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I can get why people would like it. I mean, I like it. What I don't get is what's getting them to watch it to begin with. The other matches on that list with high ratings had people reviewing an instant classic, or they're part of the established list of CMLL all timers. That match got its first rating in 2015. I know it's been highly praised here, but with the short thread on this site and the low viewcount on Youtube it wouldn't figure as something with much exposure elsewhere. I dunno. Virus classics P2: Damiancito el Guerrero, Pierrothito and Fierito vs Cicloncito Ramirez, Mascarita Magica and Bracito de Oro, October 3 1997 I really like that Pierrothito was still calling himself the pequeño intocable. The Intocables ceased to exist in 1993 and none of the members remained in the promotion by this point, but I guess he'd sprung for a hat and duster years back and wanted his money's worth. I have no problem with anyone who calls this a great match. They cut a ciberneticoesque pace and still hit all those crazy moves cleanly. It's just never hit me as the apex of 3 vs 3 wrestling like you'll sometimes see it called (the Youtube description gives it five stars, for instance). Even sticking only to technical matches, I think you can find other ones contested on this level, especially since... Damiancito el Guerrero and Pierrothito vs Cicloncito Ramirez and Ultimo Dragoncito, March 14 1997 ...I think the technical wrestling was even better here. This is the definitive battle of holds between Damiancito and Cicloncito, right up there with the time Blue Panther wrestled Huracan Sevilla for technical work buried in a random multiman. Insane creativity and athleticism. Dragoncito and Pierrothito had some incredible spots together as well. That sort of blocked sunset flip turned into an armdrag didn't even seem physically possible. But if somewhere out there Pierroth Big was watching this match, I bet he'd have been prouder of that faceplant or the way his man beat the shit out of Dragoncito and then stared at his hand like Booker T. And he wasn't even the best on his team. Virus was so good at this point that he made the headbutt to the stomach, which is usually just a thinly disguised shove, look like it actually hurt. Leobardo Magadan went as far as to call him the Michael Jordan of wrestling after a flying elbow. Watch him in this one and you can believe it.

I've always had a hard time getting a good grasp on the minis. They're cordoned off from the rest of the workers in their own division, so you aren't going to get a glimpse of any of them wrestling guys you already know and instead have to dive into matches where everyone's unfamiliar. Virus of course ended up breaking away from the rest of the minis, but that came after the period I'm most familiar with. Consider this my attempt to seriously familiarize myself with him and other minis even if some of these matches I've seen before. I realize that he no longer identifies as a mini, but you know what? Virus's Luchawiki page and my driver's license have the same height listed on them, so anything I say about him I also say about myself. I've long considered myself a miniposter here anyway. Virus classics: Damiancito el Guerrero vs Cicloncito Ramirez, January 7 1997 When I first became aware of lucha opinions, this was the classic Virus match and one of the classic title matches in general. Virus and Cicloncito were probably the two most gifted CMLL workers at this time, in terms of combination of athletic and technical ability, and they wrestled a match which was all about demonstrating that. No other pairing could have done what these two did together. The match didn't have any major plot points, so it wasn't as emotionally resonant as a title match could be, but the minis never really worked that way. They had the same job as the WCW cruisers, going out there to wow the fans and cement their spot with things that the bigger guys couldn't do. That's no easy task when it's just two guys with over twenty minutes to fill and no one to tag out to. To produce a match as competitive and serious as any other classic championship match through work alone took skill and it took guts, and I don't think I can name a better pure workrate match than this. Virus vs Guerrero Maya Jr., June 7 2011 Did you know that this is the highest rated 1 vs 1 CMLL match on Cagematch.com? It's true. That's kind of weird to me. I looked, and the thread for this match on THIS site has only two comments. The Youtube video for this match has a little over a thousand views. I wonder how that happened. Anyway. The matwork in the first fall, while very good, didn't quite feel like they went all the way with it and had a fall that could have been a match on its own. It reminded me of the opening fall of Atlantis vs Fiera, which isn't remembered as one of the classic title matches, if indeed it's remembered at all. Virus looked like a consummate rudo maestro working the arm in the second, but what was that comeback by Guerrero Maya? A headbutt off the ropes, that's the big transition? It wasn't BAD, but I wasn't really thinking classic after that. What got this over the hump was how GM actually did look like a badass technician in the third fall, just destroying Virus with impossibly complex slams. That shifted the match entirely, not just because Virus had to make a comeback of his own, but because GM was clearly on his level by that point. For two falls, GM had been trying to catch up to Virus technically and failing. Suddenly he was the one doing things that Virus was struggling to match. Virus's reversals and huge senton to the outside were the acts of a desperate man, but even if they didn't get him the victory they kept him alive for a few moments more. It was a bigtime third fall and it also kind of pieced together the first two falls for me, made them better retroactively. This was definitely more dramatic than the match from fourteen years before. Guerrero Maya even had fans from his hometown ("the only Maya from Puebla," joked the announcers) sitting front row cheering him on. Push comes to shove? I'd take the match from Virus's days as a mini. Him vs GM was worked more like the way I'd prefer my championship classics to be, but him vs Cicloncito was simply a better representative of its style.

This was for a shot at the lightheavyweight title the week after, so if you know 1996 CMLL then you know who wins. It also featured four guys who wrestled in the welterweight division around this time, perhaps a sign that they didn't worry so much about anyone's actual weight by this point. The first time I saw the listing for this match, my immediate reaction was something like, "Oh, get Ringo the fuck out of there." But I tell you he fit in perfectly. I wish he'd worked like this more often, this stooped over old grappler who can dish out some lessons on the mat to a young punk, instead of bouncing off the ropes with slow armdrags and spinkicks. Speaking of spinkicks, Fiera had a pretty excellent outing here. His style always worked better in brawls than in workrate matches like this, but even at 35 he could still move. I loved his reactions from the apron and how he'd stamp his foot like a bull before kicking off an exchange. The best part of the match came when Lagarde landed a spinkick of his own on someone and started pounding his chest in Fiera's direction. Fiera just pointed at Lagarde in acknowledgement. Sure enough, when they met up later on he made it clear that he remembered. Felino and Mascara Magica showed the excellent chemistry they had in their title match, although by the third time they squared off they started reusing spots from the earlier match, which was kind of disappointing. They went to another double countout, and wouldn't you know, Mascara Magica bitched about it again. His fatal flaw as a character. Anyway, not everyone in this cibernetico was a great worker, but they all wrestled like they wanted to be. I don't know why Warrior never reached that level. Mascara Magica of course fell victim to Angel Azteca Disease. They looked like they had all the potential in the world here, but this period probably represents the best either man ever was.

So while I was watching this, I had to ask myself, "Is this the best 3 vs 3 of 1996?" It ended up falling a bit short of the famous November 29 match, not quite as frenzied or heated, but still a great brawl, the kind that goes six deep with everyone chipping in. Black Warrior doesn't seem to have much of a reputation (good or bad) here, and Bronco was an inconsistent CMLL presence whose daughter might be more famous than he is, so that doesn't necessarily read like a must see central issue. They really went to war though. Warrior beat the shit out of Bronco, and even the mask ripping ended up looking badass, as by the second fall Bronco's mask was not just torn up but also painted red. I really didn't know he could brawl like that. Bronco kept trying to charge back from underneath, and you know that a guy from Monterrey can brawl. Meanwhile Bestia was the perfect third man, mixing up the brawling and the athletic bumping for Shocker, and Satanico was outstanding as the number two. That's not really a role that I associate with him, but he nailed it. For the first two falls it was mostly just solid henchman stuff, like after the first fall when Shocker tried to roll out of the ring and Satanico blocked his exit to deliver more punishment, before he and Lizmark decided that their rivalry was going to have the same intensity as Warrior-Bronco. My favorite part was when Satanico landed a sneak low blow, but Lizmark had the audacity to get his foot on the ropes. Satanico just snapped and started pummeling him in the back of the head. That rivalry has largely been deemed a disappointment, but here's a case of some excellent chemistry between them. I also thought that Lizmark was mostly washed up by this point. Not the case.

Santo has to fend off his three biggest rivals at the time. I love matches like that. It really stuck at the end of the first fall, when Guerrero superplexed him, Psicosis hit him with a senton and Santo Negro made him submit to a trademark Santo sequence. This wasn't one of the wildest, most violent wars of the 1990s or anything, but it was structured a lot more like a classic brawl than most of the praised 1995 AAA. Instead of running the ropes the rudos just focused on clearing the ring and tearing up Santo's mask, and man did they tear it up. He spent much of the second fall lying on the floor with his head under the ring before eventually running to the back to get a new one. It's an interesting way to make a wrestler look helpless. He took forever to find one, so Octagon and Park had to make a pretty good two on three comeback and actually got some good shots in for a while. The numbers caught up to them eventually, but then Santo came charging out from the back and kicked all three rudos' asses. Kind of surprising that they'd save his big comeback for after the tecnicos had already tied the match. Anyway, not one of the most insane brawls ever, but it hit the plot points that I wanted out of it, and there were a lot of good visuals of battered tecnicos on the outside. Plus it was a chance to see Espanto Jr. lead a rudo team against his archenemy, not something that we fans from the 2020s have gotten much of from the surviving videos.

There's something depressing about this match. I remember someone once saying that the best matches have a way of making whatever small trinket is on the line feel like it means everything, but that's a hard sell with these two heads of hair. Apolo Dantes had already destroyed Cruz's reputation as a bigtime hair match wrestler, and Ciclon Ramirez's career plainly fell apart the moment he lost his mask. I mean, obviously hindsight lets me know how little Ciclon accomplished after this, but even at the time, between his sad eyes, his Huracan Ramirez wannabe tights and the poor 3,500 person turnout here, a lot of fans could probably guess that every important event of Ciclon Ramirez's life had already happened by this stage. So without much for either man to win, they just went out and fought. There's a lot of flying, and I can certainly sympathize with those who don't like when a hair match ascends into a flashy athletic contest, but this was more like two guys just throwing themselves at each other. Cruz had his signature missile dropkick, and no wrestler was better than Ciclon Ramirez at making it look like his dives were done with the intent to cause harm. This was probably the best performance of Cruz's career. I loved how he swarmed Ciclon in the first fall, really setting the tone for the rest of the match, but he really impressed me with how he wrestled from underneath Ciclon's third fall onslaught. Maybe he went back to his tecnico roots with the way that he slipped off the apron to tease a countout and sell his fatigue, slugged away at Ciclon from his knees and punched his way out of a huracanrana nearfall. And as ever, in spite of all that it was Ciclon who was the more compelling presence to me. He's such a friendly looking guy and he had such a hard luck career, and this is his one of his few big main events. It's hard not to pull for him. He put everything into the match, not just with the dives but with the way he'd fling himself into the turnbuckle or spike Cruz with his backbreakers. Finally he caught Cruz with perhaps the most vicious tope suicida of all time, one that has been .gif'd multiple times and is remembered by anyone who's ever seen this match... and lost on the very next move. Fitting. But because of everything Ciclon had hit him with, and the violence behind all of it, Cruz came out looking like a real survivor rather than Ciclon looking like he'd blown another one. The only thing separating this from entering the mix for greatest of all time is the short second fall. But even then, they had twenty minutes to work with, I wouldn't shave anything off the first or third fall and it makes more sense to abbreviate the rudo's comeback than the tecnico's (as Villano III so often did). I can accept it, and I'm also fine calling it the best hair vs hair match of the '90s.

Praise for Maroñas! I don't know if I've seen anyone compliment that guy, ever. Obviously not here, but not even in Youtube comments or anything. So I guess I'll jump on the bandwagon. One, I thought he did a really good job in Felino vs Mascara Magica, which is one of my personal classics. Two, the way that he loved to bring up Emilio Charles's weight loss, even in matches that didn't have Charles in them, helped shape my image of Emilio as a guy who had to take a look at where his career was going and radically transform himself in his early thirties to reach the levels that he did. I don't think that I would have grasped that element of his career, that he wasn't a Hennig type of second generation worker who immediately looked like a future star, if not for the way Maroñas frequently marveled over how hard Charles worked to make that change.

In a year when the big CMLL stars rarely dug deep in their big matches, these four undercard workers had the promotion's most frenzied brawl third from the top on a half full Tuesday show. They'd fought just the week before, and despite the rudos' win in that match Gran Apache dismissed them as a pair of talkers. I guess that set them off, because they wrestled cleanly for about thirty seconds before deciding to just swarm the Indios Bravos and doubleteam the hell out of them. Escudero Rojo in particular whipped in some wicked right hands and headbutts like a sawed off version of Baby Face. I don't know what the strengths and weaknesses of Gran Apache are in terms of his GWE candidacy, but he was excellent here trying to fight back from underneath and on the comeback. Definitely looked every bit as tough as the rudos. By the middle of the third fall his chest was covered in blood, Reyes Veloz might have lost even more, and Escudero could barely move his right arm. Because this was a rare big chance for these guys, they made sure to throw in some dives and other athletic moves to make sure everyone recognized their talent. It must have worked. At the end of the video the ringside fans were sending their kids over to hand the tecnicos money, and one parent even held up their daughter for a kiss from the bloodied Apache. They had a good rematch the next week with everyone's hair on the line, but the weird layout meant that it would never reach the level this one did. Great match from some unheralded workers.

Title matches often get treated as rare opportunities to see extended high level technical wrestling in the Mexican style. They really are, but there's a lot more to them than that, and this match provides a good example of the dramatic opportunities that the title match presents. The exchanges of holds in the first fall didn't have any wizardry to them, but they established Lizmark as the superior wrestler with an answer for everything Estrada threw at him, giving us multiple shots of Estrada standing across the ring wondering what he could try next. It wasn't about how beat up Estrada was, but when the essence of the match is to find out who is better, you can build to something just by having him repeatedly looking and feeling inferior. He finally got an opening and tied the score, and it surprised me how even through the break between falls Lizmark made a two second submission hold seem like a big enough move to override all of his prior offense and put Estrada in control. That was good selling. Then Estrada laid into him, took out all his frustrations on him with borderline moves like an attack from behind right on the bell and tosses into the turnbuckle, violating the spirit of the match if not quite breaking the actual rules. In a mano a mano or apuestas match, Lizmark could have fired back with some of the same, but here he had to dig down into the reserves of his ability to get back into it. All those reversals, all that skill on display in the first fall was nice, but did it actually mean anything when the chips were down and the match was on the line? That's not the kind of question the third fall of a hair match will have you asking. Lizmark managed to worm his way out of Estrada's submissions like in the opening fall, but he couldn't hang back like before. He was taking bigger and bigger gambles and time was clearly running out on him. In an apuestas match, there's often something downbeat about the postmatch, with a focus on the person who just lost as they surrender their hair or mask to the victor. Here we did get some nice acting from Estrada while Heavy Metal consoled him, but it was largely a celebration. Solar ran around the ring with Lizmark over his shoulder and almost dropped him, before the champ went over to kiss the middle aged women who brought a Lizmark banner with them to the show. Estrada was probably the least imposing of Lizmark's challengers in 1993, but I don't think that the triumphs over Satanico or Parka felt as joyous as the one here.

Look at that Dandy-killing unit assembled by Fiera. When you want to put the hurt on El Dandy, Satanico and Charles are the guys you call. Dandy brought some pretty good teammates with him too, as Atlantis in particular had one of those outings that made him the best backup tecnico ever. This felt like a post-AAA split version of the famous match from earlier in the year with Perro Aguayo, Rayo Jr. and Konnan. That was a chaotic brawl with a bright arena, a packed house and the hottest TV acts in all of Mexican wrestling chasing each other all around the ring. This brawl came in a darker arena and a snowy and grayed out video, and it wasn't quite as frenetic, but it also had a much more ominous mood from the sneak attack at the start to the DQ for attempted murder. Fiera looked like the scariest rudo going with the way he mugged Dandy throughout the first fall. Dandy was great trying to fight back (I loved when he pulled himself off the floor to slug it out with Fiera, only to get sent crashing into the front row by a spinkick), but he might have been even better getting his revenge. He busted Fiera open and even dropped a row of chairs on him (you can barely see it in the corner of the video, but it's there), and things somehow got worse for Fiera from there. 1992 was one of the best years for CMLL brawls, and even in that environment this match stands out as one of the best.

It doesn't look like they were even related, just two guys with the same last name. I haven't seen a Rudy Reyna biography mention a brother. Reyna is a fairly common family name. You might remember that MS-1 was Pablo Fuentes Reyna.

I don't see it as an either-or thing. To me a classic, alltime great championship match combines the two, with enough skillful wrestling that it seems like it's the two most talented wrestlers alive right there in the same ring, and then backs it up with riveting drama to produce a contest that feeks like the most important thing in the world while it's happening. By drama I don't mean blood, visuals, or other apuestas staples, but excitement and the sense that the match has come a long, long way from where it started, and that the wrestlers' positions vis-a-vis each other have changed over the course of the match. Mocho Cota is a memorable character, but when I think of his matches with Rocca I think of his dogged onslaughts to tie the score more than facial expressions or poses to the crowd. The April 2000 Panther vs Santo has a great image of Santo, his arm badly hurt, put in the unfamiliar position of having to back off from an unusually aggressive Panther. Virus vs Guerrero Maya had GM turn the match on its head and make Virus the underdog when he started blowing him away with big offense in the third fall. Those matches all had brilliant technical performances as well but managed to feel like there had been a major shift over the course of the action. The most you could say about this one is that the moves got bigger as the match got longer. And if a match trades on skill and execution, it really hurts to have a spot set up this shoddily. I can forgive a blown or poorly executed spot, but it's harder to do in a match whose selling point is aesthetics.

Storytelling within a title match doesn't necessarily mean playing into larger angles surrounding the match like in AAA. It's more like how the match could come off as described in a story for Sports Illustrated or some publication like that. Think of things like momentum swings, or strategy, or interplay between the characters. Surely you don't think that acclaimed classics like Rocca vs Cota, Cochisse vs Satanico, Casas vs Dandy, Santo vs Panther, Virus vs Guerrero Maya reached that status solely because of how technically good the wrestling was. If someone watched any of those matches and all they did was praise the technical work I'd feel like they missed something. If someone watched this match and all they did was praise the technical work I'd understand. The title match style is one that lends itself to displays of beautiful wrestling, and you can have a great one focusing on just that one aspect. There's also a lot more that can be done with the conventions of that style, and if the workers neglect everything else then it's hard to get past that 4.25 star level into bonafide classic territory, at least to me. If I weren't able to appreciate beauty in a match like this, I might not have praised it at all. There's also some rather obvious slop on display, and it goes beyond nitpicking how well two men can pull off a preplanned spot in a worked sport. Damiancito vs Cicloncito is the same kind of match as this one, and that one is pulled off much more seamlessly despite possibly having a higher degree of difficulty.

I feel like even people who see Blue Panther as a well rounded worker would say that he's at his best in title matches. I'd say that too, but there's always such a duality to his work and it's all on display here. The technical work is brilliant, so much that it becomes apparent early on that this match isn't just for the middleweight title but for the title of best technical wrestler in the company. They manage to get an Arena Mexico crowd excited over small victories, like the test of strength early on or some of the fights over leg holds, so they know a lot more than just how to apply the moves. It's extremely competitive all the way though. Yet for all Panther's skill, I've never thought much of his storytelling within the title match conventions. I thought they were going somewhere when Atlantis was pressing his advantage after winning the first fall, but instead of pulling off some genius reversal Panther just kicked out of a cover, whipped Atlantis into the ropes, caught him with a clothesline, and from there went on to even the score. I'm not of the belief that whoever is in control needs to stay in control until they counter or their opponent misses a move, but this was a flat way to tie it up and left me thinking that maybe those knees to the temple weren't as painful as Panther's spasms made them out to be. And for all the thought they put into the battles over individual holds, they didn't really worry about how to get to some of the other crowd popping spots. Panther at one point drops Atlantis, walks more than halfway across the ring and climbs the ropes with his ass sticking out for his famous Blue Panther Moonsault, which unsurprisingly gets him knocked to the outside. There's another time when he plops down on the top turnbuckle and has a rest, while Atlantis strolls over and superplexes him. So continuing the half and half theme, I agree with the consensus here that this isn't an alltime great match, even within the championship style. It's more like Angle vs. Benoit, skillful, action packed and competitive but without a real reason for the swings in momentum. And that can be enough. This time I came away thinking it was a great match that I'd probably underrated in my head for a bit there. It had a real big fight atmosphere and lived up to it, not an easy thing to do.

If you see Felino vs Santo as an alltime super classic, there's no way either of those matches will surpass it. Number one is one of those matches where you get a little bit of everything, technical work, comedy, violence, dives, all built around the Halcon Negro vs Olimpico rivalry. I think it's been on Youtube for well over ten years at this point in terrible quality. Number two is a pure technical match where Santo and Felino let some of the potential next generation workers eat at the table with them. That was a fairly recent Roy Lucier upload.

Usually the way that you work a fake foul into a match is at the end. Here they did it in the first fall, and I really can't express how well it worked. If Dandy was furious after being suckered in the first fall, he was ready to have the hair match right then and there after Satanico did one better and outwrestled him in the second. It takes some guts to put your all into a match built around your getting shown up, and Dandy couldn't have done a better job showing his humiliation here. Not just in smacking the turnbuckle with his head in frustration, but also in the way he let his behavior cross the line after each fall, trying to get Satanico worse than Satanico had given to him. I always think of Dandy as the kind of guy who's never willing to let himself get oneupped by a rudo and occasionally willing to give a rudo a taste of his own medicine, but repeated fouls and postmatch attacks are hard to justify from a tecnico. Rather than having Dandy look like a brat, it worked, I think because the indignities got worse as the match progressed, and because Satanico certainly doesn't make himself difficult to hate. There was some great brawling between the two and even a fast exchange off the ropes to show off their skill, and Atlantis is one of the best at the backup role in this kind of match, so the action is excellent too. I just really liked the mind games here and the way they paid off in the eventual apuestas match.

In Mexico: 1. El Hijo del Santo 2. Felino 3. Maybe Zumbido There is not a lot of 1998 lucha on Youtube, okay? There's not a lot of discussion over what the best 1998 matches from Mexico are, either. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone call 1998 a standout year for Hijo del Santo (oops, my mistake, Microstatistics did it several posts up), but you can basically follow the CMLL plotline by watching his matches until he finally turns in September. I also don't remember rudo Santo doing stuff like challenging up and comer Tony Rivera to a mat contest in 1997. Felino was probably the best CMLL technical wrestler at this point, or at least he was the one giving the best technical displays. Those two were the guys who stood out to me. For third, I dunno, I went with Zumbido. Maybe he wasn't the third best wrestler in the country in 1997, but I do think that he, at least briefly, surpassed Virus as the most exciting short guy with a mullet, quite an achievement in itself. On resume I probably should have gone with Karloff Lagarde Jr., a pasty gormless faced man who really tried hard to be a good technical worker. As ever, pleading ignorance on Japan. Who was the best US worker, Benoit? I'd take 1998 Santo or Felino over him. Ten of them:

To me this is the defining Satanico performance. Maybe he has better matches, but I don't think Satanico himself was ever better than he was in this one. At least not in anything we have video of. I recall that somewhere in there Atlantis kind of fucks up a backbreaker and the announcer says something along the lines of, "You can see how nervous he is, being in there against a great wrestler like Satanico." I always liked how he acknowledged it, gave a reasonable excuse for it and put over the stakes all at the same time.

This could have sucked. Pierroth isn't a guy who really embraced the dramatic opportunities that came with a title match, and Mogur's most notable characteristic as a wrestler is his complete lack of charisma. But what happened here is that they filled in the gaps for each other. Mogur isn't charismatic? That's fine, obviously Pierroth can work a crowd. More important, though, was that Mogur IS a good technical worker, and they played to that, built the match to him totally outclassing Pierroth on the mat until there was nowhere for Pierroth to go. He'd held his own at first with little tricks and a focus on Mogur's arm, but once Mogur came through with that brilliant slam counter the match belonged to the champ. He was torturing Pierroth, humiliating him, to the point that Pierroth's only hope was a genius reversal of his own (lol no) or perhaps a more out of the box solution. It was a great foul. Right there for everyone to see, but how could you possibly call that deliberate? Both guys sold everything wonderfully. Pierroth you'd expect, but Mogur might actually have outsold him here, even if he didn't possess Pierroth's theatrical flair. One of the best title matches of the '90s.

I wouldn't say it's the number one reason I love this match, but the most impressive thing about it to me is that, if all you had was a blow by blow description, you couldn't know how well the match came off. When Dandy wants some heat, he does a bodyslam, or a clothesline, or an escape from a camel clutch, or a legdrop. There's a nearfall off a diving headbutt, but for the most part the close calls come off rollups and basic suplexes. The fans are with them all the way, though, because everything is timed perfectly. Everything is built up. Everything is sold right. You can get heat off a clothesline when it's largely surrounded by matwork, when the recipient sells it like a big move, and when the guy who executes it immediately and without any prompting holds up his forearm to indicate that what he did was technically within the framework of the rules. They've scarcely left the mat by the middle of the second fall, and the match has still turned into a life or death struggle by the time Dandy has to fight out of Angel Azteca's leglock. Then, having gotten that much out of holds, it opens up a third fall in which almost everything is a potential match ender. There are no nearfalls in this match in which it feels like the match should end. Instead they've managed to make it so that anytime someone's shoulders hit the mat it feels like the match COULD end. I love the technique on show here, but beyond that this is just a very well crafted bit of wrestling.

Eh. In my mind felt more like some kind of statement that they were trying to make than the culmination of a yearlong, promotion dominating program and a careerlong rivalry. But this wasn't something that I rewatched this time around and I'm going off old memories. It's a universally praised match, even somewhere like Cagematch, so I'm likely either remembering it wrong or offering a goofy opinion.

For Mexico: 1. Damiancito el Guerrero 2. Cicloncito Ramirez 3. Blue Panther The most important wrestling footage development for 1997, for me, is that rnrwrasslin stopped uploading TV shows midway through the year, limiting the stuff I got to see. I suppose that if I were truly dedicated I could get a hold of some of that stuff for myself, but that's not the kind of person you're dealing with here. Besides, I got no stomach for that kind of life anymore. As a result you get a pretty generic list for this year of minis and ciberneticos. Virus and Cicloncito are more of a 1/1A scenario than a true first vs second. Virus was a more interesting character I guess, so I placed him first with no real conviction behind it. I thought that the minis were pushing things with their work more than the big men. Blue Panther's 1997 work had the same flaws that it always did, but he did seem to want to establish a strong footing for himself upon his CMLL return. I also respected his attempts to brawl with a nextgen Mascara Sagrada and to wrestle on the mat with Apolo Dantes, who was solid there but not really a guy who saw the thrill in that type of work. What Virus and Cicloncito lack in (filmed, available) quantity, they make up for in an outstanding hit rate. They're definitely more pure work candidates than well rounded personalities, so you'd have to be okay with guys whose abilities lean more towards that side. An attempt at a top ten:

This match has the most well done ref interference I've seen. A backhanded compliment to some extent, but I appreciated the thought that they put into it. The issue is that Gran Davis doesn't want either man using closed fists. A fired up Dandy wrestles emotionally and repeatedly gets cut off when he prepares to throw a punch or simply protests Davis's admonishments. Charles on the other hand sees what's happening and plays the ref like a fiddle. A couple of times you see him tell Davis about Dandy's right hand, and then when Davis hassles Dandy, Charles nails him--with a kick. Charles of course uses his fists at points too, and Davis warns him as well, but Emilio never lets the ref take away his focus, and at one point basically tells Davis off when he tries to stop him from pounding Dandy into the dirt. The ref work never overshadows the two wrestlers, and instead the first fall is about how the two different personalities react to it. There's also plenty of fight and hatred on display throughout the fall, like when Dandy takes Charles down out of nowhere, and Emilio has to destroy him with right hands to keep him down. And when Dandy finally does make his comeback and busts Charles open in the second fall, he does it without throwing a single punch. By the third fall both men are bleeding and swinging wildly, and they've both gotten angry with Davis, so he gives up trying to enforce the letter of the law. If you're the kind of person who appreciates incremental escalation, with the moves getting bigger and bigger, you might like the big flying spots in the third fall, as they go from Charles's standard tope suicida, to Dandy's plancha suicida, to the splash that Charles won the first fall with, to Dandy's tope suicida over the top rope. There's nowhere to go after that, and then Davis springs back to the forefront of the match by counting them out. I think that it would have felt a bit flat if he'd just done that out of nowhere and the match ended in a draw. With the crowd already angry at him after how he called the first fall, instead we get a heated postmatch featuring some guy calling Davis an asshole, fans tugging on Dandy's arm to convince him not to go through with the haircut, and Dandy and Charles looking like they might unite to force Davis to get his hair cut. I don't know if any of this is why I think this is a great match (personally, I prefer that shot of Dandy struggling to get up off the floor after Charles sent him flying off the apron), but I really am impressed with how they laid this one out.

Mexico's top three: 1. Negro Casas 2. El Dandy 3. Felino HM: Mascara Magica, Black Warrior I'd be lying to you if I said that I had a solid grasp on every Mexican group's 1996 matches. AAA fell victim to the throes of Konnan booking before eventually becoming an organization based on indistinguishable guys in bodysuits and Halcon Dorado Jr. Promo Azteca got TV at some point this year but never found its footing as a promotion. IWRG got TV too but I think the only ones who saved video of it are IWRG themselves. This is mostly just me rating CMLL stuff. They had a big bounceback year in 1996, and so did two of their biggest linchpins of the 1990s, with Casas at his most creative since early 1993 and Dandy at his best since 1992 or maybe even 1990. Like with Dandy vs. Emilio Charles in 1989, I thought that Dandy probably had the better list of matches but that Casas gave the stronger individual efforts. I will say, though, that over the last three months of the year, after Casas had turned tecnico, Dandy was outperforming Casas and might have had one final run as the top guy in the country. Felino gets third again. This year he actually got some spotlight matches, and we did see his overindulgent tendencies crop up, but his four fall title bout with Mascara Magica ranks as the banner outing of his career, to me anyway. Mascara Magica had a good six minute mat based match with Kung Fu Jr. this year. That's when I was sold that he was a real talent. He and Black Warrior both looked like future greats but never really built on what they had at this point. I thought that Casas and Dandy were up there with anyone in the Western hemisphere in 1996. Japan I can't really speak to though. Top ten matches:

My top three for Mexico: 1. El Hijo del Santo 2. Rey Misterio Jr. 3. Felino Santo's tough to rate for these things because he doesn't really change. Some years his matches are better, but he's always the same guy. What stood out for me in 1995 wasn't any particular performance but how the balance of power in terms of match quality shifted the moment he jumped. Just about marked the end of the AAA golden years for workrate fans, and suddenly CMLL TV became good after months of their TV presence consisting mostly of condensed matches. Not that it was all his doing (mostly it was that they stopped with all the clipping), but it helped for a narrative in my head if nothing else. Misterio was a genuine phenom. I've never found him interesting as a character and I prefer more grounded workers, but he had the year's preeminent big match and didn't totally reject the classic tecnico style. Felino's a guy I haven't always taken seriously. What I didn't understand was that 1992-94, which is more in my wheelhouse, represented his Stunning Steve years, when he was a clear talent who was maybe 75% of the way there. No one thinks of Felino when they think of 1995, and no one thinks of 1995 when they think of Felino, but this was the year that he seemed to mature and find the right balance (for him) between comedy and wrestling. He was a pure background character this year, and normally I try to list guys with more prominent roles, but, um, I guess didn't this time. Misterio Jr. actually was considered a best in the world candidate at the time. I think Santo was better, and he actually has a really strong case if you're high on his title matches with Psicosis and Casas, both of which have gotten strong reviews at one time or another. My top ten: