80s Joshi on Wednesday: Ikeshita! Nancy!

Disc 1 

14. Nancy Kumi vs. Yumi Ikeshita (WWWA Singles Title Tournament 1st Round) - 11/5/80

K: The most striking thing here is that Yumi Ikeshita starts this match with some MMA style gloves and starts throwing punches. The announcer is calling “body blow, body blow!” as she corners Nancy Kumi and pummels her in the gut. Nancy reacts to it like something illegal is happening, turning to the referee as if to protest but the ref is allowing it. I’m not sure what they’re trying to convey to the audience here. The referee only objects when Ikeshita starts doing the face-scrunching.

Until now Ikeshita has came across to me as more of a badass than a villain. For some reason, after Nancy scores a takedown on her, she takes off her gloves, passes them to a second and squares up for some grappling. She gets the better of Kumi here, enough that when she takes down Kumi to the floor, Nancy reacts by scrambling for the ropes to force a break rather than trying to wrestle her way out of it. When Nancy gets the better of the 2nd exchange, trapping Ikeshita in a headscissors, Ikeshita then does one of the slickest kip-up out of the headscissors that I’ve ever seen. In kayfabe it also kinda makes it look like Ikeshita is the superior mat wrestler here that she didn’t need to go for the ropes.

An interesting little twist is that it’s actually Nancy who escalates things. After getting beaten on the mat for a while and bullied out of the ring, Nancy reacts by grabbing Ikeshita’s foot in a rage, pulling her out of the ring and throwing her into chairs. Ikeshita gets back in after a tense standoff but her rhythm has been broken and Nancy is able to take control for this segment and goes to work on Ikeshita’s leg.

We’re now 12 minutes in, so it takes a lot longer than usual for her to get tired of trying to win the match legitimately and start resorting to blatant cheating. This time she’s playing hide the wrench, before whacking Kumi in the head with it a few times. One time she’s trying to prevent Kumi from applying a Figure Four by wielding the wrench, but the ref snatches it off her and Nancy powers through and is still able to apply the submission despite taking those wrench shots. This time it’s Ikeshita who is forced to crawl to the ropes to force a break.

It’s around this point that I feel like they lose the thread a bit and just start randomly doing stuff including a walk and brawl on the outside before getting back in and going back to same grappling. It’s not bad but it does make me lose interest compared to the first 15 minutes or so. They get back on track when Ikeshita counters an Irish Whip by hitting a big back drop where they both land on the back of their heads and stay down on the mat as the referee counts, scenes reminiscent of the 1/4/80 Jackie Sato vs. Tomi Aoyama finish, but Ikeshita is up, and before Kumi can collect herself she gets hit with a nasty piledriver. 

Fast forward a bit, Nancy has Ikeshita in an abdominal stretch. Ikeshita makes it to the ropes, but Nancy pulls her off and hits her with a big back drop of her own onto the back of her head that again feels like a significant moment where she establishes a bit of dominance. The announcer is alerting us that the time limit is close to expiring so things get a bit more hectic. Nancy goes in for the win a bit too hastily so Ikeshita is able to hit her with a quick knee to the jaw from the floor, which was a nasty and believable way for her to get back into this. The time limit expiring just means a brawl on the outside with chairs being wielded. 

AJW has a way of resolving draws in matches like this where you really need a winner. They’ll do an ‘extra time’ period, usually 5 or 10 minutes, where either the match will be decided in the usual way, but if that time limit expires, a winner will be announced based on who had the best performance in that extra time. So that’s what we’re getting here. There’s a massive escalation in intensity here as Ikeshita immediately just tries to jump Kumi on the outside, but it backfires as in the chaos Nancy is suddenly swinging a chair around, gives Ikeshita a few shots to the head, jumps into the ring and before you know it Ikeshita has been counted out! Ikeshita screams on the mic that Kumi cheated, which is pretty funny coming from her.

I do think this is a good match but I’m not a fan either. This is a relatively well known one (well by early 1980s AJW standards anyway) and I know some people are a lot higher on it than I am. I think the biggest flaw in it is it just feels too pedestrian for most of the match, things never really get ‘exciting’ until the last minute. Dare I say it could have done with a couple more cool fighting sequences in the middle part of it? Also, I just don’t think Nancy Kumi is a very compelling or sympathetic babyface at all. 

***1/4

MD: And we’re on to the Singles Title Tournament. We actually have some announced brackets but I’m not sure I was able to catch all of them. But the winner here will face the winner of Lucy Kayama vs Monster Ripper. And then on the other side Irma Gonzales would face Rimi Yokota and Jackie would face someone (I think Masami but I’m not sure. The next match on the set is Masami vs Jackie, so maybe that’s it?). They said it had to do with the rankings. Regardless, this goes 45 and we have about 30 of it.

While we miss things, of course, to me, the story of the match was that no matter what Ikeshita tried, Kumi had her number. Ikeshita started wearing thin black gloves and boxing, so somewhere along the line, apparently she’d picked up that gimmick. After one too many takedowns from Kumi, she gave up on those and tried to work the mat. When Kumi got the better of her, she started to slam her head on mat instead, and when that failed to work, she got an object and started hiding it, including trying to stop a Figure-Four by jabbing Kumi in the head. The ref caught her and Kumi pressed up with the Figure-Four doing some damage to the leg. 

Where Ikeshita had the most advantage was with power moves, including a double underhook slam and a belly to back. But even then, Kumi jammed her and rolled to the outside (though that played into Ikeshita’s strengths). As things headed towards the stretch, they both threw bombs, missing off the top rope one after the other. Ikeshita was able to jam an irish whip into a belly to back but Kumi turned a rope break into a cobra twist and then Ikeshita caught her with a kick as she was going to pin her shortly thereafter. It was a fairly exciting bit of scrapping as the time ticked down to the bell. Once they hit a draw, however, it was decided they had to continue in overtime. Things completely broke down on the outside and in the chaos, Kumi rolled back into the ring to beat the count and win. Post match-Ikeshita destroyed the ref at least. This felt like a fairly impressive 45+ minutes but it’s hard to tell with the clipping. I did get an underlying story of Kumi having an answer for most things Ikeshita tried but that might have just been because bits of heel control were clipped out.