JWP UWA International Champion Decision Tournament Official Release |
1/6/91 Tokyo Korakuen Hall, UWA International Champion Decision Tournament 1st Round: Miss A vs. Itsuki Yamazaki 16:46. While Noriyo Tateno limped through much of the 90's and beyond, her far superior old partner Yamazaki had a brief but excellent run as one of, if not the top worker in JWP only to sadly retire at 25 even though that was no longer manditory. While still the best Manami Toyota in the game in 1991, this is a fantastic example of what she could do above & beyond the workrate style, an intense & well focused bout that felt truly desperate & meaningful. Though at heart the expected technician vs. bruiser bout, they blended the styles really well with A mirroring the body focus & some of the holds to get revenge. This was a really good tournament for A, who was beginning to come into her own as the big powerhouse who could maul the smaller girls, but was still athletic enough to hang with them in the faster paced sequences. She had illusions of steamrolling her much smaller opponent, taking her out with a lariat before the bell then whipping her into the guard rail, but Yamazaki caught her kick & injured A's knee posting it. Though less the case in JWP where they had more proper technical wrestling training, normally the early portions of these old joshi matches weren't that great because the matwork was random filler until it was time to start jumping around, but that was definitely not the case here, as here Yamazaki negated A's size advantage by debilitating the leg. This wasn't just A laying around letting Yamazaki pretzel her, she kept trying to make comebacks only to have Yamazaki reinforce the storyline by cutting her off with another shot to the knee. Kansai eventually regrouped on the outside, but her attempt at a hot comeback was immediately thwarted when Yamazaki again caught a kick & this time went right into a leg lock. Finally, A answered Yamazaki's forearm to escape the Northern Lights suplex with a really stiff one of her own, hit the suplex, and was able to sustain an advantage with the scorpion. A gave Yamazaki some of her own medicine working Yamazaki's knee, leading to one of the better little touches of the match where Yamazaki was desperately punching A's knee to try to get her to break the figure 4. Yamazaki was really thinking about how she was doing things, and she made some nice little adjustments to throw pressure onto A's knee such as a high elevation on the figure 4 reversal. A still sold her own knee here & there, but working Yamazaki's knee also allowed her own to recover, and she began to finally get into her powerhouse routine, really overwhelming Yamazaki with her kicks. Yamazaki eventually avoided a corner charge & hit a diving missile kick from one corner, a reverse body attack from another then climbed a third corner, but actually got down when A rolled to her side & piledrove her to set up a diving headbutt. I know this didn't really change much, but I really liked how Yamazaki reacted to the opponent's recovery rather than making just Kansai lie on her side & take another flying move like probably everyone else would have done. A answered with her own tombstone piledriver, but missed the diving headbutt. Yamazaki was up a bit sooner, but by the time she charged at A, A was recovered enough to charge back & lay her out with the lariat for the win. Starting & ending with the lariat was nice & all, but while the best finish in the tournament, it still seemed forced & rushed, with Yamazaki having the out of that she sort of kicked out though she never really got her shoulder off the mat. Still, this would have been fantastic as the tournament final, much less as the simple 1st round match that it actually was. The only real problem was nothing else here could top it. ****
1/7/91, UWA International Champion Decision Tournament 1st Round: Eagle Sawai vs. Shinobu Kandori 11:30. Kandori was in top form here, really intense & vicious. Watching some of these original JWP shows, it seems like I've underrated her in the past as she had more talent than I realized and simply wasn't motivated by the LLPW opposition enough for it to shine through, with the energy she generally put forth greatly declining as her top spot was so completely unquestioned. Today, Eagle stood up to her somewhat from a hold for hold standpoint, but while she was still a quality wrestler at this point before she turned into big bird, she just so seeming lacking in the savagery department against such a tough, nasty, fired up version of Kandori. That's really the difference in the early version of Kandori to the later, she'd beat you up in both but here you really feared her because she was motivated to hurt you, whereas later she was much more dismissive. Eagle finally switched to brawling, taking over on the outside, and suddenly Kandori "lost it" and threw a table then tossed 2 chairs in the ring. They dueled with the metal much to Eagle's chagrin, but she had to defend herself, resulting in the cheesy tournament staple of advancing the wrestler who wasn't supposed to win through cornball shenanigans. **1/2
1/8/91 Tournament Semifinal: Harley Saito vs. Devil Masami 13:23. Harley was such a great worker in the early '90's and would totally be a legendary worker had she not spent her career squandered in the Kandori or bust LLPW where their big idea for her was to turn her into a farm animal. She took it to Devil here from the start, which is exactly what you need to do against older Devil to get the most out of her, forcing her to step up to answer rather than letting her control with her more methodical pace. Devil did slow it down once they got to the body of the match where she focused on working Harley's arm, but this was a good change of pace as they'd already established the intensity & urgency. It set up a dynamic come back from Harley using her kicks to usher in an aggressive second half. Devil was throwing Harley around whenever she got hold of her, so Harley kept forcing running sequences to use her speed advantage & use momentum to make up for what she was lacking in size. Saito gave a spirited performance here, and Devil was really engaged & on her game as well. They packed a lot more action into this match than you would expect, but partly because it was so good the flash pin finish out of nowhere was even more disappointing because you really wanted another few (or several) minutes. That being said, as with the previous Eagle/Kandori match, you had to like that they were moving the up & coming wrestlers into the forefront even if their methods were sketchy. ***1/2
1/13/91 Osaka, Tournament Semifinal: Miss A vs. Eagle Sawai 13:35. An odd but spirited & energetic match where they did a little bit of everything. It started as the typical Eagle brawl with A really going hard into the guard rail, and that was probably the most consistent aspect of a match that had no real consistency as they at least went back to it with A getting busted open from getting her head rammed into a table later on. The most interesting of the many turns they took was into U.W.F. territory with hard slaps as A got frustrated with Eagle & started "shooting" on her. She took her down, only to get quickly reversed, but A used headbutts from the bottom while Eagle was in her guard. They went right from this more credible stuff to running around & doing some fake weardown submissions where Eagle's back was compromised before Kansai hit a dive. Though both were thinner than in their heyday, they were big enough that the pace they kept & athleticism they displayed was not what you'd expect if you hadn't seen them before. Both had an epic fail on an avalanche style move when the opponent shifted their weight & landed on top before another terrible finish that seemed a lot less justified given there were no big name veterans here when A got a flash pin on a sloppy roll up even though Sawai obviously kicked out. I really wanted to like this match more than I did because they worked hard. It was never dull, & often the individual spots & sequences were impressive, but it was just so random & the finish was groan worthy. ***
2/11/91 Tokyo Korakuen Hall, Tournament Final: Miss A vs. Harley Saito 17:15. The previous matches in the tournament had been flashier, more AJW paced affairs even as they dabbled into UWF & brawling. The final had more of a slow boiling epic feel with All Japan ferocity to the strikes and more of a European base to the technical wrestling, built up in a more realistic manner with a advantages being hard to come by & fatigue setting in down the stretch. I liked the early portion quite a bit, there were a lot of misses & reversals early on leading to brief runs. It took a series of brutal elbows for A to gain the advantage, and similarly, Harley had to unload on A with a series of nasty kicks to finally take the tide. Harley was the underdog because A had a big size advantage, and the format was sort of that she would get behind but then have enough moments of her own to nearly get back to even. This changed midway through the contest when A injured Harley with her leg submissions, compromising Harley's comebacks as speed & agility were her advantages, and her kicks and suplexes require a solid foundation. This was very similar to A vs. Yamazaki, except with Yamazaki working the leg first it was much more a motif of the match as opposed to a less than stellar bridge to a finishing stretch where A isn't going to win with a submission & doesn't have time to go back to the leg in another fashion. Both were slower & less explosive at this point, selling the toll of the match, but really the point of the scorpion & figure 4 was to tell the story of Harley being compromised, so she had to try to give up on her delusion of overwhelming A & settle for a cheeky flash pin. The finish wasn't nearly as bad as A's win over Eagle or Eagle's win over Kandori, but nonetheless felt really forced. This was probably the most interesting match of the tournament stylistically though not as deep or thoughtful as A vs. Yamazaki, and I'd rate it slightly below Harley vs. Devil as well because that was a better worked version of the same underdog Harley finds a way story that doesn't fill in the gaps enough to fully come together. While they did a lot of things really well in a vacuum, the match felt more like an outline where Harley went from being a competitive underdog to one who wins the only way she can rather than a fully fleshed out whole that has enough focus to make you buy the finish. Harley was the star of the tournament as the other top eschelon JWP worker Yamazaki went out 1st round, though that was by far the match of the tournament as she carried A to possibly her best match to date while this was more A dictating & Harley raising the level by naturally being such a skilled performer. The tournament was damn good from a wrestling standpoint, but the finishes were so consistently bad that the booking rose to the sort of heavyhandedness that Gedo was surely proud of. I'm not sure the value of the younger stars Harley, A, & Eagle was really raised the way they should have been from a tournament where they got wins over established stars Devil, Kandori, & Yamazaki, but at least JWP was able to keep a number of talented wrestlers at the top of the card. ***1/2
