70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Barkley!

57. 1979.09.2X1 - Jackie Sato vs. Winnie Barkley (After 9/21, possibly October)

K: This is similar to the Jackie vs. Vicki Williams match we covered last we so it makes sense to more of a direct comparison. I don't like how these Japan vs. American matches are laid out, the evil foreigner is way too dominant and the constant cheating is overkill.

I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here. People often associate this kind of match with Dump Matsumoto but there's actually a substantial business. Dump's matches (especially the famous ones) don't have this kind of flat constant cheating where the heel is just doing essentially the same thing over and over again. Rather, there's an ebb and flow to it where she'll do some cheating, then roll it back a bit, before coming up with some new devilry, and you never know what she's going to do next or how deep into her bag of tricks she's gonna go this time. It's why her matches sometimes have an element of horror in them.

But back to the match I'm actually reviewing. This does feel like a slightly improved version of what we saw last week in that firstly, Jackie does get a bit of shine at the start. I'm not saying there's some absolute rule that that needs to happen, but I think in this kind of match it really worked and neither of her opponents have ferocious enough heel offense to take over right from the start and have it feel meaningful. The dodgy referee  business starts early but is a little more restrained in that he breaks up a hold that he claims is a choke, and there's a little plausible deniability there that he's just strictly enforcing the rules before it becomes blatantly obvious that he's just crooked against Jackie.

But after hinting a more efficient direction at the start this settles into the pattern of the referee slow/fast counting and the Americans on the outside constantly interfering under his nose so Jackie can never get any momentum going (she does hit a beautiful proto-slingblade in one of her brief hope spots though). It just feels a lot more right when Jackie gets to go on offense, she's meant to be the heroic Ace around here, plus she's just such a physical specimen.

But then in the last few minutes this match turns into something different entirely when AJW referee Jimmy Kayama runs into to confront the American ref and his crooked ways but the ref attacks him. The crowd are so furious at the ref they start throwing things at him and it really feels like things are getting out of hand when suddenly a random fan actually runs into the ring to  remonstrate with him, and all the wrestlers on the outside have to jump into the ring to get rid of him. Jimmy Kayama is in there again fighting, throws the crooked ref out of the ring just in time to fairly count a Jackie cover to give her the win. Well. That would have been an awesome final 90 seconds of a great match if I hadn't been mostly bored for 10 minutes beforehand.

**

MD: Yeah, this was more of the same from the last match but Williams had looked way smoother than Barkley. She was, of course, Winona Littleheart, just out of gimmick.That’s almost a shame because I’d be curious what the gimmick would have looked like in this setting. As it was, we were looking at choking, eye rakes, draping the face over the ropes, etc. Jackie emoted well in agony. The heel US ref made sure that she didn’t get any comebacks but honestly, there weren’t even enough hope spots in here. The US team (the Moolah Army) interfered when they did. The commentators told us some useful things, like that the winner of the tournament would get $30,000 (I think dollars at least), and that Winnie liked disco dancing. At least things did come to a head in a crazy angle at the end as referee Kunimatsu Matsunaga had enough and got involved, getting into a big brawl with the US ref and finally just making the count himself. It was a wild scene for such a pedestrian angle and probably made this work overall as long as they just don’t go right back to it later. You could watch the last two minutes of this and get the full effect save for some of Jackie’s great selling.