An anonymous commission here, from someone who’s probably read me lamenting that the lucha reviews didn’t do so well in terms of views. Here’s hoping a more famous one does a little better. You can be like this person and pay me to watch and review any wrestling match you’d like, so long as I haven’t done it before, at $5 per match. Head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and let’s make a deal.
This was a masks vs. hair match, conducted under classic lucha rules meaning two of three falls, with each member of the team needing to be eliminated per fall.
It’s quite the famous match, both as a result of being on this big English language pay-per-view and involving a young Eddie/Eddy Guerrero. In the years since, it’s shown up on a hundred lists and through WWE’s re-release on at least one Eddie Guerrero DVD, it’s been exposed to a wider audience than most lucha libre matches ever, if not all lucha libre matches ever.
You’ve likely seen this match before or heard of it.
It’s pretty good.
Great, even.
They deliver a classic sort of a match, rather than a classic match, I think. The distinction being that this is a great illustration of a sort of a kind of match and a stellar execution of formula, moreso than it is a classic professional wrestling match. Not an airtight match by any means, but a match one could use to show somebody and explain why this shit is very very good. My problem, which I’ve had some trouble putting into words while writing this, is that it feels more like an exhibition of the style and the promotion than a real blowoff. The two best wrestlers in this match will go on to top this significantly within a few years in different apuestas matches, once they’re able to really tighten up, refine, and get closer to the heart of what matches like this should be (a fight). This is certainly a heated piece of business, you can’t rightly call it a pure athletic showcase, but it’s a match that feels as though it would rather be a Great Match than anything else, in a very 1990s sort of a way.
It’s a match with very little to complain about besides that sort of nebulous feeling though and a few mechanical issues early on.
Eddy and Art are perfect scumbags here (Art in particular, as it wasn’t a hard act for him to pull off. Look it up.), in every way. The classic taunting of the hispanic audience in Los Angeles with the swimming taunt, down to the tactics used. Barr uses a Tombstone Piledriver on Santito for the second fall of the match, famously illegal. On top of that, they sort of perfectly illustrate how a heel act can still be full of cool and exciting moves but still reviled. There is no one way to do things, of course, but this is another stellar example of how you can be so personally unlikeable that it doesn’t matter how cool your offense is.
For their part, Santito and Octagon are pretty good here. The match is sort of set up so that they don’t really have to bring a lot to this outside of a basic competency, and one already knows El Hijo Del Santo can do so much more than that (nevermind one’s natural instincts when seeing that Blue Panther is the corner man, imagining him here instead of Octagon), but you can’t say they didn’t hit all their marks either. Eddy and Art set the table, and Santito and Octagon just absolutely go to town on what they’ve cooked up. Likeable offense, energetic high flying, sympathetic selling. Nothing wrong here. It’s easy to get behind them when they get the table run on them in the first fall, when Octagon has to fight back in the second fall without a partner, and in the end, when El Hijo Del Santo has to do it all on his own.
The booking wrinkles also make for a fun thing. Art’s sneak Tombstone Piledriver on El Hijo Del Santo in the segunda caida is a great little piece of heeling, but the moment in the third when Octagon is eliminated and Blue Panther sneaks in to counteract the gringos’ cheating with his own piledriver on Barr is a great little master stroke. Santito barely gets an arm over him after surviving minutes of 1994’s best double teams, and is later just able to get a prawn hold on Guerrero to win.
While not what one might imagine given apuestas with Santito and Guerrero later in the decade, it’s also as good as a match like this (a more figuratively and literally bloodless more spot focused apuestas) can be. Great isn’t the enemy of good as far as this is concerned, and while certainly overrated in the twenty seven (and counting…) years since as a result of name value, there’s still a lot to like here.
A match that feels less than it could have been, but also impossible to really dislike at the same time.
HANDWERK 