Found Footage Friday: KONG~! KANSAI~! HAMADA~! SATOMURA~! STOMPER~! HEENAN HANDCUFFED TO T~!

Frank Hickey vs. Mongolian Stomper Kansas City 1960s

MD: This was another old match that Charles from Wrestling Playlists posted last year in one of his huge tape buying sprees. As best as I can tell, the Geigel match from earlier in this show was online but this wasn't. It's certainly a moment in time and a moment in pro wrestling canon in its own way. More on that in a minute. Stomper, at this point, had the look (mostly shaved head, fu manchu style goatee) but he talked just like a normal guy and wasn't affected (in his inner ear) by the crowd's boos. Hickey had an elaborate costume with a cape and a headguard. They don't call him the Spaceman here, but he was. I don't know if this was heel vs heel or what but these were just two big guys throwing big shots for the most part. Hickey controlled this more than I'd expect, honestly, as Stomper was pushed harder and talked about going after Thesz post match. Midway through the match, a hulking figure with glasses from the crowd walked up to ringside and had to be shuffled away. That was a debuting Ox Baker (no facial hair) and one subplot through the match was the commentary talking about how they had to turn him down when he wanted to wrestle before because despite being 300 pounds he wasn't trained. At the end of the clip,  after Stomper had won somewhat anticlimactically, they said that the promoters were going to allow Ox to wrestle that coming Thursday and he got to introduce himself. Interesting little angle/gimmick for the 60s. To me, it was just strange to see the Stomper not even trying to put on foreign airs.

Superstar Billy Graham vs. Hercules WWF 8/15/87

MD: This was another recent Richard Land find so you'll have to go find his patreon. While there was absolutely no way it could live up to its promise on paper, it was still pretty great, all the more so because I didn't realize what the post-match was going to be. This was when Graham was stepping in for Patera. The match itself was ok. Hercules created the motion with a few big bumps. He had some nice cutoffs. Graham controlled the middle and was able to stand tall with his strength. They had a nice finish where Hercules tried to slam Graham from the outside in and got rolled through on it. 

The real appeal here, however, was Heenan. This had the one-two punch of Heenan handcuffed to Mr. T and the losing manager having to get whipped, so you can only imagine all of Heenan's mannerisms as he got yanked around by T and then the whole hoopla of the post-match with Hercules trying desperately to protect his manager and then Graham and finally Patera getting their shots in on a writhing, squirming Heenan as the crowd went wild. I wish there was more of it. A lot of the time we just got glimpses in the corner of the screen of Heenan's reactions. This was definitely more for the live crowd, but I'm glad we got to see it at all.

ER: I thought Heenan's promo to start this whole segment was far and away the most cutting thing. Heenan wasn't funny at all, he was ruthless. I mean, he was funny, but he came off tough, like a guy who ran a hard card game. When he was talking about being cuffed to Mr. T he straight up told Ken Patera to put the cuffs on himself, as a little stroll down memory lane. He talked about how everyone you see with big arms and a big body is unemployed, because working men can't spend 8 hours lifting and 8 hours working. He makes fun of Graham for eating 19 cans of tuna and 65 raw eggs all day. It's a promo that felt like real hate, and it made the match more disappointing for having hardly any hate at all. I don't think any of the Heenan/Mr. T payoffs were there and it was one of those reminders of how big wrestlers were and how small actors are. When Bobby Heenan is larger than Mr. T and he just cut a promo about real tough men from the midwest, I want more than just 10 minutes of Heenan cowering from T on the floor. 

It's insane how Billy Graham aged 30 years in 10. 1987 Billy Graham works like 75 year old Jimmy Valiant. 10 years earlier he was the most charismatic man in the building and here he's like 1999 Terry Gordy. Hercules I thought looked great. His kneedrops and elbowdrop and knuckle locks and big bump to the floor selling for Graham all looked strong. He had a pretty steep hill to climb and the stipulation would have been more fun if it had ended with Heenan bumping for Mr. T and Patera instead of absorbing pulled belt shots thrown by a one armed man and a suddenly elderly man. 

Aja Kong/Dynamite Kansai vs. Ayako Hamada/Meiko Satomura GAEA 6/22/03

MD: It's hard for me to write this one up. So much happens. It's one imaginative, iconic spot after the next. You watch it and by the end you forgot that Aja branded the guardrail at one point even though it was awesome in the moment. They just pack in so much in twenty minutes and while there are themes (Kansai going for the Splash Mountain until she gets it, it gets broken up, and then she gets it again for the win, for instance), and while I'd even say it comes together and never entirely falls apart, it's just a lot to keep track of. Here, of course, you have not just the problem of Aja early on but also the problem of Kansai where she can just catch you in a claw and slam you to the ground. Even worse for Hamada and Satomura is when you get the problem of both, where you can put one down but the other is creeping over to hit you with a lariat. There was one point where Hamada was pinballing back and forth to kick Kansai to try to break an ankle lock on Satomura and then nail Aja so Aja wouldn't flatten her and she had two or three tries to do that before she just got crushed by Aja.

In some ways, despite all the spots and bombs and bumps (and occasionally weapons) this did have a bit of a sports feel where Hamada and Satomura would get lots of little shots on goal, but all it would take would be one breakaway from Kong/Kansai to end it and everyone knew it. Some of that was from the two teams just constantly pressing forward and never letting up, even though things still had weight (of course they did) and impact. It felt like a big deal when Hamada and Satomura got their opponents down and on the ropes, and they had some very big bombs of their own (literally as they power bombed Kansai onto Aja for instance). That said, it was all just a matter of time, of course, but it was a spirited time while it lasted.

ER: I thought this was good but never came close to approaching the greatness of the Kong/Meiko match from the week before (which Matt and I wrote about earlier this month). Meiko is one of our great punishment takers, an out-laster on the same level of Yuki Ishikawa. I buy it from Meiko, it's Ayako I don't buy it from here. The excitement of the Aja/Meiko matches is how Aja is going to walk through most of Meiko's offense, and be honest about the things that slow her down. You don't just get leniency from Stan Hansen, you have to move him before he sells for you. Aja is the same, you actually need to move her or bounce her on her head, and Dynamite Kansai can do the same thing. Aja and Dynamite as a team are similar to the problem created when Vader and Hansen teamed in All Japan. They are going to walk through almost anyone and Ayako's well thrown but worked elbow smashes are not going to be taken seriously by either. I need some real fire from an underdog outsized babyface and if you're still holding back a little on arm strikes after Kansai stomps on your fucking face from the top, then I stop buying it. 

But I did like this. I made a prolonged noise I've never made before in reaction to that double stomp to the face. I let out of deep guttural oof at the finish when Aja presumably broke one of Meiko's ribs with a kick to the stomach harder than any Kawada ever threw. I liked the way Aja treated Hamada like a little pest, finally hitting her with a backfist without much effort and then sitting on her while Dynamite disposes of Meiko. There were stretches where kicks were missing and timing was behind, and that's just not going to be enough to stop two monsters. Also, it's crazy how much faster Kong's kicks look than Hamada's or Meiko's. She's like Scott Norton with speed, it's unreal. 

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Found Footage Friday: KONG~! MEIKO~! CACTUS~! ATLANTIS~! MASAKRE~! DANDY~! JT SMITH~!

Cactus Jack vs. JT Smith TWA 8/20/91

MD: Guessing on this date from the finish. It's surreal to see Foley go from Manchester vs Vader back to this (just a couple of years earlier). He did stuff on top of stuff to keep it entertaining, smacking a chair into his head (two chairs; the first wooden which he sold more), going on the mic for a big rant (after which he ran right into Smith's offense), the Cactus clothesline over the top, a flip bump in the corner, so on and so forth.

His shots in the corner all looked great and he was there for every little thing Smith did. Smith was in the right place at the right time hitting the right stuff for a lot of this, keeping the crowd engaged as a babyface, but it was hard not to be overshadowed by Cactus. I'd call this more entertaining than coherent or great, but you still didn't want to look away which was the hallmark of early 90s Foley. Great finish too as Foley got his throat caught in the ropes leading to a count out, a very clever way to get Cactus Jack out of a tournament if need be.

ER: A cool match, and I love the timing of this coming just a week after we covered a new Cactus/Vader match. That was 1993, this is 1991, and Cactus seems like such a different wrestler in this one. Just two years later he was slower, beefier, and his execution on almost everything was completely different. Here he threw punches with his arm and threw them more overhand, completely different arm slot than he would use for most of his career. His punches looked great here. Every time he hit JT Smith it looked like a real shot. JT Smith was in there to take shots, and the crowd responded to it. They really got behind him, even though every single time we got a glimpse of the crowd there didn't seem to be a single person in attendance who looked like him. How about that. 

JT Smith isn't really a guy with offense, so of course you were going to have Cactus make up for that. That's when you get him wandering around the building hitting himself with chairs, cutting a promo mid-match, keeping people riled and wary against him and hot behind JT. He knew JT was going to bump big for him - JT Smith got thrown, hit, or clotheslined to the floor three times in under a minute and every fall he took to the floor looked great - and he is Cactus Jack so of course he's going to take some bumps. That said, I don't know if I've seen Cactus take that Ray Stevens bump in the corner before. It's not the Shawn Michaels roll up bump, it's the Stevens bump that John Nord and Mike Modest took neck/shoulder first into the buckles. Nord and Modest took it more horizontally and landed flat, but Cactus takes it messier and ends with an uglier bump down into the mat. 

There were two really great moments, as judged by some guy sitting near the cameraman who exclaimed "Oh SHIT!" two different times: The first was when a charging Cactus clothesline knocked Smith sideways on landed him on his stomach; the second was when Cactus got himself hanged in the ropes very near to where he was sitting. His verbal exclamations were absolutely correct both times. 

Atlantis/Rayo de Jalisco Jr/El Dandy vs. Pierroth Jr/Masakre/MS-1 CMLL 9/92

MD: Really a blast in the about ten minutes we get here. The primera and segunda function almost as a fully formed sprint and then we get at least part of the finish of the tercera. Atlantis looks like a huge star here. He bounds into the ring and gets ambushed starting the rudo control. Masakre is a menace here, sneaking in and punching anyone he can at any point, even when they're in holds.

Atlantis comes back basically on his own, including eating a punch and kipping up immediately to fire back. While this is happening Rayo is fondly holding the hand of a prone Dandy. Atlantis just outslicks all three rudos until his partners can come back (and when they do, it's with a huge Dandy punch and Rayo doing his shtick; it all felt balanced here). For the tercera we come in on them switching matches around which is a little weird, but the tecnicos pretty quickly overcome. I would have liked to see how we got to the mask switching but overall what we did get here was great.

Aja Kong vs. Meiko Satomura GAEA 6/14/03

MD: We're going to try to tackle some of these GAEA uploads that people think are rare/new as we've done a bad job at that. I have no idea about the context here, but I do know that Aja Kong might be the most immediately watchable wrestler ever. You can drop into almost any of her matches from almost any period and while the match might be enhanced by content, you're going to be able to figure out exactly what's going on. 

I call it the "Problem of Aja" which has to be overcome by any opponent she faces. She's too big, too strong, too fierce, too much, and even against someone like Satomura, you see it right from the get go where Aja just stuffs her and starts to pull her apart, wrenching her arms in all sorts of ways they don't belong. With a little bit of distance Satomura can get a quick shot in, but by giving Aja a little bit of distance, she'll get run over in turn. She can smash her head with the metal bucket (or throw it at her) but Aja will just take it and headbutt her back, or even worse: she'll get the bucket and smash Satomura and then drop her head first on it. 

The great equalizer here was Satomura's death valley drivers. Any move that took so much effort could justifiably have such an effect, and they were enough to turn the tide and even to almost put Aja away, but almost isn't enough and while she was able to duck the uraken a few times and get ten strikes in for every one Aja hit, all it took was one landing to end this.

ER: I thought this was incredible. This wasn't out there before? This is new? We're just seeing this match, that feels like one of the classic matches of a classic feud? That can't be. If this match happened on this week's Dynamite it would be a 5.5 star match that people actually remember two months later. Aja Kong is an unstoppable danger that must be endured, and I've never responded to a woman wrestler the way I respond to Aja. The same way I can show any of my non-wrestling bubble friends any Stan Hansen match from any era and they recognize on sight that this man is beating the shit out of everyone and moving and falling and reacting in ways they have never seen yet instantly understand, Aja Kong has that exact same level of accessibility. If this is your first Aja Kong/Meiko match, you will understand everything. The fight Aja forces Meiko into bringing, Aja's unbeatable and at times literally unmovable condescending honesty, and Meiko's urge and determination. Aja feels like someone who cannot be moved and it requires Meiko to do it for real, and when Aja takes something for real she's finally a monster wounded. 

The GAEA girls at ringside keep taking this to higher levels, their volume and cries and anger growing over a brisk 12 minutes, and the crowd actually sounds upset when Aja kicks out of Meiko's final surge of fire. The anguish of her girls at ringside was felt as much or more than the emotion all over Meiko's face.  Every hit in this match is honest as can be. The death valley drivers compress Kong, the slaps seem like they should all swell Meiko's jaw and wreck her hearing. Kong gives this woman a brainbuster on a metal bucket and it's not as violent as a half dozen of Kong's strikes. The emotion is huge for a "short" match, and Kong pulling a fucking small package - and a small package so well executed that it would have brought a tear to Bret Hart's eye - is one of the greatest bullshit asshole heel spots I've ever seen. Can you picture Stan Hansen needle dicking his way into pulling a small package on Misawa? Riots. I've never seen something so brazen. She eventually buckles Meiko's entire body with a uraken but I wanted to see the looks on everyone's faces and the boos from every mouth had Aja Kong won with that perfect small package. 

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2025 Joshi on Thursday? Sareee! Satomura!

Sareee-ISM Chapter VI 1/23/25

Sareee vs. Meiko Satomura

MD: Didn't expect to be writing about this one, but the stars aligned and I had a few to quickly jot down some thoughts. I am 100% a tourist in modern joshi. I'm starting back in the 70s, remember? While I've seen my share of everything that followed, I've got a working knowledge at best. While I have plenty of general admiration for Satomura, I couldn't tell you my favorite match of hers. I've seen just a handful of Sareee matches from the last few years. But it's fun to be a tourist, right? Trying to be a completionist becomes a burden. Trying to keep up with everything is a chore. We're in an amazing world that we can just drop in on CMLL or a show like this or Globo de la Muerte in Puerto Rico or the latest DPW show and then pop out and come back whenever you want. Amazing times. 

And this was a pretty amazing match to drop in on. It felt big, bigger than the venue, bigger than the stakes on paper. It felt as big as anything in the world so far this year. The sense I get is that Sareee is particularly good at that, of carrying forward that Ace quality of making matches feel bigger than they should, just because she's in them, because of how she wrestles. And of course Satomura, on her retirement run, carries herself with such stature and presence, literal stature even; she looks carved out of granite and wrestles just as tough as it. When Sareee got right in her face before the match, it set the tone immediately and from there they never looked back.

Everything was tough here. That was the point. That's what made this special. It was relatively close to 50-50. Neither wrestler was able to carry momentum for long, but because everything felt like a struggle, all the way from the first lock up to the finishing Scorpio Rising shining axe kick, it had a certain substance that most matches structured similarly couldn't begin to match. If a wrestler left her feet, it was for a specific reason. At one point, each wrestler needed to step up on the ropes to enhance an armdrag or takedown. It wasn't done for flash. It was done because they needed to get that extra bit of leverage to take their opponent over. That sounds like a given, so matter of fact, but it's actually incredibly rare for me to see a move like that and feel like it was not just warranted but necessary, that it was substance instead of just style (and style's ok! But to have it be both is always superior and like I said, so, so rare).

Sareee just gets it. She balances explosiveness and hard shots with expressiveness in the moment and engaging with the crowd. If they start to clap and it dies down, she'll slap the mat to keep them going. If she's about to lock on a hold intended to last for a little bit, she'll get them going again so that they're with her the whole way through. When it came to a stand up strike exchange, she went down hard after each blow so that she could rise back up, determination on her face, whacking the mat to show how much she cared, how much the fans should care, how much it all mattered. 

That's pro wrestling. She created something out of nothing with her reactions and attitude and body language and added it to everything already in the air (Satomura's retirement run, the specialness of these Sareee-ISM shows, her own position as a freelancer ace, the weight behind Satomura's actual forearm) to create a moment and a match that was far more than the sum of its already impressive parts. Just a hell of a place for a tourist to find himself in the middle of a frigid January week.

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Found Footage Friday: TOGO~! SNOW MAN~! CENTURION NEGRO~! MONJE NEGRO JR~! MEIKO~! AMANO~!

Snow Man (Chad Collyer)/Fujin vs. Dick Togo/Hideki Nishida 6/4/01

MD: This was from a lucha themed show at Korakuen Hall called Lucha Aid, which may be something people know about (there was a music video for it back in 2011 that's long been scrubbed from the internet), but it doesn't seem to be on cagematch and the only thing I can find online is from the April 30 2001 Wrestling Globe newsletter. Long story short on this one, Togo spends most of the match on the apron and you spend most of the match wishing he was in the ring. When he is in there, he matches up well with Collyer, and in a brawling bit on the floor has amazing punches and takes an insane bump into a bunch of empty chairs. Collyer is actually a lot of fun as Snow Man, constantly saying his name and posing and playing a strongman gimmick. A good chunk of the match is Fujin vs Nishida though and while nothing is outright offensive except for Fujin's elbow smashes, it's not exactly super compelling either. Still, even a little Togo goes a hell of a long way.

Centurion Negro vs. Monje Negro Jr. 9/17/06

This is hair vs mask and we get the last two falls of it. Centurion Negro won the first which we don't have. This starts out with him in control but Monje Negro quickly takes over and just batters him around the arena, a lot of shots into chairs and the like with Centurion bleeding and Monje Negro going after the wound a bit. Centurion gets a good comeback moment but chooses to go after the ref instead which allows for a cheap roll up. Cheap is the term for Monje Negro actually. He took a lot of stylistically interesting shortcuts, including catching the ref's arm instead of kicking out or dropping to his knees to hit a back body drop instead of bending over. He also through a really great foul as Centurion was about to put him in an abdominal stretch type move. As the tercera went on, he bleed too and ultimately got his comeuppance after a ref bump. If you like guys slamming each other into chairs and walls as they go around an arena (and who wouldn't) this one had a lot to offer.

Meiko Satomura vs. Carlos Amano GAEA 1/17/99

MD: This had existed heavily clipped previously but this seems to be the first full look at it. Aggressive, heated, chippy. They really go at it, full of animosity. Satomura came in with a taped up arm and has to wrestle defensively to start. Amano is able to chip away at her because of it and eventually starts to work on the arm. The arm, however, is primarily a gateway to other offense and especially to other offensiveness as she's there to bully and humiliate Satomura with the help of her cronies. That causes Satomura to lose her cool and grab a chair outside, which at first backfires on her, but as she's able to absorb both offense and humiliation and as Amano goes to the clothesline well one too many times, she's able to duck a shot on the outside and fire back after Amano guts herself on the rail. It's a match full of cool exchanges, spots, and moments, but my favorite is probably when both of them are tied up in the corner, each having hold of a leg, wrenching a joint high over the ropes simultaneously, mutually assured devastation. A close second would be some No Future style flicking kicks out of nowhere that looked amazing. There's a decent amount of interference here, but the match is so engrossing that it doesn't make you mad at the layout but instead that Meiko isn't getting her revenge or triumph, which takes some effort considering how jaded we all are in 2022. The finishing stretch had Satomura take one or two potentially baffling turns, maybe sacrificing her own assured win because she really, really wanted to hit the death valley bomb but overall this was a lovely, furiously fought gift for the GAEA channel to give us.

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Found Footage Friday: EL SANTO~! EL HIJO DEL SANTO~! MEIKO~! KONG~! PANTHER~! COLON~!

Carlos Colon/El Santo vs. Barrabas/Rebelde Rojo 2/1/75?

MD: Hijo del Santo posted this and at the very least, the quality is better than whatever we had before. We hadn't covered it and it's a good, focused look at both Santo and a relatively young Carlos. There's so little footage of Santo that you look as closely as possible and really watch how he moves. He was mainly paired with Rebelde Rojo at first and there are the throws you'd expect, but also a nice mat transition into a stretch muffler type submission and these really nice kneelifts that come in from the front instead of the side. Later on, he'd throw Barrabas around by his beard and hit headscissors takeovers and post match, he had a nice tope where he squared up and ran all the way across the ring to build up speed. The heels were game here and Colon had zip to everything he did. In the absence of footage, you always wonder, but from this glimpse of Santo there was oomph and swagger behind his movements and you do really get the sense that there was something tangible to the legend.

PAS: This was just a glimpse, but any glimpse of Santo is pretty great (honestly a glimpse of young Colon is pretty awesome too). Santo moved a little like his son, although without that incredible lightness of foot that Hijo brings to the table. Love those straight knee lifts up the middle, really felt Mr. Wrestling 2ish, which is really what you want from a kneelift. His tope looked good to, and he landed it almost like a Thez press. The rudos mostly bumped and fed, but did it well, would have liked of course to see this in a fuller version, but it's El Santo we take what we can get!


Meiko Satomura vs. Aja Kong GAEA 4/24/98

MD: This is apparently their first singles match. Satomura wasn't even twenty yet most likely. I'm a big fan of these ten minute GAEA Aja matches where someone has to try to figure out how to solve the puzzle/problem of her. Meiko started strong with a trip and some pummelling, but it ended with Aja just staring her down in the corner and crushing her as she ran back across the ring to build momentum. From there, Kong played with her like a cat with a toy. When Meiko dared to come back, Kong smashed her with the aluminum box (fairly mirthful about it as she played keep away with the ref). Yet, as the match went on, it went from being about Satomura surviving, to her just scoring a point or two and not getting completely shut out, to her getting a moral win by really doing a little bit of damage, to her actually having a shot. It was one thing to get a lucky, gutsy slam. It was another to pry off an arm and force Aja to make a rope break. It was something else entirely to struggle Aja up for a death valley driver and the closest of nearfalls. All the while, Aja would shake it off and crush and compact Meiko with one bomb or another. When she finally put her down with a death valley driver of her own and the meanest Uraken imaginable, it felt definitive, but not at all like the mercy killing it might have felt like earlier in the match.

PAS: This was an iconic rivalry which produced some incredible matches. This wasn't one of those, instead it was a really young Meiko just starting to chip away at the mountain in front of her. I loved how Aja just walked through her early kicks and dropped her with one of her own. Meiko was only really able to get an advantage when Aja would get too cocky and head to the top rope, where Meiko was able twice to use cool armbar take downs to bring her down. That Death Valley Driver Meiko hit felt like a big moment, she had tried for it multiple times before, and dropping a big girl like Aja on her is really nasty. Aja DVD was even sicker though, and the uraken was .95 RAW Chaparita Asari level violent. We are going to have to dig through this GAEA youtube channel, lots of stuff on there, and I imagine a bunch of it is new and cool. 

Hijo del Santo/Blue Panther vs. Nosawa/Scorpio, Jr. FCW 5/15/04

MD: A little bit clipped, but 15+ minutes of action with clear transitions and most of the big moments intact. First two thirds of this felt a little like an exhibition, the traveling show, with Santo as the world's best Mil Mascaras and Blue Panther as his trusty Dos Caras. The interesting things to me were how good Nosawa's punches probably would have looked in the crowd but how the camera angle betrayed them and how the announcers were struggling valiantly to fit lucha into their pro wrestling box. I do think we missed some of the violence of the rudo beatdown in the segunda. It started with Panther's knee going out mysteriously but by the time the comeback occurred, Santo's mask was ripped from the bottom and he was out for blood. Maybe it's just the last few matches we've seen with him, buy my favorite Santito now is pissed off tercera comeback Santito. Here he opened up Scorpio with a chair and decided to just run across the ring and kick him in the wound to open it up more. He had a stutter step on the senton-into-a-dive on the finish but by that point I didn't care because he was running about kicking rudos' wounds open and apparently that's my guy.

PAS: Any Santo is great, and he had cool chemistry with Scorpio Jr. over the years, including taking Scorps hair in an incredible tag apuestas match. I always dig Santo working his headscissors spots, and it was cool to watch him snap and bloody up Scorpio. Panther and Nosawa were just kind of there, second banana technico is not working towards Panther's strengths as a wrestlers, and Nosawa is more of a fun character then a good wrestler. I am into Santo digging into his tape library and posting random shit, hopefully there is more iconic shit out there, but this was a fun diversion.

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New Footage Friday: CASAS! AJA! MEIKO! SANTO! PANTHER! TARZAN!

Máscara Mágica/Olímpus/Silver King vs. Guerrero de la Muerte/Negro Casas/Rey Bucanero CMLL 6/29/96

MD: I love dropping into a moment in time like this, even for a mid-card feud with some great window dressing. This set up a Welterweight title match between Mascara Magica and Guerrero de la Muerte which would then set up their apeuestas match, and I have to admit, this actually made me want see all of that. They worked well together, with Guerrero standing out as a particularly effective clubbering bully that could still turn it up a notch. That's to say I didn't mind that the focus of this one was on them and not Casas and Silver King, not that we didn't get some great stuff from each individually and together. They played Sharp Dressed Man for both sets of entrances and Negro Casas had fun with it. He danced and hugged the ref with the expected audacity and familiarity so the pre-match is great. There are certain wrestlers you don't want to take your eye off in a match, no matter what is happening. Terry Funk is one. Casas is another. For the primera, they paired Olimpus with Casas and Bucanero with Silver King, which made sense. Young Bucanero, as always, was ambitious but not always entirely smooth. I loved how Casas reacted to basically everything Olimpus did (even when in a simple hold, as Olimpus would go for the chin or the hair or an arm, etc., Casas just was totally on all the time in his complaining and reacting). We did get some good Casas and Silver King time in the segunda and tercera, with the usual rope running trip spots that no one did better and some fun brawling through the ropes to clear the ring for Magica and Guerrero at the end.

ER: Great match, I loved this. I haven't seen much Guerrero de la Muerte, and I'm not sure I've ever seen Olimpus, and that already helps make it a great on paper match for me. It has two of my all time favorites in Casas and Silver King, two guys I've seen a ton and like in Magica and Bucanero, and two guys who are new or relatively new to me, one of each category on each side. The guys I loved did things that I loved, it's fun seeing the elements of Bucanero that stayed as he matured and the small things that didn't, I loved the rope work of Olimpus and the overall rounded professionalism of GdlM. Everybody fit into their cog nicely, the pairings all looked good, and we got a couple of things I've never seen. Casas and King were the highlights, with King especially moving blisteringly fast. I love seeing these two move, and they both looked excellent. King broke out this cool looking spot, where he and Bucanero had been working a nice sunset flip sequence. King kicked out of one and Bucanero went for another one, and King just tried to run away during the flip. The spot looked minorly blown when Bucanero nudged by him, and the spot became something unique and special. If it started as Bucanero slightly missing his mark and sunset flipping King after a delay, the moment Bucanero was sliding down King's back to pull him down by the legs, King starts to move with Bucanero on his back! So Bucanero was being blocked by King while King basically held him in position for Omori's Axe Guillotine Driver. It was a cool visual, pulled off quick, and felt like something innovative we'd see in French Catch. All I see now is 50s French Catch in wrestling, even if there is zero chance those wrestlers ever even heard of French Catch.

Bucanero wrestled more like a junior (and was sized like a junior), and he still had his lunatic fast spills to the floor. Bucanero was a longtime favorite of mine for the many ways he knows how to get to an arena floor, and is still capable of surprising. The peak of his powers was around 2001, when he and Christian were having weekly TV contests to see who could take the most bumps over the top to the floor in a match. Here he is not taking high bumps to the floor, but fast beautiful lucha rolls to the floor, the way a veteran luchador knows how to kind of back handspring through the ropes to the floor after taking a dropkick.  Young Bucanero, wearing gorgeous plate glass tights, had veteran level bumps to the floor at age 21. Olimpus had a couple of great ropes moments with a couple of nice tricks. I loved the moment at the end of a caida where Casas ran in to break up a pin, and Olimpus ran in the ring behind him to spring off the middle rope with a dropkick to the back of Casas's head. in ring springboard senton to a standing opponent is a fun signature spot, and it was hit and reversed in satisfying ways here. I don't think Olimpus has much of a rep, but he has few enough matches that maybe I should go through an under 10 match Olimpus run, while also doing an under 10 matches Babe Richard run, since there is some overlap with each in the same match. Is it stupid to go through and review the 20 or so available Olimpus and Babe Richard matches before I go through and review 20 or so available Javier Llanes matches? Almost certainly! Will that make a difference? Of course not. Casas made Olimpus look plenty good in their exchanges, and King worked fast with all the rudos. Seeing King try to actually take out Casas's feet with dropdowns during a sequence is just one of those signs that guys are taking their best shot at making this match a good one, and I grinned the whole time.

Aja Kong vs. Meiko Satomura GAEA 12/15/01

MD: At the 22 minute mark here I turned it onto 2x speed so I could just get through this. I was pretty much done after the fourth death valley bomb. I was probably done a minute or two before that. It's a me thing as much as anything else. What I post on the blog is basically what I watch: old French wrestling and what we find for NFF which is basically lucha, German Catch, old Japanese TV and handhelds and occasional territory stuff. The other guys watch things more broadly and much more modern wrestling. The point is that I am not at all mentally prepared for twelve minute excess-laden finishing stretches that end up being more than one third the total length of the match anymore. Wrestling isn't math, but I think that's probably my rule of thumb: while there can be exceptions like anything else, a finishing stretch should be a lot closer to 1/6th the length of the total match than 1/3rd. If anyone wants to engage me on this, I'm happy to write a couple thousand words somewhere. Otherwise, let me just talk about the rest and not drag down NFF.

What I love about Aja, especially Gaea era Aja is that her matches tend to be like thought experiments. Like Hansen and to a degree Brock, what makes them so fascinating is watching how her opponent tries to handle the unstoppable force that she presents. Meiko, obviously, was presented as a force unto herself, but she came in prepared for and experienced against what she was going to face and that let them work in some more early counters. Even so, Aja took most of this on the notion that if she can get her hands on you (and that means running into her hands as well), she's going to cut you off. Her opponents are always working from a point of disadvantage, which with a normal monster heel would be a perfectly fine narrative point, but with Aja means even more. She can attack from all sorts of different angles: my favorite here was when she just sidestepped Meiko and tripped her to cut off a comeback corner charge. I also liked how opportunity-driven Meiko's comebacks were. After getting battered around the ringside area, Aja placed her back on the apron and she used the higher ground for an axe kick in a way that felt perfectly strategic. Later on, Aja dropped her onto some metal with a brainbuster, but the ref demanded the object leave the ring before counting the pin, letting her come back with another Pele kick. She went to that well once too often and the finishing stretch (overextended as it was) was entered by Meiko realizing she didn't have the right distance/angle and jamming herself on launching another which let Aja clothesline her instead. The match was full of little touches like that which kept things both believable (human) and interesting for the first two-thirds. And I'll just leave it at that.

PAS: I agree with Matt, this match really could have used an editor. We only had a clipped version of this match before, and I imagine it might have worked a bit better as a clipped match, as it might night have felt as bloated. Still Joshi has a maximilist style and this is a pair of great wrestlers to watch overeat. Awesome Aja performance as she demonstrates again why she is one the greatest monster heel wrestlers of all time. Violent and brutal offense, mixed with perfectly timed moments of vulnerability.  Meiko is awesome in this match too, she has such credible offense, and is great at finding and taking advantage of openings. She has really good boxing for a pro-wrestler who doesn't throw punches. There were awesome moments where she uses head movement to evade shots, and she fires in these killer fast combos to the face. There were lots of moments when this would have have been an all time classic if they had ended there, and there were just too many of them. I did love the actual ending though, Aja's one count kick out is the best one count kick out I have ever seen. Total hubris, like a fighter who stands up too quick from a knockdown, instead of taking the moment to clear her head she bolts back up, only to get put back down. We just needed less nearfalls before that.


El Hijo Del Santo/La Mascara vs. Blue Panther/Tarzan Boy Monterey 1/1/06

MD: If we were going Epic/Great/Fun/Skip on this, it'd be Fun. Mascara was, not unexpectedly, the weakest link, but that's not to say he didn't carry himself well given who he was in there with. You'd get a 'rana that looked a little off but it'd follow three or four exchanges that hit perfectly. My favorite bits in the match weren't the perfectly smooth Panther vs Santo exchanges or the usual joy in seeing Santo's signature spots, but instead his interaction with Tarzan Boy. They had been on the same side of trios and at least one tag back in 98-00 when Tarzan Boy was much younger and after the tecnicos took the first fall here, Santo patted his cheek and shook his hand only for Tarzan Boy to return the favor. That felt like it really paid off with Tarzan Boy catching Santo with a powerbomb for a pin later on. My other favorite bit was Blue Panther using the drop down double leg nelson move we've been seeing from France so often lately to submit Mascara. The tercera was a little loose and free, feeling more like a local show than something for TV, but there were a bunch of tecnico dives and everyone went home happy. A good match with flashes of excellence from two of the best ever, and we're never going to complain about something like that popping up.

PAS: I love formula lucha libre, as a wrestling style performed well it has the highest floor. A basic househow lucha match is better then any other kind of houseshow wrestling. This is a match with two all time greats, a solid young wrestler and a competent hand, so it is going to be super entertaining. Santo and Panther are two of the most perfectly matched dance partners ever and we get some gorgeous exchanges between the two, some classic Santo dives and nifty interactions between Tarzan Boy and Santo, which had a bit more roughness then the smoothness of Santo and Panther. Mascara was pretty replaceable, but didn't do anything giant to drag down the match.

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Shinobu Kandori Feels the Glass Against Her Cheek

Shinobu Kandori vs. Meiko Satomura LLPW 2/25/07 - EPIC

PAS: Man it feels like 2000s Kandori might be an undiscovered gold mine. In this match she is more like NOAH Misawa then the killing machine she was in the prime of her career. Broken down gunslinger is one of my favorite wrestling tropes, and she is great as someone fighting through the beating, too old to die young. Kandori comes in with bandages over some nasty bruise cuts on her forehead, and Meiko spends most of the match trying to kick those bandages off. Meiko was great in this match as well, she is the next version of a brutal asskicker and trying to take down the old queen. Kandori is a master grappler, and still has that in her arsenal, as she slips in some nasty submissions from the ground. The end of this match is great Kandori is getting plastered but she sidesteps a pele kick and dives into a desperation rear naked choke, she slips her forearm across the throat and the ref breaks the hold, but that extra bit of illegal choking allowed her ragdoll Meiko enough to get a powerbomb and a win.

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Two MOTY Additions from Progress Wrestling 12/15/19

91. Meiko Satomura vs. Jinny

PAS: I clearly need to do a deep dive on 2019 Meiko, as she still looks completely incredible here. Early in the match Jinny looked like she didn't belong in the ring with Meiko, but she kept scrapping and by the end this was a pretty great underdog match. Loved Jinny trying a drop toe hold take down at half speed, only for Meiko to do the same move with incredible speed and precision. I was ready to give up on Jinny at that point, but then she started throwing sharp elbows and actually standing toe to toe with Meiko Satomura. I loved how she flipped off Meiko, only for Meiko to kick her head off. I also liked how it played into the finish with Meiko pulling up at two, only to get pinned on a flash roll up when she was too nonchalant. If you have to take the belt off of Meiko this is a pretty good way to do it.

ER: I like Jinny a lot. She's one of a handful of people I actually go out of my way to see on NXT UK, and I love how her sharp features give her the most natural ice queen vibe, coming off like the Persian Tessa Blanchard. So it's even more fun seeing her pull off the underdog babyface role in her home fed, getting pummeled by one of the best wrestlers in the world. It's hard to work a match like this, where the champ takes 95% of the match without the match feeling like a total steamrolling, but I think they pulled it off. The mat scrambling was cool, with Meiko showing off her supreme talents with sick rolling takedowns, floating effortlessly in every pass she wanted to make through Jinny's body. Meiko showed she could hop from the legs to the arms to the neck essentially whenever she wanted, and every time they stood up I thought Jinny was great at showing she barely escaped with her arm or leg. Jinny is not a tall woman, but she reads like a tall woman. She has long legs and arms, and I like the way those come into play in her matches. They always seem to play into her rope break game, and here Meiko sank in a nasty hold only to see Jinny's long leg reach the ropes, big toe barely making it. When Jinny finally managed to get her head above water, she used those long limbs to throw sharp elbows, and soon she's hammerfisting Satomura's back to lock her arms and pendulum slam Meiko's chest repeatedly into the mat, and hitting a big dive into Satomura and a couple security guards. But I knew Meiko would go into killer mode, and when she does it's the very best, and I thought the big kickouts were very well done. They hadn't spammed any big moves early in the match, so by the time Jinny ate that decapitating cartwheel knee it was still feasible that she had some gas left in the tank. The end stretch felt like Liger/Sasuke to me, with a vet getting too cocky when met with insolence (middle finger fighting spirit spots have been used in some lame ways in the past 15 years, so I like that Jinny got her finger moment in and then got smashed), absolutely folding her with a death valley driver...but picking her up for 2? I loved Meiko's reactions to the crowd after breaking up her own pin, as the crowd really isn't into it, so Meiko feels the need to justify her decision, allowing Jinny to get a flash roll up crucifix pin. I really liked this, but it made me even more excited to see a rematch, curious how the dynamics would change with Meiko as the fired up challenger and Jinny the champ.

15. Timothy Thatcher vs. Kassius Ohno

PAS: This was tremendous violent wrestling. Ohno was in full brutalizer mode just beating Thatcher horribly, with Thatcher toughing it out and firing back with some really big shots of his own. Loved the transition with Ohno catching Thatcher's leg and kicking him right in the patella. Ohno then gets straight down to torture, just mauling with nasty submission holds and brutal stomps and elbows. At one point he ties up the legs in a modified Indian death lock opening up Thatcher's head for ugly forearms. Really liked Thatcher's knee selling, at one point he tries to plant and loses his balance briefly which was enough time to get kicked in the head. Finish was Fujiwarian, with Thatcher countering a rolling elbow with a headbutt right in the elbow, and snapped on a Fujiwara for the tap. Great stuff, didn't outstay its welcome, and every bit of it was violent and nasty.

ER: These two separately are always must see, but these two together? I don't know how much more must see you can get. I was there live for their first ever match in 2015 and it was one of my favorite live wrestling experiences of my life. They match up all through 2015 and have barely fought since, so you knew this was going to be a treat. And this was a quieter match than their prior bouts and I liked that. This really wasn't focused on bomb throwing or big spots, and as Phil pointed out it feels more like a classic Fujiwara match, with Thatcher being tortured and overwhelmed while always being fully in the match and pulling out a last second magic trick. Ohno keeps powering Thatcher down to the mat, and every time he has him there he unleashes something mean, primarily focusing on Thatcher's ankle. Ohno found all sorts of ways to step on, stomp on, and twist Thatcher's ankle: stomping it over the bottom rope, cruelly stepping on the ball of his ankle while getting to a standing position, wrenching and twisting it, doing clever leverage spots, even things like pressing his forehead into Thatcher's arch while cranking the ankle. The hard strikes and big spots we do get are used sparingly and came off effective as hell: Thatcher's stuffed piledriver sell was an all-timer, his arms stiffening and his back rounding into a C. I loved the moment where Thatcher went to put weight on his ankle and buckled under the weight, looking up in time to see a boot land flush in his eye. The finish was that sudden Fujiwara blast, Ohno setting up KO blow only to have Thatcher headbutt his ulna, sending a lightning bolt up Ohno's arm, allowing Thatcher to sink the armbar. Let's make sure these two don't go another 3+ years without crossing paths.


2019 MOTY MASTER LIST

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Mae Young Classic 2018 Episode 8

Toni Storm vs. Meiko Satomura

ER: I had a feeling this was the full bore Storm push, but I thought she stepped up here and looked better in this match than any of her other MYC matches. The layout wasn't my favorite, as we would get a long period of Storm, then a long period of Meiko, repeat, and I didn't really love Storm kicking out of a bunch of nasty Meiko offense down the finishing stretch only to win with a double underhook powerbomb. The powerbomb that won the match looked great, Meiko even made sure to take it differently than the prior Storm Front that Meiko kicked out of; Meiko took the one earlier in the match more flat back, the match ender she took up on her neck and shoulders and that made it at least look like more of a ramped up version of the move. I thought the execution was strong throughout, and I think Storm peaked with her STF, that was probably her strongest looking moment of the tournament. The STF looked really nasty, hooking her arm deep under Meiko's neck and I thought Meiko's selling was fantastic. Meiko had a way throughout this tournament of making me buy into potential finishes, like making a Lacey Lane crossbody look like it landed on her head and may have knocked her out, and here we get a STF several minutes in - in a match I assume is getting some time - and I fully buy that the STF can finish it. Storm made it look good, and Meiko knew exactly how far she was from the ropes, knew exactly how to milk the drama. But Storm worked hard throughout, I liked her opening wristwork, she got a super impressive high bridge on a northern lights, hit a great low tope and smashed her elbow on that metal grating (god that grating is really the ultimate heel in this tournament), and I liked all her kicks around the back of Meiko's head. Meiko looked like pure class, and it's really nobody else's fault that they didn't look as good as Meiko in this tournament; Meiko is one of the few people who could feasibly lay claim to currently being #1 in the world, so others just aren't going to look as good. All of Meiko's comebacks here were strong, that cartwheel kick looks like a straight guillotine, all of her strikes outclassed, and she knew how to strongly build nearfalls down the stretch to keep ramping up the intensity, and she really had this uncanny ability to properly sell Storm's strikes throughout. I noticed early when Storm hit a headbutt, and it was a decent enough headbutt but nothing coconut shattering, and Meiko looked up with more of an annoyed expression than a hollow daze. From there it just made me notice how great she was at knowing just how hard or soft a move or strike looked, and reacting to it accordingly. That's got to be one of the most impossible things to recognize and react to, but, she is a master. I obviously wanted Meiko going over, but this was as strong a way as any to have her lose.

PAS: This was really good, Storm is not a favorite of mine, but she definitely worked hard, I will second the love of her STF, although Meiko's Figure four variation right before it was even nastier. I also loved Storms snap kick right to the chin, it felt like that should have cut her chin open. Meiko is incredible though, all of the early grappling was such class, her early wear down strikes were withering all of her big offense was so big looking, she is out of this world. I just can't buy anyone beating her, she is just too good so it is hard to like a match she loses as much as one she wins. I also think the finish run got a little your turn my turn, with big dramatic near falls from one wrestler leading immediately into big near falls from another wrestler. Still Meiko batted 1000 in this tournament, I need to check all of her random Euro indy work, she might be the best in the world

Rhea Ripley vs. Io Shirai

ER: Damn could I get maybe a consolation match between the losers? I don't know if there's anybody in the tournament who raised her stock more than Ripley during this tournament. I don't think there's a person out there who could keep a straight face and tell me that Shirai outshined Ripley here, or that Shirai has shone at all during the MYC. I have seen and liked Shirai before this, but she didn't come off any better than most of the way less hyped and way less experienced people from both MYC. Ripley is not nearly as giant as the big women they've brought to work both MYC, but for someone 5'8" and a little thick, she was really able to play bigger and more domineering. Ripley comes off like what they originally wanted Natalya to be, and Ripley hasn't been doing this nearly as long. Shirai had nice fire whenever she had to fight back, both those uppercuts that were knocking Rhea around the ring didn't look as good as literally any shot that Ripley threw in this match. And Ripley just looks like she owns this ring, whether she's on offense or setting up Shirai's less plausible offense, she just reads bigger than she is. I thought her grounding Shirai to start was awesome, tons of hard shots, raining down ground and pound, shots to the body, and then goes after my heart by working a stomach claw on Shirai. The camera work was great and the announcers were great at talking about it, then Ripley works a cool body vice and a long hanging vertical suplex and I'm officially a Ripley fan. Shirai's comeback at least gets the crowd involved, even though a lot of it wouldn't look like it would harm Ripley. She gets a rana out of a powerbomb and hits a nice suicide dive. The strike exchange didn't really work mainly because Shirai acts like she's throwing kill shots, and they never look great, but she hits a nice missile dropkick. Although really, I mainly just like how Ripley took the dropkick, whipped over fast and landed with her butt comically in the air. Shirai wins by violently whipping her own knees into the mat, connecting her body more with Ripley's body at least more than her other three matches. Genius! I assumed this was the finals we were getting, and maybe it will work out with them on the big stage. But if we don't get Ripley vs. Meiko as a run off for the bronze, I'm going to be pisssssssed.

ER: Meiko is the best. Three of her four MYC matches land on our 2018 Ongoing MOTY List, and I'm sure her match against Lane would have gotten there if it went 7 minutes instead of 5. Meiko is god, god is Meiko.

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Mae Young Classic 2018 Episode 7

Lacey Lane vs. Meiko Satomura

ER: Killer 5 minute Worldwide match, tightly worked, no extra fat, worked evenly without feeling like trading off, both looking like they could potentially win. I'm extremely happy Meiko won, but I thought Lane looked strong in a loss. The work was really fun, Meiko looks like such a natural that she could sleepwalk through a match like this, she has every single step down, is able to convey great emotion while also coming off like a flat out cold blooded killer. Meiko hits kick combos with precision, and is great at setting up Lane to do the same, really anticipating her opponent, and Lane importantly knows she's in the ring with Meiko Satomura and lays it in. Meiko leaning in to spin kicks and Lacey firing off elbows? Yes, please. I really wanted Meiko to win (even though I've enjoyed Lane in the tournament, I just wanted as many Meiko matches as possible) and I think they did a great job of making it seem like Lane had a real chance. The crossbody nearfall was legit, totally bought it as a finish and I have to give Meiko the credit for making things into such believable finishes. She is able to build so much drama with her selling, body language, and timing. In many matches that crossbody could have just felt like another move, but Meiko knows just how to take it, just when to kick out, all for maximum effect. She comes up holding her jaw with absolute daggers in her eyes, and I knew Lane was finished at that point. This delivered what I wanted.

PAS: I could have easily seen this make a list if it went a little longer. Lane is clearly green as goose shit, but Meiko has been training wrestlers for two decades and is masterful at putting together something interesting. They even do some Red vs. Ki Jackie Chan spots and make them look cool. I loved the early grabbing of the leg by Meiko and how she drops it instead of breaking it, just to let Lane know she was drawing dead. It felt like something Fujiwara might do. Finish felt a big abrupt, I usually don't complain about a short finish run, but it felt like we were two minutes away from something pretty great.

Io Shirai vs. Deonna Purrazzo

ER: Pre-match package is amusing as Cole keeps calling Shirai the "Genius of the Sky" while clips are showing her doing a bunch of moonsaults with the shittiest landings, just clips of her mostly missing her opponents or landing short and hurting her opponents. The clips made her looked like she was a Lita trainee. A true genius. And I thought Io looked really good for the first minute of this, and then proceeded to look the worst she's looked for the rest of the match. She started with some cool knees to Purrazzo's stomach, and hit a hard crossbody dive that Purazzo just took full force on the entrance grate, and Purrazzo got a nice schoolboy off Io's missed double knees in the corner. Then Io started throwing these really flimsy elbows and Purrazzo just completely outclassing her. Purrazzo started throwing these violent fast German suplexes that would have looked fine on their own, but Io was doing her best to making them look hokey by leaping into them way more than necessary. There's a lot of really engaging stuff around Purrazzo getting the Fujiwara, really wrenching it in and locking Shirai's free arm around her chin for a weird modified Rings of Saturn. The move was effective as hell but was marred a bit by Io's mawkish "Ohhhhhhh I hurrrrrrrt and I might just tappppppppp!" Before long Shirai is up and running around with no pain whatsoever, and Renee Young asks, "Where is Io getting the momentum, the energy!?" Well, you see, Shirai is a parody of a joshi babyface, so she has the power to make opponent's offense meaningless and pointless in the scheme of a match. The sweetest icing of all is when Shirai whiffs the match-ending moonsault completely, flying right over and past Purrazzo and slightly grazing her with arms, bad enough that the three person announce crew had no idea how to cover for it other than saying "Well she didn't get all of it but still won!" Shirai is very much not good, which is only magnified by putting her matches on directly after Meiko's matches. She comes off like a backyarder whose favorite wrestler is Meiko. I refuse to believe people thought she looked good for most of this match.

Tegan Nox vs. Rhea Ripley

ER: This was both a shame, and a damn impressive performance from Nox, and likely lead to a better  and more intriguing match than it otherwise would have been. Nox wrecked her non-wrecked knee in this one, immediately, after landing hard on that damn entrance grate on a dive. I didn't actually know about the injury before this happened, having successfully avoided tournament spoilers. But I noticed something was weird the way she stood up by pushing up off Ripley with all of her weight. Also,  she was suddenly selling *really* well. But I gained a ton of respect for Nox, as she kept trying to work on it, through a couple of match stoppages as the ref and trainer checked on her. She kept persisting to such an extreme degree that I began thinking that maybe she really was just putting on an amazing knee selling job, because she continued taking a furious beating from Ripley and kept fighting back for more. Ripley was a beast, muscling her up hardway for a huge flapjack, throwing some awesome clubbing shots to the back, and just plastering her with her sweet high dropkick. And because Nox was such a lunatic and kept taking all of this punishment and getting up for more, I really thought the only thing that made sense was Tegan Nox: Master of Sales. But soon she starts crying and the match is stopped, and I could not be more impressed and shocked by what she went through. Gutsy as all hell, as apparently her injury is quite bad (and likely made worse by working a few minutes on it). What awful luck she's had, but what huge respect she assuredly gained from everyone. Even truncated due to the circumstances, the match was a fascinating story and incredibly effective.

Mia Yim vs. Toni Storm

ER: I came away from this really impressed with Yim, and still very much unimpressed with Storm. They clearly want to make Toni Storm a thing, and Toni Storm is definitely not a thing, not in this house. She has a good look, and she's not sloppy, so she has at least a somewhat high floor, but she's very overrated at this point and not as good as they pretend she is. I really loved Kaitlyn/Yim last week (and was surprised to see that many people didn't think much of it), and Yim follows that match up with a real nice performance with a dull finish that we saw coming a mile away. Yim threw plenty of nice strikes, especially loved her muay thai knees, liked her locking up Storm with an Indian deathlock, a bow and arrow, and a guillotine, and dug her great powerbomb and even better Saito suplex. Storm was selling a lot throughout, just taking a lot and I just had a big hunch it was going to end with her taking a bunch of offense and then just winning with a move or two. That's exactly what happened, though she had some nice isolated moments in the match: her headbutt to cut off Yim was good, fighting through the guillotine for a spinebuster was nice, but I'm just not very impressed with Storm relative to how impressed they are with her. Satomura/Yim and Ripley/Purrazzo seem like potentially WAY better matches than what we'll be getting, but I suppose we will see.

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Mae Young Classic 2018 Episode 5

Toni Storm vs. Hiroyo Matsumoto

ER: This one kept having me and then losing me. I liked the first half for the most part, and the stretch lost me. I thought the strike exchange was weak, the weird rope running weaker, and Storm's selling and facials the weakest. When Toni cut the cutesy crap she was better, and she certainly has no problem eating tough suplexes, that nasty kneedrop to the stomach, or hard lariats to the neck. I like how heavy Storm bumps; she doesn't look super athletic when she bumps, which works well as it makes suplexes look harder and makes lariats look like she's running into a low tree branch. The early parts with wristlocks and headscissor escapes were more interesting than bad learned behavior rope running, or Matsumoto clumsily taking forever to do a old  powerbomb turned into a Boston Crab. She held Storm's legs awkwardly for way too long, and Storm basically had to hold still until Matsumoto turned it into a nice single crab. I really didn't think this had any decent flow, despite some good moments (and that's been a running theme of this tourney so far).

Kacy Catanzaro vs. Rhea Ripley

ER: This was really fun. Ripley has great presence, and her size reads bigger than she actually is (and no it's not just because she's against a tiny human). Most of Catanzaro's offense doesn't look too plausible against someone like Ripley, but I really liked how Ripley made it look plausible. She didn't take light headscissors as if she was getting launched across the ring, more took them as if they were knocking her off balance. It's always annoying when much larger opponents bump the same for every opponent regardless of size, and Ripley doesn't act like any of these moves are devastating, but sells them appropriately. Kacy does important things really well, and her tight roll up was maybe my favorite spot in the match, fully grapevining Ripley's leg before they had even rolled fully over, clamping Ripley's legs shut. It actually looked like something that could have finished the match. Ripley's power offense to take over was really fun, nice cocky suplexes, show off dropkicks, a cool standing Cloverleaf variation, and that match finishing Riptide was about as gif-worthy as things get. Catanzaro was mostly good at the stick and move stuff, got hung up a bit on that Mascarita Sagrada spinning DDT, but Ripley spiked herself nicely and had some good comedic flailing after. This was a fun one, and I'm glad Ripley advanced.

Taynara Conti vs. Lacey Lane

ER: I wasn't sure what they were going to do with this one, both being still pretty new. They kept it to a tight 150 seconds. It was kind of clumsy but in a fun way, throwing awkward knees, getting tossed by hair, Lane tying up Conti in kind of weird ways. Conti has some cool judo throws and it's awesome that WWE in 2018 has two women working judoka gimmicks. Lane's crucifix was nice and snug, looked like a pinfall. This was probably the quickest match of the tournament, but it was fun and effective.

Meiko Satomura vs. Mercedes Martinez

PAS: An absolute classic, maybe the best WWE Women's match of all time. Satomura is incredible, in the early chain wrestling sections she looked like the best wrestler in the world. The way she transitioned from a collar and elbow lock up into an armbar was intricate and flawless, the hammerlock into an armdrag, into an armbar with a knee on the neck this was simple stuff done as well as it can be done. Martinez looked good in those sections as well, not as crisp as Meiko, but the bit of grime worked well with her character. After getting out wrestled early, Martinez tries to turn it into a fight, and lays in with huge thudding shots, Meiko worked a dozen Aja Kong matches so isn't afraid to escalate the violence and we get some of the stiffest wrestling ever in a WWE branded ring. Thudding forearms, punishing kicks and knees the kind of thing that leave deep bruises which last for weeks. Martinez used her size and power really well, I loved that choke bomb, tons of force and Meiko landed poorly. The entire section where Martinez was fighting out of the Fujiwara armbar was great too, I loved how all the counter attempts were counter countered, until she finally is able to get a foot on the ropes. The finish run was great, I loved all of Mercedes's selling at the end, the limp collapse from the axe kick put over both the violence of the move and the fatigue of the war they were in.

ER: Hot damn I thought I had pretty high expectations for this one, and this completely demolished my expectations. This is definitely the best women's match in WWE history, and we have had some WWE women's matches pretty high on our MOTY list the past couple years. This had a totally different pace and structure than most WWE matches, and from a kayfabe perspective it was exciting as neither woman felt out of the match, always felt like one could feasibly end it. I don't check ahead on results so honestly had no idea who would be advancing, so I was going nuts down the stretch. Rachel was positive Mercedes was advancing, I was positive Meiko would be...but was getting swayed by Rachel, and Mercedes' strong showing. All the early moments were tough, nice headlocks, headscissors, Satomura looking like she could maneuver to north/south and transition to any single one of Mercedes' limbs with her eyes closed. Things ramped up for me when Satomura fired off two quick kicks to the chest to drop Martinez, then drops a knee right into her neck. Meiko's knees are absolutely terrifying; I hate things touching my neck, the thought of wearing a turtleneck makes me anxious (luckily I...don't often think about wearing turtlenecks, so I'm pretty safe), and Meiko was making me watch this match while covering my throat with my hands. I loved Mercedes fighting back, working a guillotine, coming at Meiko with hard strikes and uppercuts and slams, and I like how each momentum shift almost seems like a surprise, not a preordained thing. Each of their transitions back to offense didn't necessarily have a smooth flow, which benefitted them, as every time one would fight back it felt just like that - fighting back, not wanting to give up ground. Meiko starts putting on a clinic, reversing a fisherman's buster into an armbar, and that armbar looked worthy of finishing a match. And obviously that's what made all of this so great, that so much of it looked worthy of finishing the match, without ever once feeling like they were burning through actual finishers. Mike Awesome/Masato Tanaka matches also had a few dozen things that looked like finishers, but it was just guys hitting big moves and then getting up and taking big moves, like you were demoing finishers while making a bitchin' CAW. Here their moves look very worthy, but it always seems plausible when both escape or kickout.

Meiko's arm bar was one of the nastiest I've seen, totally expected that to end, but Mercedes kept rolling while also getting her arm bent straight behind her, Meiko great at starting the armbar at 3 and cranking it up to 9 the longer it was on, allowing the spot to build and breathe and not look silly that Mercedes wasn't tapping immediately. Meiko hits a heavy frog splash, big knees, and an absolutely spine shortening DDT. I loved how Martinez took that DDT, loved her forward crumple, her defeated child's pose. I certainly wasn't expecting a kickout after Meiko's cartwheel knee aimed to behead Martinez, and Martinez looked to drill Meiko through the mat when she finally hit her fisherman's buster (on the third overall attempt). Meiko's slumped over sell on the mat after kicking out was an awesome visual. Fully agree that Mercedes' selling was impressive, loved her dropping to a knee from fatigue, allowing Meiko to hit a low spin kick. The sell reminded me of one of my favorite's from last year, in the Cain Justice/Cecil Scott match, when Cain hits Scott with a big shot and Scott lurches forward before falling, his will to fight being a second ahead of his pain. This was a stone classic, and Meiko can do no wrong. I have no clue what exactly she will get out of Lane in the next round, but I can tell you at this point I'm not looking forward to anything else in the tournament more than that.

ER: Well, good luck to the rest of the people in the Mae Young Classic, you got some mighty shoes to fill. Who can credibly beat Meiko at this point? As you may have expected, that is one very easy, very high add to our 2018 Ongoing MOTY List.

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Mae Young Classic 2018 Episode 1

Tegan Nox vs. Zatara

ER: Cole is a little too head over heels for Nox, so my household is Team Zatara right here. But Beth Phoenix informs me that Zatara is not here to make friends. You don't say. I mean, it's tough to make new friends once you're an adult. Maybe one of these 32 women knew they might not have the best odds of winning this tournament, but thought it would be a good way to meet some new girlfriends. I was entirely unfamiliar with both women, and this didn't make me want to get more familiar. There were some things I liked, like the fun arm work right at the beginning and Zatara's Negro Navarro-ish cruceta and Zatara's running knee and hard missile dropkick, etc. But both had some poor looking offense at points. Nox threw these uppercuts that looked like she was intentionally missing Zatara, and Zatara threw a pretty ugly mule kick (that's a tough move to connect on, and a lot of ladies use it, and I'm not sure I've seen one do it well) and threw missed clotheslines that were in no danger of hitting anybody. Nox also had a couple of annoying phony athletic bumps, like she was trying to do athletic Hennig bumps but there was a hesitation or delay. I remember there being worse matches than this last year, but I likely won't remember this one by the end of the tournament.

PAS: This didn't do much for me, Nox is someone who gets a lot of hype from people whose opinions I don't trust, and she didn't show me much here. There was some OK stuff by Zatara I though her moves landed with force, but parts of this also felt disjointed. I am not sure there are 32 good women's wrestlers for a tourney like this to be all good matches. I like how the MYC brings in women from all over the world, but the best Chilean versus the best Welsh lady is going to likely be subpar.

MJ Jenkins vs. Rhea Ripley

ER: This one was really fun. Ripley won me over in her match against Dakota Kai last year, and I liked how this was structured with Ripley being a bully until Jenkins snapped. Ripley hit a nice dropkick to knock Jenkins off the apron (with a nice two part bump to the floor from Jenkins) and a GREAT clothesline back in the ring, locked in a snug abdominal stretch, really all her control stuff looked good. She also did a few little things that impressed me, like when she missed an overhand strike in the corner when Jenkins slipped out to the apron, and Ripley missed hard and then grabbed her side and shook out her arm, occupying time until Jenkins was ready to hit offense. I see so many wrestlers just stagger back into position and just stand there crooked and waiting, so seeing a 21 year old already finding interesting ways to occupy time is really cool. Jenkins bumped nicely for Ripley and was mostly in there to make Ripley look good and sell, so it worked. Fun showcase.

PAS: I thought this was fine. Ripley was a bit OTT with her new tough girl attitude, lots of silly faces and grimacing. I did think her offense looked good, that powerbomb finisher was class. Jenkins had some nice energy, but I am not sure she showed me much to make her stand out, outside of being an opponent. I assume Ripley will go pretty far, which is fine, she fits with what they want, and is still really young.

Lacey Lane vs. Vanessa Kraven

ER: Absolutely love Lane's look, and I really liked the cat and mouse stuff here. Kraven is so much bigger than Lane, but it was fun seeing Lane find neat ways to put her boots upside Kraven's head. Lane doesn't have great elbow strikes (and yet I liked a lot of her kicks and she had a fantastic jumping knee to the chin) but I liked the way she would stick and move and spring back in undeterred. Kraven was good at those swinging "Andre being swarmed" arms, trying to shove away to create some space. There was an unfortunate botch that both handled about as well as possible, really not a ton you can do but pick yourself up and get back to it. Kraven had some cool stuff, like hanging Lane upside down in the ropes and chopping at her, and I liked Kraven's cannonball and the callback whiff, and Lane was working for a crucifix the entire match so it made sense to have her win with it. This wasn't always sound, but was an interesting match up and had a lot of ideas. Probably my favorite of the night so far because of that.

PAS: I thought parts of this were really fun, I liked all of Lane's early evasion and stick and moving. I didn't think she lost some steam post botch. Kraven is impressive looking, but I thought she was a bit stiff and didn't work with the same brutality as Jazzy or Viper last year. This is a match layout I usually dig, and it was put together well.

Killer Kelly vs. Meiko Satomura

ER: Is there going to be any woman in this tournament who doesn't get completely outclassed by Satomura? I loved her profile promo, talking about her WCW stint and keeping kayfabe by saying she was young and had no finisher yet, which was why she lost so quickly. And this match was awesome. Never heard of Kelly before, and she was basically in their to get her ass beaten by Meiko, and she ended up turning it into a whole lot more. She clearly understood who she was in there with and had no problems laying it in. She lands a kick to the chest that made me sit up, and then likely earned her a half dozen even harder kicks to the chest from Meiko. Meiko unleashes a lot, shows off her awesome speed and impeccable ring placement, hits a super fast armdrag roll up into a half crab that she turns into a chiropractor's dream of a STF (Renee Young on commentary even flipped out, yelling "Look at how Kelly's knee is bent!") and drops her cool cartwheel kneedrop. Kelly is cool working at a choke and really stands up to Meiko, and gets an awesome comeback when she catches Meiko up top, and the two have some cool close quarters struggle before Kelly locks in a sick dragon sleeper while hooked across the ropes. Kelly was good enough here - and Meiko was convincing enough - that I fully bought Kelly's fisherman's suplex pinning Satomura. Meiko had the perfect last minute kickout and I was actually smelling upset. That's effective work from both ladies right there. Meiko looked like an absolute boss in this one, but Kelly impressed the hell out of me too. Awesome capper to the first episode.

PAS: I don't think there are many wrestlers in the world who aren't going to be outclassed by Meiko, outside of maybe Daniel Bryan she is the best wrestler in the whole fed. She looked incredible in this match, she is clearly amped to be working in the WWE after all these years, and some of the chaining of moves in this match were breath taking. Kelly impressed me too, she realized where she was and who she was there with and came with it. Meiko unloaded with some huge violent kicks and when Kelly fired back she met her force to force. Meiko's timing in this match was great, that fisherman's suplex was timed perfectly, one of the better nearfalls I can remember.

ER: After talking it over we decided to add Meiko/Kelly to our 2018 Ongoing MOTY List, just a fantastic little TV match, with Meiko looking like the best wrestler in the world, Kelly getting a couple great comebacks, and really the match had the best nearfall kickout of the year. Very excited for what's to come.

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2016 Ongoing MOTY List: Aja v. Meiko

Aja Kong v. Meiko Satomura Sendai Girls 4/8

PAS: These two have been feuding since 1998, but this is their first singles match against each other since 2012. One of my favorite match ups in wrestling history. Aja is maybe the greatest monster wrestler ever, she has slowed down a bit but still will beat you silly, Meiko has great looking chop down offense, she was landing some great kicks, and even doing some cool kicks and stomps to Aja's instep. Kong lays a sick beating here, including braining Meiko with chairs and a metal door, punching her in the face and dropping her on her head, and Meiko kept finding ways to land her own shots. I thought it may have gone a bit overboard in the end, including some goofus no selling, but man overall this was a hell of a war. Loved to see this revisited, now we just need another Ishikawa v. Ikeda match.

ER: I love how these two dance with each other. And I always love how Meiko looks like any other unassuming Japanese woman, somebody you wouldn't notice in public, yet if you only know she's a maniac who can get dumped on her head time and again and come right back and kick you in your connective tissue. The early lock up moments were so cool, with neither cutting the other slack, no knuckle lock or arm wringer just given up. Meiko had all these neat short kicks to areas you don't see getting kicked, like a kick to Aja's shin to set up a lock up, or a kick to the forearm to set up a wristlock. It was a cool way of striking to open up an opportunity to get in close. Meiko keeps getting in close for side headlocks and the whole time I'm thinking what a terrible idea it is to put a side headlock on Kong, and sure enough before long Meiko is getting dumped on her head. But the match ramps up to a whole new level when Meiko flies off the top with a splash, and Kong sticks her legs straight up in the air, with Meiko landing full force on them stomach first and bouncing grossly off to the side, like a skater messing up a rail slide. I can't believe spots like that don't go viral. Meiko rolls to the floor and Kong follows for ass kicking reasons. Meiko gets tossed through chairs, gets chairs tossed at her, gets a heavy looking piece of ring barrier tossed at her, gets dropped with a brainbuster on the corner of that ring barrier, gets dropped with a brainbuster on a corner of Kong's trash can. She takes a lot of damage, is what I'm getting at. But she keeps coming back, keeps fighting, keeps finding ways to get at Kong. Meiko probably did take a bit TOO much damage to come back to the level she did, but overall it was a whole lot of fun watching them do their thing.


2016 MOTY MASTER LIST

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Say Goodbye To The Bad Times, Now Meiko Satomura's Free On Her Own

Meiko Satomura vs. Kyoko Kimura SENDAI 3/11/15 - SKIPPABLE

Match starts around the hour-and-fifteen-minute mark.

I meant to have this out a lot sooner. Like, right after the WKO 100 wrapped, and before another 2015 Meiko match started getting hyped up. I remembered overhearing someone on Twitter talk this up, right before the WKO 100 started, so I figured I'd reconvene this project by catching up on this match, and boy oh boy, was that ever a bad idea. I wanted to come here and tell you that, even with THE BOSS's reign of terror, you shouldn't sleep on Meiko in 2015, and I probably will have chances to do that. This isn't one of them. This was a chance for me to feel sad and not want to write about wrestling for a while.

And let me be clear, this is not Meiko's fault. And when I say this is not Meiko's fault, what I mean is that it's actually Meiko's fault in a very significant way. This match's biggest crimes are it's layout and the story it decides to tell. Given that Meiko is SENDAI's booker, I guess it was her call to work this match evenly and try to present Kimura as someone on her level...and that's a big problem because Kyoko Kimura is bad. Like really, really bad. She has some double stomps that she busts out now and again that look pretty nice, but outside of that, I have seen literal backyard wrestlers who were both less sloppy and had more convincing offense than her. She is the rare person whom Hiroshi Tanahashi could tell to tighten up their strikes. And Meiko spends the whole match working like Meiko - same great offense, same great selling - and I'm expected to buy the two essentially as equals, to the point that it goes to a 20-minute time limit draw! It's not even like Meiko's selling makes Kyoko look more convincing. It makes it look even more fake because I don't buy that this feeb is giving someone who scored wins over Akira Hokuto and Aja Kong a run for her money.

I gotta wash the foul taste of this match out of my mouth. The much pimped Hojo match may do that, but right now, I wanna go with a sure thing, so we'll look at that next time. For now, we've got....

Meiko Satomura vs. Nanae Takahashi Stardom 3/20/12 - EPIC

Now this is more like it! This is also presented as a battle of equals, but unlike Kimura, Nanae Takahashi can actually hang with Meiko in this match. This in itself is a bit of a surprise, as I had always known her as the unremarkable partner of false idol Momoe Nakanishi before this match, but here, she's quite the capable ass-beater. She's also one of the screamier joshi wrestlers, so if you're someone who's turned off by that, be warned. Still, she does lay into Meiko from the opening bell here, and the effect is that when Meiko fights back, she looks twice as badass. Meiko's selling is on-point here, too. At the time, I read some people knocking her selling in this match big time, but I really don't see it at all. Nanae has some selling issues here and there in the latter half of the match, like when she pops up from a backdrop out of nowhere. On the other hand, when she turns around and gives one to Meiko, she gets to the ropes and uses them to pull herself up. Meiko sells fatigue really well in the match, too. There's a great part right after the backdrops where they have a strike exchange (an organic one, not one of those shitty New Japan "let's put on a show!" ones), and Meiko starts to get gassed, so Nanae just stops hitting her and backs her against the ropes before clubbering her. She does do a one-count kickout power-up spot near the end...but she collapses before she can land a single blow on Nanae, and it's immediately followed by the finish. It's a spot that I could see someone finding hokey, but I liked it, and was a great cap to a killer performance.

Next time: HOJO! And something else, I guess...

THE COMPLETE & ACCURATE MEIKO SATOMURA

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2014 Ongoing Match of the Year List

Kana v. Meiko Satomura Kana Produce 2/25

PAS: Super weird setup where the entire match was under a blue light and accompanied by guy performing on a Kokyu (a traditional Japanese string instrument), with Kana in weird face paint.  It had the feel of the kind of thing an Asian art museum would put on. I have a friend who works at Freer Sackler, I should pitch it to her as a traveling exhibit. Match itself was the quality we expect from this matchup. I love Kana as the Mickey Knuckles to Yuki Ishikawa's Ian Rotten, and this was the best BattlArtsy match of the year by far. I loved the nastiness of all the kicks and forearms, and the really cool jujitsu chokes that both girls worked into. The oddness of the presentation added to the feel of it, although it felt more like a cool novelty than an elite match. Still a total blast, and something I am going to really remember fondly at the end of the year.

ER: This was weird in a good, good way. I am a big Ali Farka Toure fan and the Kokyu style of play does not seem too dissimilar to his old African fingerpicking style. But this also wasn't TOO weird for me as sometimes I just don't care about commentary and will put on music as I watch wrestling on mute.   If you already listen to Tinariwen while watching wrestling then listening to a man play a Kokyu while watching wrestling won't seem too out of this world. This also feels like an appropriate match for Phil and I to review as we saw The Mountain Goats do a live score of a silent era Swedish film, we both dug the weird Jeff Jarrett/Dutch Mantel PBS orchestra match from the Memphis set, so watching two assbeaters get the live score treatment seems within our wheelhouse. And I think this totally works as both awesome match, and as weird performance art. As the action heated up as the match wore on, the Kokyu started playing faster and faster, and as I watched I noticed myself actually buying into the tension more because of it, getting more and more into each submission attempt. I wouldn't have even guessed I would actually be affected by a live score, yet there I was, totally buying into it. The match was as good as you would expect given these two, and I really loved Kana here. She had some badass reversals, like catching a Pele kick while falling back into a grapevined ankle lock, and even more killer catching a Meiko kick behind her back, and then ducking under it while still holding it to transition into a German. It looked like the first time you saw World of Sport and were captivated by their foreign movements. They wrench in all their nasty chokes and I loved the struggle for the finishing triangle. I would have dug this whole thing without the Kokyu, but I genuinely got more into it because of that. This was the coolest list fusion of art with asskickery.


2014 MOTY MASTER LIST

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Tell You What Meiko Satomura's Gonna Do...Kick It Down, Kickin' It Down, Kick It Out

Meiko Satomura vs. Kana Kana Pro 2/25/14 - EPIC

(Previously published in SLL's All-Request Friday Night)

One of the most unusual and fascinating matches of last year, played under blue lights with Kana in one of the trippier wrestler get-ups this side of Alebrije and some dude jamming on a traditional Japanese string instrument throughout the whole match. Seriously, what's it's closest relative? That Jarrett/Mantell match with the percussion orchestra? Kana should be NXT's next hire as a dual worker/producer. I wanna see the weird shit she and Jimmy Jacobs come up with together.

First part of the match has the girls trying to match the trippy setting with equally trippy matwork. Meiko with the reverse figure four breaker? Kana chains the stretch muffler into an ankle lock? Is everything about this match delightfully weird? Eventually, we transition into the "Meiko killing the fuck out of people" phase of the match. Meiko, as always, is great at dishing out a beating, and Kana is great at eating a beating and sneaking in comebacks and hope spots, including a really big German suplex.

Uh oh, the music is getting intense! Their health bars must be low! Seriously, they've both been kicked to shit by this point in the match - even though Meiko has been the big aggressor, Kana has chipped away at her enough that you buy her being worn down, too. Meiko with the cartwheel that ends with her kicking a downed Kana in the head, because Meiko even makes cartwheels devastating. I am glancing at the index of nominees for PWO's Greatest Wrestler Ever project, and I'm noticing Meiko hasn't been nominated. I should probably amend that when I'm done writing this up. I have no idea what my ballot for something like that would like right now, but pretty much single-handedly making an otherwise dead genre of wrestling still somewhat worthwhile for 15 years seems like a resume worth considering for something like that.

They start fighting over sleepers. Manzerman is thrilled, I'm sure. In all seriousness, though, it's really well-done, the sleepers are impressively varied, and most of all, this is the rare three-act match where all three acts are very different from each other, but all seem to fit together regardless. In summary, you want all this.

Meiko Satomura vs. Akira Hokuto GAEA 4/29/01 - EPIC

Fair warning, the quality of that link is shit, but it was all I could find. I came from a tape trading era where you kinda had to take what you could get video quality-wise, so this was watchable enough for me. I actually used to have this in better quality on VHS, but my wrestling stuff was, surprisingly, amongst the first to go when I began to purge my physical media some years back, and even if I hadn't, my VCRs have bitten the dust.

That said, so long as I could find this in at least somewhat watchable quality, I kinda had to open with it (well, open as my first original review for this project, anyway), because it's really Meiko's signature match from this period, and if you really want to understand why I'm doing a Complete and Accurate Meiko, you have to understand this period. See, in 2001, the smart fans I paid attention to considered joshi to be good. Very, very good. The stuff GAEA was doing in the late 90's through about 2002 was some of the most praised wrestling in the corners I was following...hell maybe the most praised. And joshi fandom wasn't some weird superniche like it is today. The people who thought GAEA fans were contrarian fools didn't feel that way because joshi was obviously garbage. They felt that way because AJW was obviously better, and everybody knows Momoe Nakanishi was the real future of joshi. GAEA fans, of course, disagreed. Momoe was an overrated hack with bad skin who only got popular because her fans could fantasize about abusing her since she was so good at taking a beating (I'm paraphrasing here, the actual reviews of the time were much more entertaining). The real future of joshi, they contended, was Meiko Satomura.

Actually, the real furture of joshi was no one, because two years after this match, all of of this was gone.

In my near 25 years of wrestling fandom, joshi's near-overnight, near-universally accepted de-evolution into utter crap is one of the most bizarre developments I've ever seen, and yet, it really never gets discussed. I guess I understand why. I mean, it's not like it's something I really noticed at the time. I didn't wake up one day and go "well, joshi sucks now, I'm gonna have some coffee". I just bought some GAEA shows from Jeff Lynch and thought "hmmm, these weren't as good as they looked on paper". I was kinda taking a chance on them, since they weren't getting talked up as much online by that point, but hey, they're not gonna knock one out of the park every night...or every month...or a fucking year, wait, what? So it's not like it was an immediate realization, and by the time it dawned on us that this thing we all used to think was amazing was now lousy, we had become too disinterested in it to investigate further.

To this day, I still don't really understand how it all fell apart, and maybe this project will help make that clear, but regardless, I think the framework you need to fully appreciate Meiko's career is that of the career she was supposed to have. Like I said, this was probably Meiko's signature match pre-genre collapse, and on rewatch, I'm not sure it should be. Akira Hokuto is really the better half of this match, and what problems I have here, I mostly attribute to Meiko's performance. The first half of the match is built around Hokuto ripping up Meiko's arm and Meiko finding openings to kick the shit out of Hokuto when she could. She sold the armwork well when it was being worked over, but when she made her comeback, she quickly dropped it for some big throws, and none of it really figured into the rest of the match, which was mostly just bomb throwing. It's the kind of match layout that a lot of mediocre indy dudes would do and you'd instantly forget about afterwords because all they cared about was getting their shit in. This is a match that got MOTYC plaudits at the time because Meiko came into it with the eye of the tiger and Hokuto was on a bit of a post-prime hot streak that year as I recall, and from early on, they did a great job establishing the feisty young ace-to-be of the company standing up to the legend who was repping for Mayumi Ozaki's goon squad that was running roughshod over GAEA at the time. You buy into the match because you buy into Meiko and Hokuto, and despite a few awkward moments along the way, they reward your faith in them.

I have to talk about the finish, because it is pretty distinct. It's something that stood out enough to me to 2001 to help me call this MOTY, but in 2015, it looks wrong enough to me that I wouldn't even call this a MOTYC. Basically, after a lot of big moves back and forth, Hokuto drops Meiko with the Northern Lights Bomb, but she's too out of it to get up, so the ref lays the ten count on both of them. Lo and behold, Meiko is able to stagger to her feet, and Hokuto isn't, so Meiko Rocky II's her way to victory. On paper, I do think that's a really cool idea: Meiko survived Akira Hokuto, and Hokuto wore herself out trying to take down the sparky young up-and-comer. In practice, watching events unfold leading to that finish, I have a really hard time believing that Hokuto had nothing left in the tank after dropping the Northern Lights Bomb, or at the very least, that she had less than Meiko. That really felt like stretching my suspension of disbelief a bit too far, and that's a shame, because most of the rest of this match is really easy to get wrapped up in.

In retrospect, maybe there were better Meiko matches from this period to highlight here, but I don't mind going with this one to make my point. Just the way they took this wonky match structure that shouldn't work at all and somehow made it awesome just by having really strong characters and a great story and absolute conviction in their performances is really admirable and amazing to watch even with it's flaws. Even if you watch this and don't see that Meiko had "it" here, I'd like to think you'd see why people like me thought she had "it", and why we were sure she was the future.


The future never showed up, but Meiko Satomura is still here. And that's why I'm doing this.

Meiko Satomura vs. Ayako Hamada SENDAI 10/18/14 - GREAT

Mike over at Wrestling KO said this may have been one of the twenty best puro matches of 2014. I'd need to think hard before committing to that claim, but it doesn't seem outlandish. Honestly, this tip-toed right up to EPIC status before a flat finish stopped me from going all the way. They didn't create the kind of atmosphere that helped push Satmoura/Hokuto past it's flaws and limitations, but they did at least make up for it somewhat by being a more technically sound match, and damn entertaining in it's own right.

Consider Ayako Hamada, who made one of the more drastic career transitions post-genre collapse. Late 90's/early 00's Hamada was the spunky young star of ARSION, positioned opposite veteran badasses like Lioness Asuka and Aja Kong, and was generally considered one of the premier PYTs of joshidom. Today, Hamada is a straight up hoss, and I gotta say, as cute as she used to be, I like her way better now that she's mauling people like Little Miss Hashimoto. This also means that Meiko doesn't just get to murder the fuck out of her problems like she would with someone like Kana. She's the smaller, faster, more technically sound one this time, and she has to use those things to her advantage. Not that she doesn't bust out things like the cartwheel kneedrop, because she does. Nor for that matter, is it like Hamada doesn't bust out a pair of moonsaults, one of which goes from the top rope to the floor, because she does. It's just that this is mostly about Hamada as a violent slugger and Meiko trying to outmaneuver her. Look at Meiko's frequent use of the sleeper here. It's a quick and easy way to try and slow down a woman who - left to her own devices - was double stomping the shit out of her knee. It comes into play again at the end when Hamada kicks out of the Death Valley Driver, so Meiko slaps on a sleeper again for a moment, then...just releases it and hits another DVD for the win? That's it? Well, it's more believable than the ending to Meiko/Hokuto, but still, kinda lame. Honestly, if they were going in that direction, they probably should've just had her go out in the sleeper. Still, very well put together, very well executed match.

THE COMPLETE & ACCURATE MEIKO SATOMURA

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