Continuing my journey through joshi wrestling championship title lineages with Ice Ribbon. Emi Sakura started Ice Ribbon after getting famous in IWA Japan and FMW and striking out on her own with Gatokunyan. The championship has two distinct eras which are helpful in splitting up the over thirty matches into two posts. It was introduced as the ICEx60 Championship for women under 60 kilograms (132 pounds). Matches had twenty-minute time limits (after which the title would be vacated), so this should be rather breezy. They eventually scrapped that to allow women of any size to compete and jacked up the time limit to thirty minutes, but today we’ll just cover the cruiserweight stint.
Footage on the early days of this title are a bit spotty, as Niconico (the channel that airs most Ice Ribbon Shows) is missing some of the ICEx60 matches. That includes the first championship match in which Seina (Riho’s older sister) beat Makoto in the finals of a tournament to win the title at the end of 2008 and also the match that saw Seina lose the title to Kiyoko Ichiki a month later. That’s where we pick things up.
August 23, 2009 – Tokyo, Japan
Makoto def. Kiyoko Ichiki {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 111: Ice Adventures in Wonderland. The original title belt looked like a middle school art project and is not the version of the title pictured above. That came a bit later. A lot of this match was Ichiki bullying Makoto only to fall victim to a rather out of nowhere figure 4 leglock. Ichiki regained control, but hurt her leg coming off the top which allowed Makoto to go on a run toward the finish. I wish they’d done a bit more with the leg rather than the random big moves they exchanged near the end, but we got what we got. Makoto hit a fisherman suplex for the win at 13:09. ***
October 12, 2009 – Tokyo, Japan
Emi Sakura def. Makoto {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 123. This venue is dope. It’s a town hall I guess but all of the walls look like the inside of Bowser’s castle from Super Mario World. It turns out that Sakura was a much better anchor for Makoto’s flailing kicks and dives than Ichiki was. This went along at a much stronger pace than the previous match, and was really only held back by some meandering near the end. The final stretch was brilliant though, seeing them fight like rabid dogs over top position on a backslide followed by Sakura going for la magistral from any angle she could and eventually getting the win that way at 16:50. ***½
January 4, 2010 – Tokyo, Japan
Tsukasa Fujimoto def. Emi Sakura {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 146: New Year Ribbon Games. This was also the finals of the Super Ice Cup 1 Tournament. Sakura had defended her title throughout the tournament. This match was really oddly booked. Both wrestled in the semifinals before this, but it was Fujimoto who went directly from one match to the next and beat the fresher champion in six seconds flat with a sunset flip. I don’t know how to account for that, but it sure made Fujimoto look unbeatable. Oh and the belt is the normal one pictured above now. N/A
March 21, 2010 – Tokyo, Japan
Miyako Matsumoto def. Tsukasa Fujimoto {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 168. This was often amateurish and at times dangerous looking. That said, the way that Matsumoto spammed her taunt as if she was a character in WWF No Mercy for the Nintendo 64 had me laughing out loud after a while. I also can’t get over the speed at which these women wrestle. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else. That’s probably because (it seems like) in order to work that fast you are necessarily going to get your head stuck under your neck on the mat at some point. Anyway, this was fun if very unpolished. Matsumoto won with a rolling Gedo Clutch at 11:20. ***¼
April 3, 2010 – Tokyo, Japan
Riho def. Miyako Matsumoto {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 172. Ah, Riho comes from Ice Ribbon. The style, wild and loose, does seem like something AEW would be into. I think Riho is legitimately 12 years old here. I think about my main concern at her age being beating the Curse of Monkey Island, figuring out how to get through Mr. Barrett’s class without doing my homework, and worrying about not humiliating myself during my bar mitzvah and this match becomes pretty impressive. It’s not great, but it’s astonishing that Riho doesn’t look completely out of place. In large part that’s because Matsumoto is pretty small to begin with. The match ends completely out of nowhere after Riho hits a double knee strike at 8:32. Where were the last few minutes of the match? **¾
May 3, 2010 – Tokyo, Japan
Emi Sakura def. Riho {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 180: Golden Ribbon. With this match Riho became the youngest person to ever main event in Korakuen Hall here, and I can’t imagine that record has been broken since. The gimmick here was that Sakura had to lose 18 pounds to meet the weight requirement. This match took a negative and made it something of a positive. Riho’s initial attack was hard to swallow and felt like Sakura was just standing around letting stuff happen to her. But it wasn’t long before that turned into Sakura actively egging Riho on and seeing how much of the young champion’s offense she could take. From there they kept Riho’s comebacks believable as they were the result of Sakura trying to be as flexible or fast as Riho rather than actively trying to win. But so much of the match was dominated by Riho, sometimes in feats of strength, that I found myself checking out. I liked the finish, which saw Riho hit a bunch of knee kicks and get tight roll ups for believable near falls, but Sakura just barely escaping with la magistral at 15:49 after a whole match where she was outwrestled didn’t sit well. I tried to get in the right headspace by thinking of that episode of Barry where the little girl kicks Bill Hader and Stephen Root’s asses the whole episode, but this wasn’t as good as that. **½
July 19, 2010 – Tokyo, Japan
HIkari Minami def. Emi Sakura {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 202: Itabashi Tournament. I really can’t rate or review this match because it was clipped all to shreds. But I did get the sense that Minami had a few cool bullets in her chamber. I especially liked her avalanche Finlay Roll, much more so than her goofy running Finlay Roll on the floor. She picked up the win with a fall away suplex out of nowhere at 4:15 (shown of 16:13). Two months later, Command Bolshoi beat Minami for the title. Fujimoto beat Bolshoi for the belt three months after that. Fujimoto became the first person since Ichiki to hold the title for more than 100 days and actually beat Ichiki’s record. N/A
August 21, 2011 – Tokyo, Japan
Hikari Minami def. Tsukasa Fujimoto {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 316: Ice Adventures in Wonderland. I still don’t really feel like I have a sense of Minami even after a full, if short, match. She won the title again with the fall away suplex at 10:40. The crowd just wasn’t there for this, which makes me wonder if they wrapped this up early. Nothing to go out of your way for here. Fujimoto won the title back three months later, but then lost it to Hikaru Shida a month after that. From here on out, all of the title changes are available to stream so there won’t be any more gaps. **¾
September 23, 2012 – Tokyo, Japan
Mio Shirai def. Hikaru Shida {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 417: Knights of Ice Ribbon. And so ends Shida’s record-breaking run with the title. Mio is Io’s older sister. They worked at a breakneck pace here, but given that the match was so short it didn’t start feeling important until the final minute. Shirai got the win with a victory roll at 9:47, sort of out of nowhere as Shida had been controlling rather handily. ***
December 31, 2012 – Tokyo, Japan
Maki Narumiya def. Mio Shirai {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 437: RibbonMania. Hopefully this is a trend that the title changes will start getting back to a place where they were early on. The match had a comprehensible story, with Shirai acting like a total dick and controlling much of the match because, plainly, she was much better than Narumiya. Narumiya’s comebacks were mostly exciting, well-timed, and short-lived. That made for some great drama. Some of this match had the same problem as other Ice Ribbon matches where the balance of power changes so quickly that there’s no way to get emotionally invested in the transition. But largely this avoided that issue. Narumiya hit Shirai with the Argentine Spine Bomb for the win at 13:28. Narumiya sustained a pretty bad injury a few days later and was out for much of the following year. The title was vacated. ***½
February 27, 2013 – Saitama, Saitama
Tsukushi def. Miyako Matsumoto {ICEx60 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 451. This was the finals of a tournament to crown a new champion. For some reason, Niconico decided to clip the semifinals and the finals to shreds and air them in all in an 11-minute clip. Given what little of the match they showed, I can say that the crowd was kinda dead despite these ladies beating each other up in a rather gnarly fashion. There was no taunt spamming from Matsumoto this time around. Tsukushi hit a tiger suplex for the win at 2:37 (shown of 10:46). N/A
July 14, 2013 – Tokyo, Japan
Tsukasa Fujimoto def. Tsukushi {ICEx60 Championship vs. IW19 Championship Match}
From Ice Ribbon 482. The Internet Wrestling 19 Championship was created to be the headlining title for Ice Ribbon’s 19 O’Clock Girls ProWrestling show. Matches had a 19-minute time limit and in the event of a draw the champion would retain the belt. Given that, they probably could have done a clever bit where this went to a 20-minute draw under ICEx60 rules and Tsukushi would lose her belt that way while Fujimoto would retain. They didn’t go that way but the ultimate result was the same. This was the best use of this style I’ve seen yet. It was chaotic, but executed in such a way that it fed into the quick transitions of control. There were a couple of pin variations here I’ve never seen before, like countering a backslide driver at the very last second into a backslide. Fujimoto took Tsukushi’s head off with a Sankakugeri for the win at 13:40 (shown of 15:28). ***¾
A month later, the unified title was renamed the ICExInfinity Championship. The time limit was extended from twenty minutes to thirty and the weight limit was abandoned. I’ll take a look at the modern version of the title in the next post.
From Diamond Ring Kensuke Office Changes. They emphasize that Nakajima beat Dragon Gate wrestler Kenichiro Arai 
From Dynamite 131. This is a qualifying match for the Owen Hart Foundation tournament. Joe debuted at ROH Supercard of Honor, saving Jonathan Gresham from Jay Lethal (whose soul searching apparently led him to turn heel) & Sonjay Dutt after the main event. And now that ROH and AEW are the same thing, that seems worth mentioning. Caster’s pre-match rap was cute. This was real squashy, with Joe needing only two minutes to put Caster down with the Muscle Buster at 2:52. Lethal & Dutt pop up on the big screens and Lethal says he’d been trying to get a hold of Joe during his difficult soul searching time, and Joe never picked up. They have a present for Joe next week. N/A
From Dynamite 132. Jay Lethal & Sonjay Dutt were in the front row cheering on Joe. Sarcastically, probably, as they brawled with Joe at ROH Supercard of Honor XV. 
From Rampage 39. 
From Dynamite 137. 
From Dynamite 138. This is a 
From Double or Nothing. 
From PWF York Cougar Football Fundraiser. I didn't know that this match happened until over a month after the fact. This started out as a non-title match, but we'll get to why I've listed it as a title match in a moment. FTR have Mick Foley in their corner while their opponents have Bill Behrens. I’ve never actually seen Behrens do an on-camera gig before. He's holding a tennis racket, presumably as an Umaga to Jim Cornette. But it's confusing because there was actually a tennis player named Bill Behrens. They announce this match as having a 20-minute time limit. Only 11 minutes in, they say there are three minutes remaining. Until then, this was as run-of-the-mill as a modern FTR match gets. But the announcement snapped everyone out of their heat-on-Wheeler funk and forced them to go for desperate pins. They announce ten seconds remaining a couple of times, but no one can get the roll up pin they're looking for. The 20-minute time limit expires at 1
From NXT UK 183. McGuinness started by essentially saying that Fraser is going to pee or poo himself during the match. Unnecessary. Had Shawn Michaels been game to have a good match against Vader, this is what it would have looked like. Actually, a more appropriate and modern analogue is Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins from SummerSlam. Much like that match, Frazer used quick strikes and avoided his larger opponent’s signature big move to stay alive. Here it was the powerbomb whereas there it was suplexes. Here, Frazer also successfully damaged WALTER’s knee, which slowed the big man down and made it hard for WALTER to hit the powerbomb. Unfortunately for Frazer, WALTER was able to bide his time and clothesline Frazer’s legs out from under him. An inevitable powerbomb followed and won the match for WALTER at 14:02. I hate to say this because I’m happy that he’s healthier, but the way WALTER has slimmed down has taken some of the magic away from his aura. At least for me it has. That said, dude can clearly still go as well as ever in the ring. ****
From NXT 659. Strong was feeling it here, which is thanks in large part to the crowd being maniacally loud from the get go I’m sure. His whole game was fast and devastating stick and move attacks. That worked pretty well, as WALTER was dazed from time to time. But as with all good WALTER matches (which is pretty much all WALTER matches), everything WALTER does is devastating here so it takes very little for him to take back control. And eventually he did just that and hit the powerbomb for the win at 9:46 (shown of 12:18). After the match, WALTER gets on the microphone and says that his name is Gunther now. I did not think WALTER would be a victim of the renaming curse this far into his run. What will they rename Strong?! ***¾
From NXT UK 185. Andy Shepherd helpfully announces from inside the ring that the reason for the stipulation is that the feud has gotten so violent that it wouldn’t be safe to have fans around. Devlin says during the match that it’s because he thinks Dragunov could only muster the energy to win if he had the crowd behind him. I like that explanation a lot more. The only real reason I could think of to do this without fans is that there was a scheduling conflict with one of the wrestlers for the regular TV taping date and they needed to get this thing filmed. We just had such a long stretch of empty arena NXT UK episodes that I can’t imagine anyone was dying to get another taste of it. This aired the day after Adam Cole vs. Orange Cassidy in a match that was also no disqualification and falls count anywhere, and this served up everything I felt was missing from that match. Now you might say, “Brad, Cassidy is not the same kind of character as Devlin or Dragunov, how could you expect the same level of violence or intensity?” To that I say, when Cassidy started his match by breaking his own sunglasses and rapidly punching Cole, he was indicating that level of violence and/or intensity. And instead the match was mostly wacky. Anyway, this was not wacky. It was stiff and intense and featured weapons that made sense and spots the didn’t take forever to set up. Dragunov got in trouble when his eye injury acted up. Devlin took control and beat the crap out of him. I wasn’t wild about how meek Dragunov was when Devlin was zip tying his hands, but I did like that in the end it turned out to be an error on Devlin’s part anyway because Dragunov’s finisher requires no hands. And indeed, a bound Dragunov jumped off the steel steps (which had been brought into the ring) and hit the Torpedo Moskau on Devlin for the win at 21:43. NXT UK is still sneaking in these dope matches that no one is watching. Y’all should watch them. ****¼ 
From AAA Triplemania Regia. FTR come out with Vickie Guerrero. This was supposed to be explained at an earlier AAA taping but FTR and Guerrero all missed them. AAA is notorious for having this kind of luck/being incompetent lately. FTR is also wearing Eddie Guerrero tribute tights, with American flags on one side and flames on the other, I suppose to pay homage to his Gringos Locos and Latino Heat gimmicks. This match mostly sucked, but one cool spot saw FTR tie Pentagon’s mask to the ropes and force him to unmask with his hands over his face to stop them from climbing the ladder. That would have been a very meaningful moment to lead up to the Lucha Brothers winning the titles back, but unfortunately instead it led into nothing. He just got his mask back and the match continued on in its lame, derivative way. At one point, Pentagon was the only man standing, but instead of climbing the ladder he grabbed a table from the floor. So the titles mean enough to him that he’d unmask to stop his opponents from winning, but not enough for him to get the titles when he had a clear path to do it? Vickie powered Pentagon, causing him to voluntarily jump through the table and Harwood grabbed the belts at 12:12. This was abysmal. *
From AEW Full Gear. Silver was hamming it up a lot more here than he was the year before in New York. That said, this had stronger just-a-match vibes than the aforementioned match. After Silver ripped out Cassidy’s pockets, Cassidy turned up the heat and these guys put on a middle of the row undercard match. Not bad by any means, but nothing memorable either. Cassidy hit the Beach Break rather out of nowhere for the win at 9:42. **¾ 
From the second Honor Reigns Supreme. The commentators sold this as Gresham getting a big shot against a top ROH guy after being an also-ran in the Television Championship division for a while. This was terrific. Both guys did a fantastic job selling their respective targeted limbs, and Gresham in particular played the role of the tenacious underdog perfectly. He didn’t just watch to see where Lethal would have trouble executing his finisher because of the damage he’d done to the former ROH Champion’s arm, he pressed the assault whenever he could, taking out the arm to make sure the Lethal Injection would never come. But what he couldn’t do was stop Lethal from battering his knee and ultimately winning with a Figure 4 Leglock at 17:54. ****¼ 
From the second Masters of the Craft. Columbus has way more Gresham fans than Concord did. That’s a neat little advancement to the plot, innit? They both went after the same limbs that earned them dividends in their previous match. And then they went ahead and built an incredible match out of that story. At first it seemed as though Lethal wasn’t going to be able to get Gresham’s leg to give out. But about halfway through the match, Gresham’s knee was in trouble. Gresham was able to escape the leglock this time by using the momentum of Lethal pulling him away from the ropes to shift to an armbar. But Gresham’s focus on the arm bit him in the ass. Lethal went for the Lethal Injection and collapsed again, but when Gresham went for a roll up after that Lethal cut back on it for the win at 18:27. This is one of the best American examples that I've seen of a match building on the match that came before. Rather than try to outdo the maneuvers from their first meeting for the sake of a big crowd reaction, they adjust their game plans in logical ways that, to me, were just as exciting. I think this match is slept on, by virtue of the fact that I’ve never heard anything about it before watching it. ****½ 
From ROH Wrestling 364. In real life, 
From Death Before Dishonor XVII. Gresham and Lethal had been teaming, but Gresham grew frustrated and started heeling. Ultimately, he turned on Lethal. It took them a little while to get there, but once they got into a groove this was exactly what I wanted from this match. It was back to their old tricks, with Lethal targeting the leg to set up for the Figure 4 Leglock and Gresham targeting the arm to block the Lethal Injection and set up for his Octopus. In the end, Lethal tried the cutback trick that worked for him in Columbus, but Gresham countered to a pin and then put on the gnarliest Octopus for his first win over Lethal at 17:20. This is the best kind of wrestling series. And none of it felt stale because it was a year after they’d wrestled last and because they found ways to energize the old tropes. And that’s not to mention Gresham busting out what I can only describe as a sumo-style assault. Gresham and Lethal make up after the match. ****
From ROH Wrestling 500. During the pandemic, ROH made the most of their empty arena shows by kicking them off with a tournament to crown a champion for the revived Pure Championship. Gresham won the tournament, and this was his fourth defense of the title. Lethal and Gresham were still allies here. In an interesting move, the other match on this milestone episode was two other partners fighting in Jay and Mark Briscoe. They cut to a commercial break about six minutes in, though the action didn’t get beyond (admittedly fast-moving) mat wrestling until the 10-minute mark. That had me thinking this was going to go long, but things took a different turn. Both guys had abused the other’s shoulders, and Lethal used that to his advantage best. He forced Gresham to use his first rope break to stop a pin, and his second to escape a crab. Then, he used the failed Lethal Injection to bait Gresham into a crossface, forcing the champ to use his final rope break. But he made the mistake of giving Gresham a breather and was quickly caught in a head scissor takedown giving Gresham the winning pin at 14:06 (shown of 16:40). For an empty arena match, this held my attention. It was totally different than their previous matches while still using a couple elements from the rivalry to elevate it just a bit. Not essential viewing, but if you’re working your way through their series you shouldn’t skip it. ***¼ 
