70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Williams!

69. 1979.10.17 - 04 Jackie Sato vs. Vicki Williams
 
K: This is the final match of the Japan vs. USA series. I hadn’t noticed before but they seem to have got a pretty good crowd for this show, you can see there are fans in the upper sections and this is before they started being careful to only show one side of the venue on camera for poorly attended TV tapings. It starts with Jackie Sato coming to ring with mic in hand shouting about the crooked referee. It reminded me of Chigusa Nagayo's mid-match promos about 5 years after this when some injustice had occurred, but no as effective. Jackie doesn't have the deep booming voice for it. The American ref is kicked out despite his protestations that he is "the greatest referee in American and Japan" and is replaced by AJW ref Jimmy Kayama.

We get a decent enough match which is helped by the crowd being relatively heated, although they don’t make much use of that or take the crowd to higher peaks at any point. That’s my biggest takeaway from this series as of today, they’re too content to just go out there and have their match that they do almost every week. Even with this one being different in that the heel ref is gone, it doesn’t really payoff in any way except the heel has to tone down the cheating. Even just Vicki going for a big bit of cheating when she thinks the referee had been distracted for something only for him to not fall for it and cut her off I think would have helped this along and given the crowd a reward for putting up with so much bullshit leading up to this.

Jackie spends a bit too much time on the receiving end, but her comeback is good. She’s a lot better on offense and I don’t think presenting your Ace as constantly fighting for her survival against anyone who isn’t Monster Ripper is effective in the long run. We’re finally done with this series now and will be on to more entertaining and memorable things soon enough.

** 

MD: We’ve finally made it to the end of the US vs Japan series. The US team (which included the Black Pair) had already won the overall team competition. This was for the individual crown. Ronnie Wright came out to ref as always, still bandaged but ready to go. Sato complained and this time, she had the law on her side. They had called the NWA office in New York and Wright was not just taken out of the match but suspended. 

And in a fair fight, Williams got crushed. This was pure ace stuff from Sato. She missed a dropkick once and Williams hammered her a bit. Williams got some shots in from underneath another time, but basically, this was a lot of Sato. In retrospect, Williams took more of this than I remembered, but I think that’s because Jackie’s comebacks were so strong. When it was time, she absolutely had her way with Williams. She’d outwrestle her, stepping over and flipping her over, stretching her this way and that, outfight her, coming back from some shots with a cross choke in the ropes, and then at the end, out suplexed her, just driving her down with two belly to backs before a splash off the top to pin her. It was a real sense of inevitability, as if they were done with this farce and were going to wash their hands of it.

That’s not to say the ceremony at the end wasn’t fun, because it was. All of the American team (including Ikeshita and Kumano) got medals and both Moolah and Sato got trophies. And thankfully, we can move into the home stretch of the decade and not look back to this series.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Tomi! Kumano! Williams!

65. 1979.10.XX - 04 Jackie Sato & Tomi Aoyama vs. Mami Kumano & Vicki Williams (2/3 Falls)

K: It’s good to see Jackie again. It hits me right at the start that she has an aura which draws me into her matches, even the way she stalls still feels like she’s just getting you to brace yourself for what’s about to happen next. She’s a very cool wrestler. I noticed as well how Vicki Williams took such a big bump for Jackie’s offense when they first crossed paths. Felt like she was consciously conveying that Jackie’s a much stronger opponent than anyone else we’ve seen her go up against.

The 1st fall was a bit messy. I did like the spot where Mami Kumano has Tomi Aoyama on the apron and pushes her into the corner post, but when Tomi spins her around and tries to do the same thing in revenge the heel ref immediately intervenes to stop first. I haven’t been very complementary about his style of heeling but I’ll give credit where it’s due. Mami has pretty strong performance here, taking up most of the match as Vicki seems a bit off at times.

The 2nd fall was a bit more structured, but the biggest problem with it is the match felt more concerned with getting heat on the referee than the heel wrestlers. There were a couple of moments where Jackie got physical with him and looked like she’s on the verge of losing her shit, but it’s not much of a payoff and isn’t worth how much his antics break up the flow of the match. We did see a very good comeback that led to Tomi picking up the pin with her top rope boomerang, but the camera cuts missed it, they really seem to hate her.

Our 3rd fall only have one purpose. Jackie is gonna kick ass and win. She did tag out for bit in the middle so the heels managed to get a bit of offense in on Tomi, there was a weird spot where Tomi came back on an Irish Whip diagonally (which seemed to break the laws of wrestling physics) and pushed the heel ref into her opponents. I got the idea but I don’t think it worked. Maybe if they all tumbled over it would have been effective, if a bit more comedic than I think was the intent here. But once Jackie was back in the ring she just turned into a superhero, repeatedly smashed Vicki Williams into the mat and got the 3 count despite the ref doing a ridiculously slow count on her. He then gets beat up for his crimes. 

**1/2

MD: I’m not sure what happened to our beloved Queen Angels. I know that Lucy and Tomi wrestle at the end of the year but they were commentating like Jackie and Tomi were the strongest tag team in the world and we don’t see Tomi and Lucy team again in the footage. Williams (with Grable) was the NWA tag champion and she was fine here. You almost had to feel for her because Kumano would do her dangling choke (twice) to Jackie and then Williams would come in with a conventional choke, or Kumano would do her top rope seated senton and Williams would come in with a kick. What’s probably even going through her mind in that situation? The world is far bigger and more wonderful than Moolah told her yet she was trapped in her box forever.

This had a lot of heel ref shenanigans. It had plenty of outside interference from all of the American women. That said, it still worked just a little better than some of the other similar matches. Maybe it was just a bit more chaotic. Maybe it was because Jackie worked well from underneath and Tomi was fiery on the outside, dragged out again and again by the ref. Maybe it was because there were a few spots where the ref got comeuppance (or almost did like when Tomi pushed him into a double clothesline from her opponents). But it still didn’t clear the bar of if this was Jackie/Tomi vs Mami/Yuki. This was one where the ⅔ falls structure hurt a little too (and it usually didn’t) as the big comeback was deferred past a banana peel Tomi cross body pin to even up the falls. I wanted that big Jackie comeback and we didn’t quite get it. What we had to be satisfied with instead was the ref reluctantly counting three after Jackie’s belly to back and then him getting beaten up a bit post match (only to be helped out by Moolah; had to be an interesting tour for that guy overall, but boy am I sick of him).

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Tomi! Williams!

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

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

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

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

**1/4

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

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Williams!

56. 1979.09.21 - 03 Jackie Sato vs. Vicki Williams

K: I’ll be a bit theoretical like this. For a match to work, it almost always has to have some structure going on in order for it to have any value. This distinguishes it from an angle, which can just be one thing happening because that’s its only purpose. This feels more like an angle than a match because it’s really just one thing happening. Vicki Williams jumps Jackie at the start and chokes her and gets helped out with blatant interference from the other Americans on the outside and the biased American referee just lets it all go. Jackie doesn’t put up any real fight against it, it’s hardly a spirited performance from her. So I’m only a few minutes into it and I’m already thinking “ok you’ve made your point, the Americans are cheating and their referee is crooked” and just want this to wrap up quickly.

Unfortunately they didn’t. This just goes on very monotonously until Jackie finally gets tired of the crooked ref constantly slow counting her and attacks him to get DQed. There was no need for this match to go any more than 5 minutes.

*1/2

MD: As a one time thought experiment this was pretty interesting. Jackie had to face not just Vicki, not just all of the American contingent on the outside, but also a biased referee who would let Williams put her in illegal holds, would break Jackie’s mostly legal holds, and would count far faster for Williams than Jackie. It’s something we’ve seen a hundred times but here it was fresh and new and shocking to the announcers and the crowd.

And that was probably a good thing as there wasn’t a whole lot else interesting with the match. Williams used a bunch of chokes. She had one nice drop into a body scissors. Jackie had some really good comebacks especially after the image of her getting choke in the ropes in front of the whole American team and they had a clear way for Williams to get back on top as Jackie was arguing with the heel ref, but it never really added up to much overall. That was especially true with the non finish. Instead of the ref getting some meaningful comeuppance, Jackie tossed him after a slow count and he DQed her. I assume this will be a story moving forward with the American vs Japanese tournament and therefore it made sense to introduce and not pay it off, but we’ll see.

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