee again and by this point it’s just getting frustrating. The tags aren’t so bad but these singles matches are getting painful, especially after considering the standard level of quality (not through the moon or anything but definitely consistent) earlier in the year. That’s not to say this one was a particularly bad offering in these US vs Japan matches because it wasn’t. Tomi came back over and over and when she got dragged down it was due to the ref and interference, so there was a flow to this. Plus the big stuff was pretty big. Williams would take big bumps (and had one weird bridge up that was like nothing I’d seen before). She crashed into chairs. Tomi almost decapitated her with a catapult onto the bottom rope (the ref stopped her). There was a nasty bit of hairpulling as all the American team worked on her from the outside as Vicki held her legs on the inside. Vickie survived the giant swing through both hook and crook (the ref delayed the count but only after Tomi missed her first splash attempt), and things spilled out to a chaotic mess of chairshots and grabbed legs to spur a double countout. Post-match Tomi dropkicked Wright into everyone and got some revenge and the fans popped for it but this really should have been done and over after the Jackie match and the moment that the Japanese referee came in to intervene.

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