[1982-09-12-UWA] El Santo & El Solitario & Gory Guerrero & Huracan Ramirez vs Negro Navarro & El Signo & Texano & Perro Aguayo

[fxnj]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQn8WXymIVo

 

Epic multi-man brawl. I tend to be a harsh grader for these big lucha matches, but even I got sucked into the atmosphere of one of the greatest legends ever teaming up with his old buddies for one last rodeo. The entire match is pretty much just these guys unleashing all kinds of chaos on each other in front of a rabid crowd, and that's really all I needed here. Santo had clearly lost a step compared to the clips of him wrestling in movies, but he could still bring it and looked great mixing it up with the young guys. Similar things could be said about Gory, who put in a hell of an old man performance at 60. Perro Aguayo also hits a messy blade job and the blood gets all over Santo's back near the end for a cool visual. Really cool post-match stuff as well with the rudos looking like badasses cleaning the ring after losing to the legends. One of my favorite lucha matches. ****1/2

[Mr JMML]

El Santo Retirement tag (UWA - 9/12/1982)

El Santo & El Solitario & Gory Guerrero & Huracán Ramírez vs Negro Navarro & El Signo & Texano & Perro Aguayo 

This is the last match of the biggest star in lucha history ( El Santo), the crowd is as hot as any crowd has ever been, it’s the greatest demonstration of his legacy, we don’t have as much footage as we would have liked but there’s a few minutes of some matches in black & white, his matches against Espanto and Black Shadow are canon lucha that’s talked about a lot in the spanish speaking community, lucha libre is made of myths and there’s no myth as big as El Santo, everybody has heard about La Pareja Atómica the tag team formed by Gory Guerrero and El Santo, considered the biggest draw a tag team has ever been even more than the Crush Gals and it showed, the crowd genuinely cares about the match, a contest that turned out to be an all out brawl, it’s amazing that an almost 65 year old Santo said goodbye to lucha libre with that kind of match, we are accustomed to watch Black Terry wrestle matches way more violent than this one at that age but he’s just built different, one of the highlights of the match in my opinion is 37 year old Perro Aguayo bloodied creating chaos everywhere he went. El Santo’s partners aren’t exactly in their prime either, they are just as old as Santo, the age of the competitors wasn’t an issue for the crowd, they were cheering loudly during the whole affair, they knew how important this moment was and that’s something to appreciate, if they didn’t show any interest the match would have been just a DUD but it wasn’t, the match flies by, it’s very entertaining and a match everyone should check out doesn’t matter if you don’t like lucha this match transcends lucha, it’s one of wrestling’s greatest legends last match, I think that’s special and every wrestling fan has to witness it.

[tcg91]

Absolute great crowd, this is Santo's retirement match after all and the atmosphere is quite appealing. The match itself, however, wasn't that great and it's one of those Rock/Hogan deals where the circumstances made the match better, despite the action not being the greatest. There was some goodness here and there, mostly because Aguayo stole the show, taking Solitario's mask off and bleeding all over the place on the tecnico's comeback. But the rest of it was quite chaotic, too much going on at the same time, and a bit of a let down. It would have been nice to see more stuff from Santo and see the rudos bump for him, but we never got down to only two men in the ring
***