This was a commissioned review from frequent contributor Benny aka @benbenbigelow on Twitter. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out.
This was a Steel Cage Match.
Again with a frustratingly vague date on a very interesting lucha match, as was seemingly the theme of Benny’s commissions this year. More of you should try themed commissions. Anyways, repeated searches have not narrowed this down, either on cagematch, Google, other wrestling forms, or even luchadb. I’ve found other matches they had together, other matches in this building (Plaza de Toros Monumental), but nothing in a cage and nothing even close to an official date.
Sadly, yet again, it will simply have to exist in my mind, your mind, and on any sort of official measure you or I may undertake as simply maybe happening in 1992.
However, outside of that frustration, this has everything else I could ever want.
The cage is maybe the shoddiest thing I’ve ever seen, bending to real dangerous looking angles when either man so much as leans into it or grabs a hold of the bars when beginning their climb. Both men bleed here, but primarily, it is Sangre Chicana who yet again gets an absolute motherfucker of a gusher going in the early stages and, as this is joined in progress (we still get 15:00+, it is not a real problem). Eighty percent of this match is punches, and it is fucking GREAT. They throw so many great punches, with so many great bumps and sells for them, and each single shot contains so many bad feelings. Not only a hatred, but a kind of futility to it all, throwing hands for the sake of throwing hands, insisting on staying mad and continuing to fight, because if you are going to be angry, your anger may as well have a direction. There’s a point here — a point I cannot properly define — at which each punch thrown feels like it has an outdated slur or an insult attached to it, the Al Swearengen/Mr. Wu Summit of steel cage matches, but with all sorts of different ones mixed in there too.
If this sounds like your cup of tea — a cage match with so unsafe a cage that it is barely climbed at all, and instead used as an attempt at containment for one of the great slugfest pairings ever — then, just like me, you are going to have a hell of a time with this thing.
Beyond what happens between the two men in the ring, there are, of course, the other elements. By this, I primarily mean that the match is always cut into by shots of the crowd. It is immediately one of my favorite crowds in lucha history, seemingly comprised primarily of people over the age of sixty five, who are either disinterestedly watching one of the most compelling bloodbath slugfests of all time OR standing up and hollering with full throats at either Chicana or Perro, if not both. Everybody in Monterrey to see this match is either totally disinterested in the entire thing, seemingly having just wandered in off of the street to have a place to smoke or have a few drinks without a care in the world for the fact that this cage could fall over at any moment and kill them, or they are absolutely living and dying with every shot thrown.
Speaking of the shots thrown, to back to that, this match is full of incredible shots and sequences. Every single moment of this thing has something awesome going on. Not every punch is totally different, but they string together so many awesome sequences and exchanges, different versions of punch trading spots, guys being hurled into the horribly unsafe cage, and low blows thrown with more hate and pettiness than you’d usually ever see.
Here, look at some stuff from this match, and an explanation of some things that happened, which in a match like this, is less so intended as some kind of a recap (boring), and more an attempt to tell you what I loved about it (everything).
What also rocks about this match is that in addition to the violence, it is also genuinely entertaining and god damned hilarious in a few small parts, none of which undercuts the spirit of the other eighty to ninety percent of the match.
For one, the genital violence in this match is maybe not as severe nor as prevalent as the punching, but it is just as entertaining.
During this match, there are probably no less than ten different direct shots to the old tube, and it goes both ways. Primarily, it is a Perro cut off spot, but like any great match like this, Sangre more than gets his receipts in. Chicana is especially great at selling the repeated attacks on the hog, having trouble standing up after the last one, but Perro’s pretty great in that moment too. It’s a really beautiful display of the aftermath of a fight like this, both men doubled over in pain, but with this body language and these looks in their eyes that feels less like regret or even anger, and more like the appreciation for a good bit.
This is not even the best bit in the match.
At one point, the referee attempts to assert some kind of control in a match that nobody seems interested in winning anymore, and after already getting punched away earlier on by Perro for this sort of behavior, both men have had enough, and something even cooler and funnier breaks out, as both men simply begin repeatedly not only attacking the referee, but tearing off his dress shirt and pants, before attacking him again.
The referee’s clothes are put to good use, in yet another display of efficiency out of this match.
First as things to wrap their hands in before punching each other again, obviously a little sore after ten to twenty minutes of punching each other in the face as hard as possible, and secondly (when that doesn’t work), as strangling devices.
In the middle of all that, at some point after they’re used as a strangulation device, Perro Aguayo puts the referee’s stolen pants back around his neck, and wears them for the next several minutes as a trophy.
The best bit of the entire match follows that, when Perro Aguayo has the referee’s pants finally knocked off of him, the referee briefly tries to put them back on, before he is brought a pair of replacement pants. It could be from someone in the back and it could also just be from a fan who felt bad for him. It is hard to ever know, but I would prefer the latter. In the background of maybe the match’s dirtiest and most desperate punch exchange, you can see the poor guy putting his replacement pants on.
No other few seconds of footage sums this match up better than this.
An incredible punch exchange, guttural and violent and genuine feeling, with a referee stripped of his clothes and putting on a second pair of pants in the background, before briefly cutting away to an older woman who has absolutely no idea how to react to any of this.
It’s perfect.
Once firmly secured in a second pair of pants, the referee again goes about trying for order, this time simply trying to declare a winner. Rather than calling it off entirely, the match again makes a choice that is a thousand times funnier while still retaining its believability as a real fight. He tries to raise Sangre Chicana’s hand, only for Chicana to reject it. Instead, hilariously, the referee then goes and tries to raise Perro’s hand, as if to insist that one of them is winning this, before he also refuses.
They resume fighting, the ref gets hit again, before Perro THEN reverts back to being a chickenshit heel and trying to run out of the cage. It’s the perfect antagonistic response to this situation, this moment of bravado before insisting that the fight continues, only to then immediately run away again once he got popped in the mouth the next time.
Chicana chases him out of the cage, they fight again, and finally, when they get into a sea of people, there’s finally a pause in the action that becomes permanent. Nobody officially wins, as the referee and, I think, fans in the crowd get in between the two once it spills outside. Some hold up Chicana’s arm and some hold up Perro’s. As the referee has been stripped of his official uniform and is dressed just like anyone else, conceivably, it is hard to tell what side he’s on, if he is even there at all, and I kind of prefer that.
The match breaks down into a screaming match between like forty different old men, and that is that. At the end of a generationally beautiful monument to all of the many ways in which violence is cool, the winner is both nobody and everybody.
Pro wrestling, baby.
This is one of the most fun matches of all time, and as opposed to other lucha classics, for which I think you may need a little context, I think this is enough of a beautiful mess, violent and bloody and cool and genuinely hilarious, the sort of thing that ought to be enjoyable to any fan of real pro wrestling, that there is no such distinction to be made here, and I need you to watch it immediately.
One of the most spectacular pieces of violence and nonsense, along with being one of the great intersections of the two, I’ve seen recently. If I had had a single drop of alcohol to drink tonight, I would assume this was a match I would have to rewatch with a totally clear mind, but that wasn’t the case at all, on account of this hellacious blizzard (12/23/2022). I actually just liked it this much on the first watch, and I say that specifically, because I have a feeling that this is a match I am going to watch at least fifteen more times in my life.
The Jay Briscoe vs. Mark Briscoe of early 1990s lucha spot shows.
HANDWERK 