Enrique Vera vs. Dos Caras, UWA World Heavyweight Championship, 2/26/84 (slightly clipped)

Dos Caras is a great wrestler. One of the finest to ever step foot inside a squared circle. But this isn't a great example of his work.

The difference between Caras and workers like Lizmark and Solar is that Caras was a heavyweight, which meant he had to work from a dominant or standing position. Guys like Lizmark could zip around, but Caras had to maintain the illusion that he was difficult to take off his feet.

He also worked the 70s NWA heavyweight style -- a style UWA honoured until the very end. This was similar to the 1992 heavyweight match between Caras and Canek; a slow building match, where matwork gives way to increasingly dangerous moves. There's a certain charm in watching wrestling where a carefully executed piledriver can put people out of commission, but there wasn't enough artistry here. It started off with the usual armlocks and grapevines, holds that peg your opponent to the mat and let him know he's not going anywhere; but the thing about Caras is that once he got into his mat sequences, there's never been a worker in the history of lucha libre with as many mindblowing holds as Dos Caras. He worked a few holds here -- holds that would blow away most workers' repertoire -- but as great as they were, they just seemed like standard fare from a guy as legendary as Dos Caras.

It wasn't clear from watching this whether Vera was ever a good worker. He made his debut in '68 and was still quite young here (35), but his knees were taped and he didn't appear to be moving well. He wasn't as clumsy as Alfonso Dantés in his All Japan match against Mil Máscaras, but he was pretty ordinary. He looked as though he was cut from the same cloth as Ray Mendonza; big, strong, wearing wrestling tights and a pair of boots, but showed almost nothing on the mat, which is unusual for a Diablo Velazco student. He may have been a brawler turned technical wrestler, or perhaps he was better in the 70s, but in any event he was a disappointment.

The other problem with the match is that it was technico vs. technico, which oftentimes is too polite. Caras was somewhat aggressive with the title in his sights, but for the most part this was pretty spineless. I do, however, recommend the Caras brothers' fight against Wahoo McDaniel and Frank Hill from 1979, which is anything but spineless! It's on youtube. Check out the chops.