Extreme Queen: Megumi Kudo
I’m pretty new to Megumi as I was introduced to her wrestling at the end of last year. Sometimes I would go on my random rabbit holes of new wrestlers and she was a wrestler that up when watching matches featuring Hayabusa, and Combat Toyoda.
Megumi was born on September 20, 1969. While she enjoyed playing basketball in high school, wrestling called to her and she began her wrestling career at the age of 16 years old. She trained at All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling. However, at the very beginning of her career, she would leave after a year to go on and teach children.
She would return to wrestling in March 1990, signing with Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling (FWA). FWA had many greats in there as well such as Onita and Shark Tsuchiya. FWA was known for their hardcore style matches, one of those matches being the barbed wire match where the ring ropes would be replaced with barbed wire.
Megumi radiated elegance, grace, and a style so unique that it stood out in her deathmatches. Her gear was always on point, something I absolutely loved when watching her matches.
One of my favorite matches of Megumi’s is her match with Toyoda where they wrestled a “no-rope electrified deathmatch”. The match was brutal, but it was amazing storytelling that few can do in deathmatches. At least in my opinion.
Megumi would go all-in with the crazy stipulations in matches that came her way. She entertained and grabbed the attention of the audience. She was only 5’4” and about 130 pounds or so, but that didn’t stop her from being aggressive, and risky when necessary. Her work in the ring made her a pillar in women’s deathmatches.
While she would do many hardcore matches, Megumi also wrestled more traditionally. One of those was her match against Aja Kong in AJW. Megumi would hold the WWA World’s Women Championship 6 times and the FMW Independent World Women’s Championship 4 times.
She would even create the move “The Kudome Valentine” which is a variation of the piledriver. Her version would be where she would do a double-underhook back to back piledriver. She would execute this move while her opponent would stand behind her. Notable wrestlers that would use this move were Shane “Hurricane” Helms and Homicide.
Megumi would excel in hardcore/deathmatch wrestling and is definitely a woman that was to be reckoned with and remembered.