80s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Nancy!

Disc 2 

2. Jackie Sato vs. Nancy Kumi (WWWA Singles Title Tournament Final) 12/16/80

K: This will be far more of a write-up than a ‘review’ as only about ⅓ of the match was broadcast so there’s not much to meaningfully assess. I generally didn’t even consider including such incomplete matches in this set but I made an exception here because the narrative importance to the promotion. Simply put, you gotta see who won the tournament!

This felt like an elevation of Nancy Kumi. She’s not depicted as being Jackie’s equal here I don’t think. For instance in the opening she’s able to grab a hold on Jackie briefly before Jackie’s able to escape. They then lock up again but this time it’s Jackie who is able to apply the hold, but when Nancy tries to escape the leglock Jackie just switches into a headlock on the mat, and then moves up into a standing headlock as Nancy tries to fight her way out but it takes her a relatively long time to break out. 

The clipping makes it impossible to follow what the narrative is after this but we do get a pretty dramatic finishing stretch for the last few minutes of it. Nancy’s able to hit some big power moves. It’s cool to see her like this where she’s clearly wrestling on a higher level than we’re used to seeing her. But it’s almost as if the story here is that Jackie’s big moves are just a bit more damaging than Nancy’s are, and once she gets to hit a few Nancy’s just not able to recover quickly enough for anything before she’s hit with another one. It helps that Jackie’s execution is really snug and powerful, I think you wouldn’t need any pre-existing knowledge of the promotion to recognise she’s the top dog here. She’s finishes Nancy off with a big tombstone to begin her 3rd world title reign.

No rating.

MD: Interesting match, though we definitely lose a lot of it and potential coherence from clipping. Apparently this went 35 and we have about ten of it. This was the finals. Jackie had beaten Yokota in overtime. Kumi had somehow bested Monster Ripper. What we do get here is very good. Kumi starts with a go behind trip and then Jackie follows suit. That doesn’t sound much but we really haven’t seen that sort of parallel construction much in these matches so far. Things open up with Jackie getting a roll up and a few moves in and then Nancy taking over with a roll up and some stretching and a few moves of her own. 

There was a very strong sense of sport and competitiveness here. They were both babyfaces but they rode on different buses and were in different units. The camera shots were great to capture the struggle, with Nancy pulling at Jackie’s hair to get her into a hold and you could see Jackie emoting pain and frustration. I’m not sure we can fully extrapolate out the ebbs and flows of this one overall, even if we can get a good sense of the tone and feel.

They did have a hot and iconic finishing stretch. Things spilled to the floor with brawling and Kumi took clear advantage on the way back in, stringing together one move after the next after the next. It felt inevitable maybe, a changing of the guard, but Sato slipped behind her with a roll up and took right over, dropping her again and again with her big bombs. Kumi managed to survive but only right up until the point where Jackie crushed her with a tombstone. We’d seen the Black Army use tombstones before to varying effect, I think, but they were fairly rare. This one was brutal and as Jackie celebrated her victory, Nancy was carried off to the back in a heap (if results I see are correct, it would be a bad couple of days for her as she’d lose the tag titles to Hori and Yokota the next day). From what we saw here, this was clearly good, especially considering Jackie had already worked a long match and Kumi had probably gotten tossed around by Ripper earlier in the night, but I find it hard to say definitively.