Eddie Guerrero

[KB8]

Eddie was my number 15 in 2016 and I think he'll be there again in 2026. There's something about 15 that just feels right. Comfortably top 20, but not enough meat on the bone for me to put him top 10. 15 is the happy medium. Look, cards on the table, Eddie Guerrero is my favourite wrestler ever and I quite simply cannot be impartial about him. We can try to be as objective as we like during this sort of project, but at the end of the day, "I really like watching this wrestler and doing so is more enjoyable to me than watching any other wrestler" will - and should - inevitably hold some weight. Honestly, when I get right down to it and dig into my "process" or whatever, that's maybe the most important thing to me when ranking anybody for this and I'll just figure out all the other shit around it. It's supposed to be fun and we watch footage because we enjoy it so the wrestlers we enjoy are always going to rise to the top one way or another (even in Parv's quantitative system, for example, there's still built in subjectivity). If I was ranking everyone based on how good I thought they were at their absolute very best then Eddie would be a number 1 contender. Take out longevity, length of peak, whatever; I really think Eddie in that 6/05 Smackdown! match against Rey was about as good as any wrestler has ever been. As a heel there are very few wrestlers ever that I think can put together as compelling a workover, knowing when to bring the match down with holds, knowing when to bring it up for air, when to throw in bombs or highspots, when to feed for hope spots and comebacks, staying as focused as possible if that workover is built around limb work. As a babyface he was as sympathetic and charismatic as you could ever need, sold like a motherfucker, had an awesome intensity to his comebacks, was as creative as you could want. So on and so on. His frog splash was beautiful and still to this day nobody can seem to hit the triple vertical suplexes like Eddie hit the Three Amigos. He was an amazing stooge, an amazing slimebag and a vicious bastard. He had shtick out the wazoo and genuinely funny comedy stuff. He was great in singles matches and tags and so on and so on. I think he was good at doing the pro wrestling.  

All of that said, he's not at that PEAK level for particularly long. I actually think he hit that level at two separate points (1997 and 2004-05), which is impressive in and of itself, but ultimately those peaks were short and he has a pretty thin resume when you put him up against guys with similar peaks that lasted longer (and while I think he died as the best wrestler on the planet, I can't very well sit here and say, "I'll have Eddie top 5 because I'm pretty sure he'd have been able to wrestle at that level for another 5-6 years"). I actually think that whole run from his return to WWE in 2002 until his death is incredible and he was as consistently great as anyone in the world during that period. He didn't have the same volume of great matches in 2002 and 2003 as the following two years, but from an input standpoint I thought he was pretty clearly working at a level above nearly everyone else in the company. I say that as someone who's recently gone through every single match he was involved in from that period, from the five-minute TV matches against Booker T where he's working over Booker's kidney to the ten-minute Rock match where he's hitting ridiculous armdrag escapes out of the Rock Bottom or the lengthy Smackdown! Six stuff where he's a major focus of the show. He was always awesome in tags with Chavo, and the brief team with Tajiri in the Spring of 2003 is like the greatest two-week tag team in the history of our great sport. His 2004-05 stretch has been talked about plenty of times before and I've done that myself in this thread, so there's no point going over it again, but I still think it's amazing. He has lots of great matches and lots of great performances in that period and hits maybe the most insane blade job ever seen.

I guess it then becomes a question of how highly I think of the stuff outside of the 1997 and 2002-05 runs. I like the AAA run fine and prior to the heel turn in WCW I thought he was clearly very good, but hadn't put everything together as a character and pretty often felt sort of vanilla. He was still comfortably awesome in '98 and good in '99, but he mostly got to show that in short Nitro or Thunder bouts rather than focused programmes like the Rey or even Jericho feuds of '97. Unfortunately he was mostly stuck with Chyna in 2000 and after that you could see he was struggling with his demons before his release in 2001, but there was never a point where I thought he was less than good. I think he was pretty much always reliable at worst in Japan and at his best he was phenomenal, like in the Benoit match from the '96 BOSJ. His UWA run is a hoot, btw. For the most part he was really only put in the position of flashy tecnico, but all of his stuff looked gorgeous. What I'd REALLY want is more Juarez footage (if he even worked more than one match), because that tag with Santo against Casas and Panther is balls to the wall great and, while being in there at 20 years old with three of the best luchadores in history wouldn't have hurt, he looked like a fucking prodigy and worked way closer to what I want to see in lucha than what he eventually did in AAA. If there's more of that lying in someone's garage somewhere and it shows up and he looks that good in other stuff then, well, I guess I'll have no choice but to put him top 3.

 

EDDIE GUERRERO YOU SHOULD WATCH:

w/El Hijo del Santo v Negro Casas & Blue Panther (Gimnasio Josue Neri Santos, 1987)

w/Chavo & Mando Guerrero v El Satanico, MS-1 & Masakre (CMLL, 8/23/91)

w/Love Machine v El Hijo del Santo & Octagon (AAA, 11/6/93)

w/Blue Panther, La Parka & Psicosis v El Hijo del Santo, Jushin Liger, Octagon & Tiger Mask v (AAA Triplemania, 5/15/94)

w/Great Sasuke v Wild Pegasus & Shinjiro Ohtani (New Japan, 10/18/94)

w/El Samurai & Gran Hamada v Shinjiro Ohtani, Koji Kanemoto & Dean Malenko (New Japan, 2/25/96)

v Wild Pegasus (New Japan, 6/11/96)

w/Chris Jericho v The Faces of Fear (WCW Nitro, 2/24/97)

v Chris Jericho (WCW Fall Brawl, 9/14/97)

v Rey Misterio Jr. (WCW Halloween Havoc, 10/26/97)

w/Juventud Guerrera v Rey Misterio Jr. & Kidman (WCW Nitro, 12/28/98)

v Rey Mysterio (WWE Smackdown!, 11/14/02)

w/Chavo Guerrero v Rey Mysterio & Edge v Kurt Angle & Chris Benoit (WWE Survivor Series, 11/17/02)

w/Chavo Guerrero v World's Greatest Tag Team (WWE Backlash, 4/27/03)

w/Tajiri v World's Greatest Tag Team (WWE Smackdown!, 5/22/03)

v Brock Lesnar (WWE No Way Out, 2/15/04)

v Rey Mysterio (WWE Smackdown!, 3/18/04)

v Big Show (WWE Smackdown!, 4/15/04)

v JBL (WWE Judgment Day, 5/16/04)

v JBL (WWE Smackdown!, 7/15/04)

v Kurt Angle (WWE Summerslam, 8/15/04)

v Rey Mysterio (WWE Judgment Day, 5/22/05)

v Rey Mysterio (WWE Smackdown!, 6/23/05)

v Rey Mysterio (WWE Great American Bash, 7/24/05)

v Batista (WWE No Mercy, 10/9/05)

[Rah]

Well, there's a highlights clip of him taking Casas hair in Juarez (bullshit ending it seems) and a bit of the scuffle after taking La Fiera's hair (which looks fucking amazing) so more of his stuff exists on tape. Only to find out who has it and how to get it.

Fantastic write-up, btw. I'm in a very similar position here, in that, if it was down to favourites (or highest peak) he'd easily take this. Some deaths in wrestling are shocking but I don't think I've ever been saddened by the death of someone I didn't personally know as much as I did as a 14 year old reading about him. 

If I'm honest with myself, I don't see him as a top-tier candidate because he just doesn't have the output. I did a deep dive into his Mexican work and it just doesn't come across as someone whose style fit the matches he was in. It's really strange, in hindsight, because we have that random Juarez tag where he looks like he belongs. Once he hits Japan things seem to come together and he "gets it" (again?) but I still never thought any of his work was exceptional. You get the mindbogglingly good '97, then a slump until 2003 (a period I tried revisiting but just came away underwhelmed because it wasn't "Eddie" - even if the work was consistently good, it wasn't anything noteworthy) all before he starts making a huge case, again, and just becomes a world-beater in 2004 until his death. I agree that it's a massive "what if" and we can't rely on that in making his case but I want to rate him high. Terry Funk is my #1, and I don't see that ever changing, but even he didn't come all that close to Eddie's highs. Nobody did for me. Nobody connected with me like Eddie did. 

[ohtani's jacket]

I have the same problem with Eddie. I love his 1997 and 2004-05 runs to the point where everything else is a disappointment in comparison. That's strictly because of character work. The other periods of Eddie's career are simply Eddie doing work. Now usually I don't care about that sort of thing. I've long outgrown the need for characters in wrestling, but I either really love Eddie's character work or I find his work by itself dull. Maybe a bit of both.