Falls Count Anywhere

04-11-03

I want to be Lioness Asuka.

Welcome to Falls Count Anywhere. My name is Chris, and I'm goin' to Sonoma and not having a lick of wine!

SmackDown!
I liked it. Some very good wrestling, less stupid out of ring stuff, and Piper doing the pit, feeling like he hasn't missed a step in the promo department.

The Good
Lesnar and Hardy had a fun little thing going on. I love the Electric Chair Drop, and the opening where Brock kicked Matt's belt out of the way was great. The crowd was into it, too.

Nidia and Jamie Noble had a really solid match against Brian Kendrick and Torrie. Kendrick is great, has the skankin'est theme music, and makes everyone in the ring with him look better than they are. Noble is really good, and Nidia has been getting enough work to the point where her portion of the match was OK. The Swinging DDT was a great finish, too.

Rhyno vs. Benoit may not have been the best match on SmackDown in a while, but it did tell a story, and was helped out by some very competent announcing. The tale of injured necks made for good psychology throughout. Once again, Rhyno is going to be huge.

Rey Misterio and Tajiri took a match from Team Angle, and it was a good one. Rey looked awesome, and he and Tajiri even pulled some nice set-up maneuvers. Benjamin looked good, as always, and Haas had more moments than usual. Best match of the night.

The Pit was a ton of fun. Vince was great, and the crowd really wanted to be behind Piper, until he mentioned Hogan. Pipes made a bunch of references to Vince, Steroids, the XFL, WBF, and the rest of Vince's grand failures. Still, a lot of fun, and it seemed that the crowd enjoyed it. Vince's gut gags were written down for use at my upcoming 10th Reunion.

The Average
John Cena and the Undertaker had a match that was good for what UT can do right now, but overall just kind of there. I like the FBI more and more, but this needed a real finish to elevate Cena.

Garcia's just not sure why they did this. We're not sure why he's not sure.

In what could have been magic, Sable and Torrie shared a backstage shower-and-towel moment. I would have actually liked this if it had gone anywhere, but it just sort of sat there like Scorsese on Oscar night.

The Rikishi stuff, while a nice nod to the past, really didn't help or hurt the Piper Segment, but I am still not sure why they did it.

The Bad
Nathan Jones wrestled Bill DeMott. Now I know how Sarah Stanek feels when she writes her Smallville reviews.

The bit about Jones getting questioned afterwards sucked too.

Los Guerreros had no part to play in this edition other than the clip from Eddy's match last week. That sucks hard.

All in all, good, even bordering on fantastic. There is a lot of stuff they can start developing, and I hope they do, since Backlash is looking a might bit thin.

News
Jericho. Goldberg. Brawl. The WWE has always had its share of backstage dust-ups, but it seems that recently that tempers have flaired.

Goldberg and Jericho apparently got into it over comments that Goldberg made about Jericho being small and not liking to sell moves for people. There is likely still some leftover anger from the WCW days as well. Jericho confronted Goldberg, and the fight began, apparently with Goldberg going to choke Jericho, but Chris managed to get him in a front facelock, a method that most wrestlers use to give time to the others to get a little seperation.

With the Bischoff/Flair fight, it's becoming apparent that the former WCW boys still have a lot of issues to work out. Goldberg is not too popular among any of the WWE crew, and the reports have him annoying even the most level headed of RAW stars.

Making a better effort to get along is Piper. He's known for being something of a pain backstage, but he's mostly been keeping to himself, Hogan, Jimmy Hart, and Nasty Nick, though he has made an effort to introduce himself to the rest of the locker room.

FlashBack!
Women's wrestling has been around almost as long as men's. One of the earliest surviving films done by Edison is of women wrestling on the beach. In the US, women have had their ups (the fifties when there were several major touring organizations) and downs (WOW), but in Japan, women's wrestling has occasionally taken the spotlight away from the men.

The most important organization in the world when it comes to Chick Graps is All Japan Women's Pro Wrestling. The Matsunaga Brothers, big time real estate investors, started AJW back in the 60s.

Following the lead of most of the Japanese promotions, AJW brought in foreign stars to take on native girls in the main events. Women such as Moolah and Mildred Burke came, defended their belts and then would leave.

The AJW training program became famous worldwide. They would put the girls through weeks of training, then let them do simple matches, using only 4 or 5 specific moves, as the openers to the shows.

They needed to train as many girls as possible, since the mandatory retirement age was in the mid-20s. AJW did pretty well throughout the 70s, including one of the great tag teams in the early history of AJW: The Beauty Pair. The Beauty Pair set the standard for themed tag teams that women's wrestling would use for the next 25 years.

Curse that Dump Matsumoto..

Things picked up in the 1980s. Young girls like Jaguar Yokota and Monster Ripper were drawing really good crowds, but a new tag team came about: The Crush Gals, Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka.

AJW had always used their stars as recording artists as well, but the Crush Gals were HUGE stars. They would have concerts before shows, and then the wrestling.

Every young girl in Japan wanted to be the Crush Girls, and thousands of girls would apply to the training school, with only a dozen or so making it in. For a good look at a later day training, pick up the documentary GAEA Girls.

The Crush Gals were huge, but every face needs a heel, and their heel was Dump Matsumoto. A massive ugly beast of a woman, Dump beat on Nagayo in particular, even shaving her head after knocking her out.

Even thinking about the Lawler vs. Rich and Idol riot in Memphis, that was the wildest I've ever seen a crowd: shocked, girls in tears, screams, people having to be restrained. Matsumoto did some of the best interviews of all time to lead up to their matches, and she is a Hall of Fame heel.

The thing about booms is that they almost always lead to a second boom, when the kids who were fans grow up and start working as well.

In the late 80s/early 90s, the girls who had made it through during the Crush Gal era started working themselves, almost all of them starting in tag teams. The concerts before matches continued, but never to the level they were during the Crush Gal years. Workers such as Akira Hokuto, Minami Toyota, Aja Kong, and Kyoko Inoue have legendary matches, far surpassing the work by the male wrestlers of the day.

Oh, yeah, we're not in Kansas anymore...

Other promotions started to pop up, including GAEA, JWP, and LLPW, all of which focus on different aspects of woman's wrestling. JWP began with two of the greatest women's wrestlers

of all time: Mayumi Ozaki and Dynamite Kansei. The mandatory retirement age was dropped, since once a girl would be forced to retire in AJW, they could easily go to one of the other promotions and work there.

As a result, other traditional offices, many of which had been struggling, started bringing in AJW women to work their shows. This brought women's wrestling to a new crowd: men. The crowds grew, and the matches just kept getting better.

While Japanese promotions in the early 90s were typically isolationist, the women's feds started the trend of gathering the promotions for huge shows. Dream Slams I and II and WrestleMarinpiad are considered to be some of the best wrestling shows of all time, featuring great interpromotional matches, including the amazing Manami Toyota and Toshiyo Yamada against Mayumi Ozaki and Dynamite Kansai match, which made me a fan.

Hard times hit Japan, and women's wrestling started to fade along with the rest of the scene. They did do some innovative matches after the peak, including a famous FMW match where Megumi Kudoh took on Combat Toyota in a barbed wire and bombs match that is, by far, my favorite match of that genre.

AJW ran into money troubles, promotions started fading, and some closed. A major series of defections begin, which led to the forming of more promotions, including Neo Ladies and Arsion.

The matches remain good, but as the workers age, it becomes apparent that the good times are not to last long. The future of Japanese women's wrestling is shaky, but they always seem to rebound just when you don't expect it.

If you have the means, pick up any Japanese Woman's Wrestling tapes that you can. The moves they were using in the early 90s are the ones that we say are state of the art nowadays. The Electric Chair Drop, the West Coast Pop, the Ocean Cyclone Suplex, and submissions that I can't even describe. Minami Toyota may be the best worker of any gender, and Ozaki is amazing, and pretty to look at. While the US women have turned to T&A to sell, the Japanese have always used the wrestling.

And it's great stuff.

That's another Falls Count Anywhere. Next Week: Raw, News, and Garbage Wrestling: How Barbed Wire, Blood and Brawling took over the world.

Chris Garcia