cad

All of those questions except the second one and the first part of the fourth one could just as easily be applied to individual matches, though.

2018 is gonna be the year I finally win the title.

I'm fairly confident that 1992 Arena Mexico was better than 1992 Toreo, and 1992 is the most complete year we have from the UWA. 1990 Arena Coliseo Acapulco would get you the following matches: Arqueros del Espacio vs Diabolicos (National Trios Championship) Ciclon Ramirez vs Fantasma de le Quebrada (National Welterweight) Lizmark vs Fabuloso Blondy (NWA Lightheavyweight, title change) Atlantis/Angel Azteca vs Pierroth Jr./Ulises (National Tag) Fuerza Guerrera vs Americo Rocca (NWA Welterweight) Lizmark vs El Faraon (NWA Lightheavyweight) El Dandy vs Atlantis (NWA Middleweight, title change and then a rematch for the belt one month later) Negro Casas vs Yoshihiro Asai Mogur vs Verdugo (hair vs hair) Lizmark vs Mascara Año 2000 (NWA Lightheavyweight) Fuerza Guerrera vs Octagon (NWA Welterweight) Atlantis vs El Satanico (NWA Middleweight, hourlong time limit draw) This is with sporadic and incomplete results listed, so there must be much more like this that took place in the arena that year.

According to luchadb they had three hair matches in the same month in 1984, including two on back to back days. It's all the same match, just with conflicting reports about what day it took place on.

These are all on Youtube. Satanico vs Samurai Shiro is clearly the one that's online, you wouldn't have a hair rematch in the same month when one guy already has a buzzcut. One of the dates listed for it is incorrect.

Nah, that one was on Youtube years ago, I think on Guardianpuroresu's now defunct channel.

Mascara Sagrada: Awkward as shit for his first year or so with the gimmick, but eventually he sorted out what he could do and what he couldn't and turned himself into an average wrestler. A lot of people rate him as awful but I'd probably rate him above Octagon. He worked harder than Octagon for sure. Jerry Estrada: Amusingly, Dave Meltzer at some point in the recent past called Estrada a candidate for the most underrated wrestler ever. IIRC he got slaughtered in the greatest wrestler ever poll and finished in like the 400s. His worst attribute as a worker was probably technical wrestling and he still managed a great title match with Lizmark. Americo Rocca: Had a pair of acclaimed matches with Mocho Cota in 1984. Cota is considered a lost great worker and even a genius, and no one cares about the man in the ring with him. Cota didn't carry him. Matches that technically intensive require strong performances from both participants. Tigro: I've been keeping this to wrestlers who are actually underrated rather than not really on anyone else's radar, because wrestlers in the latter group aren't really being rated, are they? I'll give a shoutout to Tigro, though, the best of the Thundercats IMO and a talented technician. Blue Panther: I'll be my own watchdog here. Most of my comments about Panther skew negative, and he deserves better than that. I do think that he gets undue credit especially compared to some of his peers. He also possessed some of the best grappling skills of any of them, and he looks a lot better when you compare him to average rather than to just the greats and the near greats. (I'm sure that these are not the five most underrated wrestlers ever, in part because the five most underrated wrestlers all working at the same time in the same place is highly unlikely. I didn't know the answer though so I just stuck with what I knew.)

La Fiera vs El Dandy from 1992. Fiera is one of the alltime great bad guys in this. No one else was doing backstage beatdowns or chain attacks in 1992. The blowoff isn't a classic and for overall match quality both guys probably had better feuds, but this one gets a sentimental boost for me in part because it was one last bit of peak CMLL awesomeness as things were crashing for the promotion. Plus I love Fiera.

I'd argue that you can't just jump into Blue Panther without some legwork to prepare you though. I'd argue the opposite. For the most part, you can watch Blue Panther's big matches and just from those get a sense of who he was, what he did well, and what the match was about. Maybe he changed as he got older but in his thirties Panther didn't surround his singles matches with the kind of buildup and followup that make for great feuds and add to the one on one match. I think it works for the Barr match and for some of the fun stuff that's popped up in Japan where Panther's working more broadly as a stereotypical rudo, but in general, you understand what makes Blue Panther so special, you need to understand lucha (trios organization and how he's so good at directing traffic, how title matches operate and why, the role he played when teaming with guys like Fuerza, what makes maestros matches special, etc.). Otherwise, he's just a guy who can get in and out of matwork quickly. I assume Bryan sees more in him than that but who knows? Technical matches are not something unique to Mexico. Kurt Angle vs Chris Benoit was wrestled with the same sort of principles as those of a Blue Panther title match, even though the styles were different. Anyone watching Blue Panther vs Atlantis is going to quickly understand what is going on, although some might wonder why Panther does not just kick Atlantis in the leg over and over. The Love Machine matches are the ones where I think you'd MOST want to watch the six mans that surround the famous matches, but then if someone asks for a best of Blue Panther recommendation I'm probably not going to suggest watching him against Love Machine.

I'd argue that you can't just jump into Blue Panther without some legwork to prepare you though. I'd argue the opposite. For the most part, you can watch Blue Panther's big matches and just from those get a sense of who he was, what he did well, and what the match was about. Maybe he changed as he got older but in his thirties Panther didn't surround his singles matches with the kind of buildup and followup that make for great feuds and add to the one on one match.

Emilio Charles' right hand. Negro Casas' right hand and dropkick. Is a kneedrop a strike? I thought Lizmark had a great kneedrop.

Nothing on that channel is just being unearthed now. Even if it hasn't been on Youtube before it was stuff that was easy to find.

I definitely think that's one way to look at it, and it's probably the answer to the question as I raised it. But the reason I raised it was more to bring up that I think there's this subconscious idea that liking less wrestling is a sign of better tastes. I just don't see it that way. The fan who is harder to please isn't so much the fan who always has a point, or whose recommendations are always going to be good. But I do think we've biased, without intention, having "higher standards" over having better standards. I'm not sure I'm formulating this in a way that makes sense or if this is even the thread to hash it out. Just something on my mind. In a way it goes hand in hand with my first response. If seeing more and knowing more raises the bar, then higher standards would indicate that this is someone who knows his stuff. I agree with what you're saying--tearing down something that other people like isn't any more intellectually demanding than building up something that other people don't--but it's also human nature. If a woman looks in the mirror and likes what she sees, and then she goes out and someone tells her "Hey, you have a really big nose," and someone else tells her that she has a pretty smile, what do you think is going to stick with her more? Now let's say that she herself has never really thought much of her teeth. And the person who complimented it is a cheery, optimistic soul who tries to see the beauty in everything and make people feel better when they're down. Instead of a dumbass analogy, let me try a wrestling example. One of my favorite wrestlers is La Fiera. Someone writes a scathing review of Fiera vs Negro Casas, which I think is one of Fiera's best matches. Someone else calls Fiera vs Atlantis a lost classic, one of the best championship matches in CMLL history. With the first one, maybe it would hit a nerve somewhere inside of me and have me thinking, "Hmm, did I miss something when I watched that match? Was I too busy marking out to actually pay attention to it? Maybe I was just biased towards one of my guys." With the second one, well, maybe they'd have a logical point, and they could frame things in a way that made the match read like a classic, but it's going to be hard to override the memory of watching that match and not loving it. Tendency toward self doubt might just be a personal thing, but I think it's a lot easier to for love to be torn down than to be created out of nowhere--so a nasty review about a match I thought was outstanding is going to hit home a lot more than a glowing review of one for which my primary recollection of it will be not enjoying it. And if it's from a person who tries to see the good in everything, my thinking is going to be that I might have to TRY to like this match in order to actually like it, and that's just not how I do things. (Sorry for the double post. I didn't know whether that or a long post in which I replied to two different people would have been a bigger breach of message board etiquette.)

Maybe it's just confirmation bias, but I can recall people talking about Dandy vs Angel Azteca. Atlantis vs Blue Panther not so much. I haven't been on this board very long, so maybe I wasn't here for what you're referencing, but the only detractors I can remember for Dandy vs Angel basically came at it from a "Nick Bockwinkel wouldn't have wrestled like this" way rather than actually criticizing the things that made that match unique. It felt like annoyance that something like THAT was challenging Flair, Steamboat, Misawa and Kawada. That speaks to Dandy vs Angel having a reputation. No real need to take Atlantis and Blue Panther down a peg, their match isn't threatening Flair. We should do that for a thread though, consensus classics from everywhere (by "we" I mean "one of you," of course).

Isn't it fairly simple? The more you've been exposed to, the harder it is for something to feel different enough that it changes the way you think about anything, and the more top level stuff you see, the tougher the comparison becomes for everything else. To use an example, Atlantis vs Blue Panther from 1991 used to be considered one of the classic matches from Mexico, especially if you're just limiting it to championship style. Then you go to the thread about it on this site, with all the posts in it coming within the past five years, and it may not even rank as a consensus four star match in there. Could be that it's a different set of opinions coming from people with different tastes, sure. But I'd guess that it's more that there's so much readily available to watch now, even just in the category of championship wrestling from Mexico, that the match doesn't stand out like it did back when the field was smaller.

Huh, I was reading this thread and thinking how Peña was more of a McMahonlike candidate, but then a lot of his booking feels overwrought to me. His biggest achievements IMO were making the EMLL easily the number one promotion in the country (largely on the strength of TV) and then creating a promotion from out of nowhere that overnight became bigger than the one he'd just helped build up, and had a different way of doing business than any promotion in Mexico. I don't know that either of these falls under what would traditionally be called booking. No doubt the wrestling programs that he booked helped these things happen, though.

Kato Kung Lee: Panamanian martial arts expert who was neither a brilliant athlete nor a master technician, but none of that mattered because he was always right. I always side with Kato in his matches. Once he lost his mask he had the look of this little grumpy old man who'd seen everything there was to see and didn't have time for any shit from the rudos, even if they hadn't done anything yet. And he was right, because they were rudos, so they were going to do something that merited a backhand from the old man. Someone like Satanico could win a million titles and have the Diablo Velazco seal of approval, but he didn't have a black belt so to Kato he was nothing. Sometimes he'd chokeslam Negro Casas to hell, which was funny to see coming from a tiny guy like Kato. More people should have treated Casas that way. El Supremo: Immobile bodybuilder type who the EMLL inexplicably used as a base for flashy young tecnicos in the early 1990s. It shouldn't have worked but he was actually okay at it. Luchawiki lists him as nearly 50 for that part of his career, but there's no way that's right. Got one of the most transparent bumps up to main event level ever in the last few months of 1992 so he could drop his mask to Pierroth. That was a fun feud, even if it was mostly on the back of Pierroth (Supremo was a better base than a brawler), and it probably would have been more fun if it weren't a sign of how bad things had become for the company in such a short amount of time. Supremo pretty much had three moves, the punch, the knee, and the suplex. Virtually disappeared after losing the mask, but not before growing a mustache and looking a bit like a movie star from the 1950s. He was popular enough to inspire an unrelated wrestler to take on the name of Supremo II. All three masks he won in his career are pretty cool: Robot R-2 and Lawrence de Arabia, because those are amazing gimmicks, and Guerrero Azteca because that match somehow ended up on Youtube, and if nothing else it's a pretty cool ringside look at a fairly big mask vs mask match from the 1980s outside of the typical venues.

Just a heads up, the match listed as the mask vs mask in the match discussion section of the site seems to be the mano a mano from the week before Triplemania instead of the big one.

I think Fame was the Macho Man's best entrance song. It's So Easy for Heavy Metal and Pelo Suelto for Emilio Charles are some of my favorites. Pelo Suelto in particular isn't something I'd ever have thought of for entrance music but Emilio made it work. I remember Rey Jr. coming out to A Little Respect. That was bad. Worse was whoever it was who used Dangerous by Roxette in Monterrey. Didn't Rick Martel have some hilariously unwrestling song in WCW? I actually like a lot of the generic WCW songs though, like Psicosis' and Alex Wright's.

This was one of those matches that had a lot of good moments which didn't really fit together. I can see people liking a lot of them, but at the end of the day you have an apuestas match in which things started off almost gentlemanly, Sangre Chicana threw away a fall for no real reason, and Fiera won with a fluky and botched rollup while not looking like a conquering hero. Even in the prematch video package, included to make this feel like a bigtime event, something felt off, as you could see that it wasn't even Chicana who turned on Fiera first. And the bottle shot made no sense. It was a cool image and everything, but it's not like Fiera had been making a comeback or done anything to piss Chicana off. Why wantonly pick a moment in the second fall to take all that anger out on him? I guess you could argue that it fit with Chicana taking random breaks from the fighting to talk to members of the audience, but it's still the weakest way possible for a tecnico to even things up. On a positive note, Fiera's selling really was outstanding, and I liked how committed they were to those ribs. I'd have preferred wild violence to working over a body part, but if you decide to go the latter route then at least make it mean something. Less than the sum of its parts match.

Just two weeks after his failed title challenge Fiera found himself in another one on one. He cut a promo about continuing Blue Panther's mission of ridding Mexico of its foreigners while flocked by some giddy rudo fans, and then he spent the first fall putting on a rudo masterpiece. He kicked Black Magic's ass all over the ring and treated him like the newcomer he was, and made rudo referee Gato Montini his half-witting accomplice. The clothesline with the chain was pure brilliance, and as a token of appreciation he clapped right in Montini's face afterward, just to let the ref know how much of a sucker he'd been. Everything in the ring was under Fiera's control. After the fall he wore the biggest, smuggest grin on his face while even getting some Me-xi-co chants. And then by the end of the match he was threatening to kick Montini, the man he'd figured was in his back pocket, right in the face, and screaming about how it was all bullshit, that a man of only physique could never defeat someone who truly understands the sport. By this point the crowd was chanting for Magic, much to Fiera's shock, and he pretty much sealed the deal when he backed out of a postmatch fight just like Bret Hart at Wrestlemania 13. His contemptuous look back towards the ring would have made the Hitman proud, too. So by the end of the match Fiera hadn't just put over Magic, he'd given him the crowd and told a twenty minute story of his own unraveling. The actual wrestling wasn't that interesting but for performance and meeting the booking's goal this was excellent.

Fierathon 2017 continues with this mano a mano from both guys' postprime. Emilio came out to a CMLLized version of Pelo Suelto that was pretty cool. One of the comments on Youtube says that he sang it, but I don't know about that. It didn't sound like his voice. Fiera wore a jacket that just said "WRESTLING" on the back and had Van Halen entrance music, so I think the early advantage went to Emilio. He did a really good job beating the hell out of Fiera, one of the better one on one performances I can recall from him actually, and Fiera again bumped and sold as well as you could expect. It really does impress me how a guy who I think of as SUCH a nasty rudo can be so sympathetic. But then again that's wrestling. This was also a match in which he got violent for his comeback, although I could have done without the Randy Savage arm twirls. The finishing stretch seemed abbreviated and I thought Fiera won the second fall a bit too easily, but what really stopped this from being anything special was that it's 2017 and I can look it up and see that they had a hair vs hair in two weeks, so what does it matter who wins this one? Still a good match and a good Fiera performance, no small feat in 1994 CMLL.

A couple of months ago, there was a thread about favorite title reigns. I said Atlantis' with the NWA middleweight championship was one of the best but lamented that all it meant TVwise was the big defense against Blue Panther and then just a bunch of failed challenges by Emilio. Shame on me, because I forgot about this match, featuring one of my main men going for Atlantis' belt at the biggest show of the year. Here we have Fiera in the rudo character that made him one of my main men, but we also have him in title match mode. The technical side of La Fiera isn't one that he showed off very often. Perhaps breaking in as a Sangre Chicana protege taught him that no one really pays to see that stuff, or maybe he just wasn't that proficient with his holds. Either way, he couldn't hide from it here, so instead they worked a good, honest hold for hold first fall, with spots like Fiera talking shit before the bell, Atlantis armdragging him off a handshake, and Fiera breaking a hold with a kick to the face thrown in to establish some heat between the two (as mentioned above, Fiera was filling in for Bestia Salvaje so they hadn't interacted before this). It takes guts to work an old school wrestling fall in front of a huge crowd waiting on the big mask vs mask main event, and not only did they work a terrific fall but the crowd stayed with them the whole way. Atlantis seems like a guy who sort of gets the backhanded compliment of being able to hang with legitimately great rudos, but this is a fall I'd use as an example of him taking someone up a level, as I've never seen Fiera have another extended technical exchange this good. Fiera for his part did a great job selling, especially on Atlantis' knucklelock counter and pumping headlock. Eventually they established that Atlantis was the better man on the mat, and when Fiera tried to up the pace he got burned. I don't know if it was something special they were doing because this was a big show, but between falls they stayed in the arena instead of going to commercial, which gave us a great shot of a disgusted Fiera shaking his head in disbelief about how the first fall ended. It was a wonderful bit of acting, especially as he had no one to play off for it (for some reason, Pierroth didn't come out to second him until after the second fall). What a dedicated performer. The second fall was back and forth and this time it was Fiera who scored with the big dive, knocking Atlantis out on the arena floor and giving a half smug, half exhausted pose when he was the only one to make it back to the ring ahead of the count. Outside, Atlantis' arm was clearly messed up from the dive, an ominous lead in to the deciding fall. Unfortunately, although they did use the arm to create some danger for Atlantis' reign, they did it in the least exciting way possible. Fiera worked on the arm the way he would have in the first fall of a mano a mano, slowly and with no science or nearfalls. The worst was when Atlantis was making a comeback and Fiera caught him with a desperate foul, but instead of going for the pin he just loosely applied a cangrejo, which Atlantis escaped without a fight. I liked when Panther started tearing at Hijo del Santo's arm in their match from April 2000, so it wasn't the armwork that was the problem, it was how dull it was and how the pace fell back from where it had been in the second and even the first fall. And the win came out of nowhere. Not in the sense that Atlantis got it suddenly and surprisingly, but that you can usually tell when they're building up to the finish, and here I couldn't. I don't know. It was a good match, really good and maybe even great for the first two falls, but the fall that should be the most thrilling of all was the most boring. The Kahoz match was better, even though it was a lesser version of Fiera against a lesser opponent than the one he had here. The one saving grace that the third fall had was that afterward I was annoyed how they weren't even bothering to switch to a shot of the beaten Fiera, before finally he got up, sarcastically clapped for Atlantis' effort, and then told him to go fuck himself. Truly a legend of the sport.

I've never found a way to accept how Fiera changed after returning to the tecnico side in '93. He spent 1992 fouling and chainwhipping the good guys, and then all of a sudden that violent side just disappeared. You'd think he could at least put the fear of death in his old rudo buddies when making his comebacks against them, but it didn't really happen that way. This is decisively NOT a match that challenges that perception of him, but what it does do is show how effective his approach to working tecnico could be. He spent most of the first two falls selling. Some of it was a bit hammy, like when he tried to jog it off and collapsed, but it was clear that Fiera was in serious trouble so in the end it worked. Well, that in conjunction with the blood. When you spill so much blood that you're wiping it out of your eyes between falls, that goes a long way towards making it look like it's going to be a hell of a time trying to survive. Kahoz has always been one of my picks for most generic wrestler--and that's with his mask, here he didn't even have that--but he really gave it to Fiera here. He started off a bit methodical and got more vicious the longer the match went on and the closer Fiera came to the end. He even got some good sneers in on the ringside fans. Maybe losing the mask actually helped. Having one of the great bumpers taking his stuff made it all the better. There was a typically CMLL-ish bit of controversy when, after Fiera tied the match with his spinkick and his still beautiful frogsplash, he collapsed in the corner and the doctor came over to see if the bloodloss was too much for him to be able to continue. Kahoz was ready to jump right back on him, but the referee held him back while the doctor inspected the cut, and in the end the doc just wiped the blood off and gave them the okay to keep going. If I were Kahoz I'd have thrown a fit over that, and sure enough in short order he was busted open too. Things were going great, with Fiera getting him right in the head with a tope and Kahoz bumping big off it, but not long after that came the finish. I really think that's what kept this from being a genuinely great match. It was a bit too soon, so it didn't feel like they'd really given all they had to give, but more than that it was just a terrible finish. Picking the guy up at two and then immediately getting pinned is always awful. I'm sure it was clever the first time someone did it, but every time since then it's just been a face saving copout. But most of all I just can't buy Fiera needing mercy to beat a guy like Kahoz. Fiera was a better wrestler, plain and simple. Hell, go back four years and he'd have pinned the man with one foot. Even with the beating, the selling, and the blood, Kahoz actually winning could never happen. There's no way Fiera had to steal one like that. Kahoz did dick all after this, so it's not like he needed the protecting, and he even had an out with the way the doctor handled things between falls. This was still a hell of a job by both guys. Fiera's one of my favorites, but I'd never have thought he could have a match this good this late in his career against an opponent the caliber of Kahoz. And they did all this at Arena Coliseo, not exactly known for its brutal wager matches by this point in time. I seriously can't think of a better Arena Coliseo apuestas match, although I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

That looks like a good call. It's kind of hard to tell with the VQ being so different for the Youtube uploads of the two matches, but it seems like the same crowd as for Hijo del Santo, Chamaco Valaguez and Cachorro Mendoza vs Fuerza Guerrera, Talisman and Jerry Estrada, which is also purported to have taken place on the March 9 event. The six man from March 2 seemed to set up a title match, too. With the scarcity of video from that era I'd guess that it likely came from a show that we have video of. Then again I have no idea how reliable the sources are for 1984 lineups. I don't think Satanico vs Lizmark was listed for that date until earlier this year.