LA Park

[ohtani's jacket]

With Fuerza you've really got to go down a path of watching matches which are good without ever being great because of the type of worker he was assigned to carry. Fuerza's individual performances in those matches are often quite brilliant but he doesn't have a laundry list of great matches to plough through. I liked his 1990-91 period the best. He was a real standout trying the TV boom. I'd rate him above Parka, but I do think based on his Juarez work and other stuff I've seen outside early 90s CMLL that he wasn't a standout guy on every night.

[SegundaCuerda]

LA Park's record has only growth to be better and better during this years, his matches against Rush, Tanaka, Blue Demon, Eddie Kingston, etc are among the best of his career and it feels like he has more great matches in the tank for the next 5 years

One of the best brawlers ever.

[strobogo]

On a very low key level, La Parka vs Disco Inferno from Superbrawl 1998 is one of my favorite WCW undercard PPV matches. Shit really came out of nowhere and had absolutely no reason to be as good or as fun as it was. Lucha in general is a very huge blindspot so for me I've really only seen his WCW (and I guess ECW) work, and a handful of post-WCW fat bloody guy throwing hands and chairs and he's still a favorite of mine. Gotta dig into more of his work.

[elliott]

I voted LA Park 57th in 2016 and I fucking blew that one. I know people will say Park hasn't gotten the week to week treatment that many top tier candidates have. People should go back and look at his AAA work yada yada yada. And they'd be right. Try and get as full a picture of as many people as you can. That said, Park is a top 25 candidate for me. His best stuff are some of the best matches ever. Extremely versatile. Can be a violent insane brawler or can work hilarious comedy spots. Great command of the crowd. Really good when he was younger and got better and better with age. Much of the modern wrestling scene has passed me by, but whenever I hear about a new big La Park match I try and watch it and more often than not come away thinking it blows away any of the other recent modern wrestling I may have watched. Basically LA Park is the fucking man and merits serious consideration not just to be on the list but to be top 50 at worst. 

[KB8]

Park was my number 60 in 2016, and like elliot that feels low to me now. He's bolstered his case since the last deadline as well by being the best brawler on earth for a minute there, working insane bloodbath spectacles with Rush in arenas where nobody is allowed to work insane bloodbath spectacles anymore (including them, which made it even better). His versatility is a huge plus for him, going from being a wonderful shtick-heavy rudo to the brawler we know him as today, all while finding time in the middle to work title matches with Dandy (what's the date on the Ultimo Guerrero match mentioned in this thread, btw? Their September '04 match is fun but it's pretty short and left me wanting something more). An exceptional trios worker and the stint in WCW is really enjoyable, even if you watch it thinking they should've done way more with him. One of the all-time great apuestas match workers ever. And the cool thing about Park from a personal standpoint is that there's still a decent handful of his highly regarded work that I need to see. Also he has like three matches that I could be talked into calling the best AAA match ever. So that's pretty neat.

 

LA PARK YOU SHOULD WATCH:

w/Octagon, Rey Misterio Jr. & El Hijo del Santo v Pentagon, Blue Panther, Psicosis & Fuerza Guerrera (AAA, 6/18/95)

v El Hijo del Santo (Monterrey, 12/23/01)

v El Mesias (AAA, 6/18/11)

v Dr. Wagner Jr. (TXT, 5/11/13)

v Rush (Liga Elite, 7/14/16)

[newtalkingwall]

LA Park has absolutely bolstered his case as an all time great in the past 5 years. Describing the Rush matches and Blue Demon match as just "brawls" doesn't do justice to the completely unhinged, out-of-control nature of these matches. Very little like them in wrestling.

Describing LA Park as just a brawler really sells him short, though. His 2004-2005 CMLL run has a lot of workrate style matches, with the Ultimo Guerrero singles match and the El Dandy singles ENESMA both being MOTYC (the Dandy match was MOTY in Mexico), and even more recent stuff like the (great) Jacob Fatu match is more of a workrate style. He was Wrestler of the Year in the 2004 Tapatia awards, and was getting votes for that and MOTY each year pretty steadily after that. That's nearly 20 years of high-end singles performances, and others have already pointed out his consistent work in AAA trios in the 90s. Not many have a resume like that.

[Rah]

I'm trying to get my hands on some discs that aren't out there in our circles - a fair bit of which is early 00s Parka. Some of it seems to be workrate/matwork, others are more violent (Wagner/Santo/Perrito). Hopefully it should bolster his case. That and some other gems coming out in fuller/complete matches (Pierroth mask match), too.

He's clearly been great since 1991 (with some cool matches as Invasor - here he is kicking Eddie Guerrero's ass for 20 minutes) so it's a pity we don't have much of his 80s run out there.

[Phil Schneider]

Sadly that Pierroth mask match is so badly clipped in the third fall that it is hard to follow what is happening in the match. We can only hope that a watchable version of that match surfaces some day.

[elliott]

Can someone easily breakdown the La Parka-LA Park timeline

[newtalkingwall]

LA Park was La Parka in AAA in the 1990s and WCW. He wasn't in AAA much towards the end, so AAA made a La Parka Jr. He left AAA officially in the early 200s, like 2002 or 2003, and La Parka Jr. started to be billed as just "La Parka." That's when the original started using LA Park. although he would still be billed as La Parka on some indies (like his appearances in the original MLW).

 

The original returned to AAA in 2010 and feuded with the new La Parka over the name, and actually won the match where the name was at stake but then said he didn't need the name and stayed as LA Park. He's been in and out of AAA a few times since then.

 

If somebody is recommending the match to you, it's LA Park.

[strobogo]

Lol at winning the name and then refusing to use it. 

[CheapPop1999]

LA Park is the man that got me into lucha and for that, I am forever indebted. He's on my list, mainly due to how much fun it is every single time he's on screen. He's great in multimans, always stealing the show with his signature goofy spots. He was great in WCW in the undercard sprint multimans and has an INCREDIBLY FUN match teaming with Silver King against Damien and Ciclope from a 1999 Nitro where they empty out all the weapons. He's a great stooging heel and he's a great gutsy babyface in his brawls, which are among the best ever in the history of the sport. He's magnetic in a really great way. The 12/5/2010 Mesias brawl got the full five stars from me, along with the 2017 Baracal Rush match. I'll pimp the Fenix match from the Crash as another great brawl from that time that doesn't get brought up a ton and a really great six-man from Tijuana with Parka, Halloween and Rey Mysterio Sr. against Rey Jr. Damien and Vampiro from 2001 for another really fun one. His exact placement is gonna be more based on gut when I get ready to compile. I think he has a firm ceiling around the 45-50 mark though.

[cad]

Some unorganized thoughts on pre-WCW Parka. It's considered pre-prime for him, and I don't want to rate him in full without seeing a decent amount of his work this century, but I might run out of time.

- There's not much footage of him before he becomes La Parka. Most of it is outside of his home base of Monterrey, meaning that he's not performing in front of crowds that he's formed a connection with, which makes it a bit tricky to extrapolate anything from. At the same time I feel okay saying that he got better once he joined AAA. Whether he was on the rise in general or if something just clicked after Antonio Peña told him to wrestle as a dancing skeleton I don't know.

- IMO he passes Negro Casas as the best worker in Mexico in mid-1993. I still have Casas as the country's top worker overall for the year in full, but around the time spring turned to summer Parka was giving good performances more consistently than Casas. I think Parka stayed number one throughout 1994. His resume that year is nothing special, but he put in a good effort and made his match better almost every time out, making matchups with the likes of Mascara Sagrada into something special. Despite wrestling's(/AAA's) popularity at that stage, no one really had a typical number one quality year. Parka kept going strong into 1995 but Santo had clearly jumped past him by the time he started working Arena Mexico.

- Strengths in this time frame are charisma, athleticism, bumping, comedy, versatility and work ethic. His biggest weakness is that most of his big matches involve some type of gimmicky crap. That's partly on AAA, but I think their style aligned pretty well with his preferences. As a technical wrestler, he was in the Sangre Chicana class of having some ability, but not really excelling at it or seeing it as a terribly exciting way to work. Obviously he could brawl, but it wasn't a big part of his game in AAA.

[Phil Schneider]

I have seen LA Park live twice in the last couple of months at local Denver Lucha show, he comes off as a huge star in that local show atmosphere, just so awesome to watch him do his random house show match with ref shtick and belt shots. He has the huge main event matches, but also is amazing in a small room

[cad]

Random thoughts on the Park that I've watched in the twoish years since that last post:

- The mask match with Sandokan in Panama was excellent, although even back then he was doing BS finishes. His title match with Volador looked like they had some cool ideas for highspots and no ideas for anything else. I couldn't finish the title match with Sandokan. Eventually the torture inflicted upon Sandokan with those endless leg attacks began to transfer to me, the viewer, and my will was not as strong as Sandokan's.

- The Wagner matches veered between hot brawling and tedium, sometimes in the same match. I thought the best one they had actually involved Mark Jindrak, Johnny Stamboli, Alberto del Rio and Lizmark Jr.

- Park and Mesias would have these wild brawls that would end with ref bumps and cheap wins, the kind of bullshit that reminds you that it's just another wrestling match. Park and AAA Parka had a few moments when their match looked like it could have been something special, but it also had a lot of arguing between two old men in dress clothes.

- Park and Rush have their match. Rush is gonna charge up the ramp, stuff is gonna get smashed, Rush is gonna miss a kick and get slapped, the belt will get used, both guys will bleed. They always go long, perhaps to justify the asking price for that match, and it always ends in some kind of foul nonsense. But it's two charismatic workers who know how to captivate an audience. Their match for something called Baracal Entertainment really stood out to me as something special.

Somewhere inside of him, maybe not even that far from the surface, LA Park had it in him to be the Sangre Chicana of his generation. He also had the bumping and comedy ability of his mentor Jerry Estrada. Only Negro Casas could match that combination of skills. But the bullshit, man, he might as well have carried it with him to the ring in a sack. He just never seemed to believe that straight up wrestling, whether a technical match or a wild brawl, could hold the crowd's interest. I don't know why. He clearly got them going when he did normal wrestling stuff and wasn't holding the ref's arm to break a pinfall or kicking someone in the balls. Sangre Chicana did that stuff too, but at the end of the day Chicana would find himself alone in the ring with his opponent, one on one, and it would be like a shootout between two gunslingers. One man wins and one man loses. If Park scripted a Wild West gunfight the sheriff would run in to break it up and get hit in the junk somehow, one guy would ride off on the other man's horse, and they'd vow to settle it in the next town for the next movie. Yeah. Sure. Casas would fall flat on his face in the final stretch and turn a comedy spot into the most dramatic thing in the world. Park would try to sell the most unimaginative ref bump action as high stakes wrestling. To me that's the difference between a contender for number one all time and a fat guy in a skeleton costume, but, you know, I think being a fat guy in a skeleton costume has taken Park a long way anyway.