70s Joshi on Wednesday: Lucy! Barkley!

63. 1979.10.XX - 02 Lucy Kayama vs. Winnie Barkley (Either late September or before October 17) 

K: And we're back with this interminable USA vs. Japan series. True to formula, Joyce takes control of the match right from the start with uninteresting offense including a couple of dropkicks that really didn't look good at all despite Lucy selling them. I won't fault her selling in execution but in context I wish she'd put up a lot more of a fight than this, but that's not the match they're going to have.

There's not much in the way of transitions here either. Lucy just grabs Winnie by the leg out of nowhere, pulls her down and puts her in a figure four and all of sudden she's on offense. Likewise for when Winnie gets to the ropes to break the submission, at which point she just gets up and with seconds is hitting snapmares as if she was on offense the whole time. We get a more aggressive one which sends Lucky flying through the ropes to the outside, at which point she gets stomped on by Moolah. I think this is the most Moolah has ever blatantly interfered in one of these USA-Japan series matches. Somehow, getting assaulted by Moolah only powers Lucy up, as she gets back in the ring, hits a bunch of her biggest moves including a Tiger Driver and gets the win.

The winning pin was very strange in that Winnie seemed to get her shoulder up at 3 and there was a slight delay in the referee calling it, except this was the heel American referee so why he'd do a dodgy looking finish that benefitted the Japanese wrestler is beyond me. This match really didn't make any sense. Seeing Lucy hit a clean Tiger Driver was cool I guess, but that's about the nicest thing you'll get me to say about this. I may be in a bad mood as while I was watching this match a bee or wasp flew in the window and stung me.

*

MD: Barkley was probably the least of the American contingent. If she had the Littlefeather gimmick maybe it’d have been different (I do believe that) because her spin through chop was pretty good. Otherwise, her best offense was just having Moolah stomp Lucy on the outside. She did throw herself into everything but even her chokes didn’t look great. When Lucy did fight back, her stuff was spirited and she had a nice finishing stretch with the leaping horizontal cross chops and the really deep gutwrench before hitting that inexplicable tiger driver. The ref wasn’t a huge issue here overall but there was no meat or substance to any of this anyway so it hardly mattered. We were better off when it was the Black Pair in just about every match. That’s for sure.