April 4th, 2004
From the Sapporo Dome in Sapporo, Japan
Attendance: 42,000 (sell-out!)
Announce Team: Joey Styles, Tracy Brooks and Bret "The Hitman" Hart
We opened with a pair of veterans in Kyoko Inoue and Toshiyo Yamada, and they got the show off to a nice start even if Kyoko seemed a half of a step off tonight. It wasn’t a blowaway or anything, but it wasn’t supposed to be. It’ll be up to others to steal the show. Yamada has been higher profile so far in WCW, and she picked up the win here as well.
I wasn’t sure how well Momoe Nakanishi vs. The Beautiful Nightmare would do, but they honestly exceeded my expectations with a match that was well above what the veterans in the opener produced. Arn Anderson worked closely with them to put this match together and I think he did a great job. It was a simple but effective story, with Momoe trying to use her skill to overcome the arrogance of the former Katarina Waters. In the end the “Genius of Pin” caught Nightmare in her Uramomo*Latch to get the win.
Chigusa Nagayo and Akira Hokuto cut pre-taped promos that we cut together for a promo package. Really excellent stuff here to get everyone more excited for the main event, and our team did a great job.
Is Meiko Satomura a future main eventer? I think so, and tonight she backed it up. Having great main event matches with Akira Hokuto is one thing, but tonight she proved she could put together quality with someone not at that level. LuFisto is good but not exactly an upper echelon member of the roster, but Meiko led the way and put together a match that was far better than I expected, and the best on the show to this point. LuFisto had her moments but Meiko is the star, and she put her foe down with the Scorpio Rising kick.
Nattie and Melissa make for a great team, and I knew they’d bring the fire here. Mita did a pretty good job of keeping up as well, but Ito was the weak link in the chain. She’s not bad and her performance was actually better than several of the others in earlier matches, but it wasn’t at the level of the other three in this match. It was still a borderline great match though. The story here in the ring was Mita and Ito being an effective combination, but Our Generation having the superior teamwork en route to Melissa pinning Ito with a German suplex.
We ran a brief ad for Clash of the Champions next Sunday, centered around the title match between CM Punk and The Unnatural.
I was expecting Manami Toyota and Wesna Busic to compete for match of the night honors, which was why I put them in the semi main event slot over the tag title match. The match turned out very good, and Toyota had the best overall performance of the night to that point, but I might have overestimated Busic a bit. She did okay, but she’s not quite on this level yet and I think it showed. It was a well-built match, but Wesna’s striking offense just looked a little inconsistent. Regardless, the Ocean Cyclone suplex gave Manami the win in her first PPV match since losing her title to Akira Hokuto after a title reign that lasted over a year.
Manami got on the mic after the match and announced to the world that she her peak was far from over, and promised she would win her title back some day. She came across well here.
We’d done a good job of building this match up and getting fans excited about it, but could the veteran Nagayo deliver in a main event spot like this? The answer was yes, but only in a sense. I thought the individual performances of both women were great and this was a hot storyline, but this was a match that was less than the sum of its parts. The slow build was good and the crowd was hot for it, but I think some more effective selling would have elevated this from on the borderline to just plain great. As for the end result, I don’t think many people expected Nagayo to win here and they were right not to. She got in her near falls, but Hokuto was a step ahead of her older challenger in the end and hit the Northern Lights Bomb to retain her title.
Daffney and LuFisto joined Hokuto in the ring after the match, and the champion got on the mic and said that the era of the Darkness was only just beginning, whether anyone liked it or not. Akira did a good job here.
The show ended with a shot of a number of the roster members watching in disapproval on a backstage monitor, teasing that Hokuto had plenty of potential challengers lining up for their shot.
News Updates:During the show, Devil Masami signed her one year extension and Alexis Laree agreed to a three year deal. I also got word that my nephew Teddy signed his own three year extension.
The multipromotional bidding war over the Jung Dragons is nearing an end. Jimmy Yang let me know what his intentions are, but Kaz Hayashi has still yet to make a decision.
Our people in 5SSW seem to think it’s time for Madison Eagles to become a full-timer on Renaissance, so it’s time to start thinking about ways to utilize her.
WCW Worldwide will officially be returning to the air this coming week, serving as a B level show where we’ll get the younger guys and the midcarders some more ring time and recap the major storylines from Nitro. It’ll air on Sunday evenings. Normally it’ll be taped before Nitro, but the return episode will air live right before Clash of the Champions. That’s probably what we’ll do going forward; taped before Nitro on normal weeks, and acting as live “pre shows” on PPV weekends.
Elsewhere in the wrestling world:WWE re-signed Dean Malenko, Val Venis and both Dudley Boys.
My pace hasn’t slowed, despite what it might seem like. Since my new format allows me to run and ‘write’ a PPV in one sitting, I actually went ahead and progressed through the next week’s worth of stuff before posting this in order to give more time for predictions. I think that’s what I’ll continue to do going forward with PPVs, otherwise it might only be a day or two between the predictions going up and the show being posted. And bonus, it means you should see the post for next week go up tomorrow.
