Solar/Black Terry vs. Negro Navarro/Rambo
Entry posted by ohtani's jacket
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Solar/Black Terry vs. Negro Navarro/Rambo, UWE, 10/17/09
This continued the trend of matches failing to be anything special, but it did feature some high end Solar vs. Negro Navarro.
In all of their recent matches, they've shown that they're not content to rest on the laurels of local MCs hyping them up as maestros extraordinaire. The 10/5 Misioneros vs. Space Cadets match from Futrap de Nuevo Laredo and the 11/22 Solar/Platino/Perro Mastin vs. Negro Navarro/Fishman Jr/Arcanos trios from Arena Ray Alcantara were good examples of this. There's no doubt that these guys see themselves as the premier workers in lucha libre and the fact that they keep adding new crinkles to their work means that this match and the one from Alcantara were as good as anything they've done this decade. That's not the problem -- the problem is that this match-up is beginning to dominate everything else around it.
In every Navarro vs. Solar match, you know that they're going to square off three times. A singles match within a tag or trios, basically. There's nothing wrong with having a predominant match-up in tags, especially when these guys are feuding over a title (the Salvador Americas Title to be precise), but the constant emphasis on Navarro vs. Solar reduces the other workers to bit-part players. That might be okay when they're working with locals, but not when it's Terry. You never wanna see Black Terry's role reduced. Ever.
Sure, Terry had his ring time here with Rambo (who appears to have lost a lot of weight, incidently), and if we're being honest it wasn't one of Terry's better performances (more scrappy than good), but the fact that they didn't switch match-ups in the second caida was a major disappointment to me. There was barely any Terry/Navarro in this at all and the scraps that we did get was a transition for Navarro to leave the ring. A few years ago, when footage like this was scarce, this would've had MOTYC written all over it, but with a proliferation in lucha uploading in recent times, I've started to expect more. Despite having more Navarro footage available this year than any point in the decade, I still feel like we missed out on a large chunk of his work this year by not having IWRG's Thursday night tapings available. We never got to see any sort of finish to the Terribles Cerebros vs. Dinastía Navarro feud, so I was hoping for some killer Black Terry/Negro Navarro exchanges here to tie me over until the New Year. I don't mean to sound ungrateful to the good folk who make this stuff available to us, but it's frustrating when these workers who've been upholding the virtues of actual lucha libre let their match structure fall by the wayside.
I don't expect a match where the falls overlap each other and tell a story. Sadly, that just doesn't happen in lucha anymore. Before I get too carried away, let me state that the third caida in this match is excellent and well worth watching for the awesome Navarro vs. Solar submission work -- nevertheless, they could've easily worked this a regular tag match instead of two separate matches. This was a two out of three falls match with more than enough time to do something special. Instead of concentrating on holds, they ought to be baiting each other. I'm not asking for some almighty struggle between good and evil, just a bit of needling. We've all seen Terry and Navarro beat on each other and we know that Solar and Navarro talk shit and mock each other. Ultimately, a bit of prickish behaviour would do these matches some good, because as much as I like Negro Navarro, his hard headed approach to wrestling and demands that his opponent be a man, he's not really forcing the issue with his in-ring behaviour, and I don't think these guys are doing lucha any great service by having matches with no swing in momentum. Navarro ought to have been champing at the bit to take on both these guys, but instead it was just another exhibition.
There's a roadshow quality to these matches and they're really just another payday, but when the top workers in Mexico aren't trying then the entire country is full of lacklustre wrestling, which is a shame, because if these guys actually worked matches in an aggressive manner like Satanico used to we might see great matches for a change instead of a cool spot here and there.
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