Blue Panther vs. Atlantis, La Copa Victoria final, CMLL 12/5/97

This was awesome. Twenty minutes of grappling with neither guy leaving their feet.

Like a lot of lucha fans, I'm always on the look out for a pure mat contest. Most of the time, you get a caida or two of matwork before the match starts heading in a different direction, so to find a match like this is pretty rare. Searching through tape lists is a lot like digging for gold. You start digging in the wrong places and come up with nothing but dirt, but when you find a match like this it's like striking it rich.

The match starts out with an amazing lock-up that's like two bulls locking horns. Atlantis works these awesome leverage spots from an armlock and Panther keeps trying to reverse into a dominant nelson position in what is basically a show of strength. Finally, they end up in the lock-up again and you know whoever comes out of the lock-up stronger will take the fall, because of the way the momentum is building. Mesmerising stuff and one of the best opening falls I can remember seeing. The whole time I kept thinking about how underrated Atlantis even among aficionados. Raging Noodles touched on this point recently. I think it's because I'm used to seeing him as a classic luchador in trios matches, so I forget what a good mat worker he was. Blue Panther brought out the best in Atlantis' wrestling ability, but at the same time, Atlantis is one of the best mat opponents that Panther's ever had. I haven't seen their 8/91 match in years, but this particular match is as good as any mat contest I've seen.

Watching the slow motion replay of the first fall submission is a lot like watching the replay of a sumo bout, where you see exactly what it was they were doing coming out of the tachiai (the part where sumo wrestlers charge at each other and collide.) The fact that it's a Fujiwara armbar makes it all the sweeter.

The second fall has the same arm lock and Atlantis does a series of armdrag takedowns into a crucifix armbar. All of this is ridiculously good. The armbar isn't as over as it is on all the New Japan we've been watching, but fuck it if Blue Panther doesn't reverse it about as well as you can in a lucha mat situation. Panther starts working some more traditional lucha holds, including an awesome "rolling surfboard variation" which Atlantis sells extremely well. The great thing about this match is the consistency in their approach. Atlantis keeps going back to the arm because it's working for him, whereas Panther is eager to get better position so he can start working from the top instead of from underneath. And just so I can avoid any of that 90s rubbish about limbwork and psychology, Panther is such a maestro that he doesn't target any limb in particular just the nearest opening. The reason for this is because he's a fucking great wrestler and not some mindless drone. I hadn't seen Panther work like this in a while, and just so you know, I'm immediately high on him again.

I actually fibbed a little when I said they don't leave their feet. What they don't do is use the ropes. And it's a two fall match, which means the cut out the segunda caida and just give you one big long tercera caida with all the momentum shifts you could hope for. It's not until the end that they start working the rolls-ups, but it's not too bad. The finish is a bit staged, but you expect that when a guy loses in straight falls. The ego takes a battering whenever this happens in lucha and you've got to make it look a margin of error. Both guys were buffing hard down the stretch and you could tell they were working hard without that second break between falls. The upshot of that was some great selling towards the end.

I managed to find the RSPW report for this match and the guy watching it said: "This was a good match, but too old fashioned. There were no dives, no brawling, just old fashioned wrestling." It's funny how values change. I sure as hell wouldn't mind if every match was like this. I dunno if I'd call it an old-school bout myself. If it had been wrestled in 1987, they would've worked the ropes more and had more flat back bumps. This was similar to the style that Santo, Casas and Felino were working at the time, pinching stuff from the juniors work they admired. Ray Mendoza was on hand to present the Copa Victoria, and considering he's my own personal god of lucha matwork it was all good to me.

Just a great match from a great year for 1997. I really thought the old '97 mine shaft was barren but it struck gold again.